These plan essentials will help you take all the information you’ve gathered so far and design a plan to build a vibrant and balanced young adult ministry in your parish.
So you’ve figured out who young adults are, where to start young adult ministry in your community, assessed the current reality in your parish, looked at what needs to happen to prepare your parish for young adult ministry, and considered who you can invite into leadership roles. Excellent. We’re ready to get started. We’ll walk you through a process that will help you figure out what to do and when to do it. We’ll also break it all down into manageable steps to keep you and your team from becoming overwhelmed.
Here’s the first –and most important –step to planning great ministry: Pray. Invite others to pray with you and for you.
Pray for the Holy Spirit to be the guiding force in you and your community in ministry.
Pray for and with those to whom you will be ministering.
Pray for those to whom you and your young adults will minister.
Gather your Young Adult Ministry Core Team
Schedule some time to pray together and get to know one another, host a retreat for the leadership/core team if you are able.
Host listening sessions within the parish and young adult communities in order to hear about the desires and dreams of the members.
Look at your SWOT Results and your list of interests and needs, and choose three priorities (by discussion, vote, or consensus – just know ahead of time which method you’d like to use) to work on in the year ahead. Allow the group to choose at least one long-term priority – something important but that you don’t currently have the time or resources to address but can move toward in the future.
Set some specific, achievable goals. Include a time frame for accomplishing those goals. Where would you like the ministry to be next year at this time? Three years from now? Sometimes ministry, especially ministry with young adults, is hard to measure, but, when possible, include the standards you’ll use to measure success (i.e. number of individuals connecting to your young adult ministry through social media, number of successful events held, etc.).
Using the list of topics that are interesting and/or important to your young adults, create a list of potential events.
A few more things to keep in mind as you plan:
Young adults often have opportunities to be social; they have fewer opportunities to deepen their spiritual lives (combining social and spiritual is terrific). Young adult ministry events should LISTEN, TEACH, SEND. When scheduling events, it’s important to offer opportunities for all three of these areas, with social opportunities built in or mixed in. The relationships built through social gatherings will often populate the other events. Check out this quick-tip on different kinds of events you can consider hosting.
TIP: There will be several different types of planning going on, so it is often helpful to have different colors to identify different categories. If you’re using an electronic process, obviously, you can just select different colors for text/text boxes. If you’re doing this old school, different colored sticky notes or markers are great.
“LISTEN” events are spaces like synodal listening sessions and townhalls, spaces where individuals and the community can voice their hopes, dreams, and concerns. Not every event needs to be a listening session, but every event should have space for young adults to share their experience and reflect with one another on what they have heard and seen.
“TEACH” events expose people to various forms of prayer, thought, and action in the Christian tradition. Be sure to consider a combination of traditional devotions – Stations of the Cross, Rosary, Liturgy of the Hours – and other prayer forms – art as prayer, reflecting on Gospel messages in feature films, popular music, and TV. Have members lead events on different aspects of faith they find interesting, such as women saints, sacraments, etc. Host events where young adults can give back to the community in a variety of ways, such as serving in soup kitchens and helping clean up public spaces.
“SEND” events provide opportunities to put the Gospel message into action in the whole of the lives of the young adults. Each event has the opportunity to have a sense of “sending” in that it helps shape the young adults and make them more active in their faith. In being sent forth, they not only live the Gospel but also find other young adults to bring back to the community and help them engage in the cycle of listen, teach, and send.
Collect Information and Revisit/Renew It Occasionally:
What are the interests and needs of our young adults? Gather your leadership team and ask the young adults on it to share answers to the following questions:
Consider what issues the young adults in your area are facing. They may be leaving for college, graduating from college,looking for jobs, trying to figure out their finances, wondering how to cook something other than noodles, getting married, getting divorced, or caring for children or aging parents. Brainstorm a list of issues you have observed or know are typical for young adults. Some issues will be specific to an age group or subset, while others will be universal – go ahead and identify them as such.
