These strategies will help you consider the elements beyond programs and events for young adults and help you become conscious of all the ways we welcome (or fail to welcome) young adults to our communities.
A new young adult minister was instructed by his pastor to get more young adults to come to Mass on Sunday. The young adult minister suggested that before they focused their efforts on attracting young adults to Mass, the parish had some work to do. They needed to work with their preachers to be sure that the homilies spoke to people in their 20s and 30s, not just to the middle-age and older crowd. They needed to improve their music program, both the quality and variety of the music. The parish needed to be sure that young adults would be welcomed by the ministers of hospitality and that at least some of the lectors and Eucharistic ministers should be under the age of 40 so that when young adults did show up, they would see their peers actively engaged in the life of the parish.
As you get serious about developing a ministry to young adults, there are elements beyond the ministry that don’t necessarily have to happen before you take action on anything else, but are worth paying attention to along the way because they’ll make everything else you do more effective.
We’re hardly unfriendly to young adults most of the time. The typical experience is that we’re just friendly enough to keep our distance. Young adults don’t necessarily have an ax to grind against the Church but often there’s a lack of engagement and commitment. There’s much we can do to bridge that gap of polite distance and welcome the young adults who come our way into vibrant engagement with our community.
Name tag Sundays, parish welcome weekends, young adults serving on the parish life committee, and parishioners specially trained to look out for young adults and invite them into deeper relationships within the parish can all help your ministry thrive. Make it easy to register as a parishioner (can people complete at least the initial steps online?) and when a new young adult shows up, get their basic information even if they’re not ready to register just yet. Find out what their connection to church has been. Did they come from a great young adult ministry somewhere else, or have a strong campus ministry experience? Invite them to share what they enjoyed about that experience and help them build the bridge between that encounter and their current one with this new community. Young adult- friendly parishes DO learn the names, occupations, and desires of young people coming to their parishes. They accompany young adults at all stages of their journeys.
Keep a list of young adults and their skills and interests. Be sure when invitations get made for leadership and service that young adults are represented with real leadership positions in the parish. According to Allan Deck, SJ, “Thirty-five percent [of young adults] said the excessive influence of an older generation discouraged them from more involvement with their parish.” Young adult- friendly parishes DO encourage that young adult gifts are shared within a community that values them.
Music and preaching are the big issues here! Do you have a liturgy that anyone could comfortably snooze through? With nothing that surprises or challenges? Nothing that inspires or excites? Find the causes and concepts that matter to young adults and where they connect with the Gospel and with the teachings of the Church. Preach about them, sing about them, and engage the whole parish in those efforts. But also don’t “advertise to” or “commercialize” your church to only pander to young adults. Young adults especially know when they are trying to be sold something rather than be invited to be a part of a lived experience. Young adult friendly parishes DO enliven and inspire the heart.
Be it marriage prep, baptismal prep, or any other sacramental prep, programs can be just hoops to jump through or they can meet the needs of young couples, even if those couples didn’t expect to make friends or get involved. Young adult friendly parishes DO make sacramental prep engaging and get other married couples involved.
Young adults have many gifts and talents that can fit right in with what your parish is already doing. Gathering the heads of the committees and ministries that already exist and asking them to take inventory of those ministries to see how many people under the age of 40 are presently involved is a great way to begin. Talk about a desire to reach out to people in their 20s and 30s in the parish announcements and even in homilies. Do you pray for young people in the prayers of the faithful? Engaged couples, college students, those seeking employment, and those in crisis are just a few ideas. Putting the thought of intentionally welcoming young adults into people’s heads will push older parishioners to think about gifting and mentoring younger churchgoers. Openly talk about being creative and finding out where some “hidden” young adults might be.
Another parish formed OCIA mentors for couples with parishioners who had been through the process. They became the backbone of the ministry leading candidates through the sessions and questions. Most of the mentors later became confirmation sponsors for the candidates. And the group invited candidates to sit with them at Mass on Sundays. Nearly 80% of the OCIA candidates signed up to be a mentor the following year. The group also ended up getting very involved in parish ministries.
A group of committed parishioners went to a nearby campus and asked some faculty members what they thought they could do for their students. The result was an engagement with medical school students providing screenings for the parish and the parish providing some care packages for their final exams.The students who were Catholic were invited to a dinner given by the parishioners and the parishioners found doctors in the community who were willing and able to give lectures to the students on a variety of topics ranging from new medical technologies they were working with, to temptations that doctors face in the field.
Studies show that middle-age women comprise not only a large portion of the professional lay ministry field but also make up the major participants in liturgical ministries at Mass. Is your church the church of the white middle-age woman? Older men who are active ushers and lectors are also part of a majority of ministers in many churches. Providing an opportunity to look deeply at this group and then asking group members to stretch into the roles of mentors and inviters of young adults to their ministry is an excellent way to focus on young adult liturgical opportunities. It also provides relief from burnout. If every minister would simply look to one younger person who they think has gifts and talents that the parish could use, and then invite them into that ministry and help train them, the face of ministry would begin to change. Start by asking each member to invite three to five young people to consider being a lector, usher, or Eucharistic minister. Perhaps only one person accepts the invitation. Imagine if the 40 Eucharistic ministers each brought one new person!
Aren’t young people the ones grieving their grandparents and parents? How might a group of committed parishioners take on the task of providing hospitality and stress relief to this group? They are often overlooked. This is a “moment of return” for many and giving them an opportunity to feel welcomed and to grieve with you in community is but one way to garner their attrition. One parish I know of put together a team of people who will sit with younger members of families and help them plan the funeral and then provide the brunch for the family afterwards. The group made an effort to lighten the burden and also spend some time talking with the younger members of the family and expressing how much their grandmother loved the parish and what it meant to her and how happy they were that they would get to be in the community that Grandma loved. The younger members never knew what kind of place the parish was and after that experience they became more regular fixtures in the parish community.
Instead of just blessings for 50th Wedding Anniversaries or Mother’s and Father’s Day, perhaps having blessings of “sending forth” for college students or even young adults who are going through transitions – those moving into the parish, those moving out, engaged couples, first anniversaries, and the birth of the first child (perhaps baptism at Sunday Mass). Get creative! A parish in Boston invited all Boston Marathon runners to church and blessed them at Mass the night before the race and provided their “carb up” pasta supper. Another invited a local volunteer community from Americorps and blessed them and their work.
Are we open to letting young adults reserve rooms in our buildings for ____? Make sure they have a priority on booking rooms and that you can be flexible with the process. Also make sure they’re not misinformed on parish processes and that a staff member helps them know who to ask if there’s a need.
Are parish events interesting enough for young adults to want to come to them? Or are they boring enough to keep them away? Something needs to be offered to the whole community, not just the baby boomers and elderly members who donate a big portion of the parish funds. A New York City parish tries to be more like a cultural center during the week providing art exhibits, lectures, and classes. A Chicago parish opens their doors from 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. each evening for artists and others to enter the church and relax.
This might be the most important element for younger people. Ninety percent of the young adults that you’ll meet will come for Sunday Mass and not much more than that. It’s an opportunity to engage them with preaching. Preaching needs to be:
