Discernment, the ability to pinpoint God’s voice amid the mess of messages the world sends us, is the first and most critical skill a Christian adult needs. It also is a skill which neither secular nor Christian schools have taught particularly well in recent years. This means that those Christians heading into adulthood, from teenagers to college students, are not prepared for one of their most important tasks: discerning the particular role God is calling them to play in his plan.
In the last issue of The Scribe, I described a youth program for spiritual gifts discernment which we have been developing. But in working on the program, we discovered that the void in a young Christian’s life involves more than simple ignorance of his or her charisms; it involves the whole process of discernment and decision-making in their life. So we broadened our scope, and have developed the Young Apostles Retreat. Young Apostles is a weekend retreat for youth (mainly high-school students) designed to help fill this void, to teach youth the skill of discernment.
The process is one familiar to many youth ministers: a weekend, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, combining teaching, small group and large group activities, experiences of prayer as a community, and an opportunity to offer one’s life—and especially one’s discernment—to our Lord. But the content and the goal of the retreat is one we have not seen in other offerings: to walk youth through simple, practical steps to discover God’s will in their moral decisions, in using their charisms, and in the big picture of their vocations. We have already put on a “pilot” retreat (with a couple more coming up) and will be training more teachers this summer. We hope we can offer the retreat to parishes starting this September. (If you would like to hold a Young Apostles Retreat in your parish, please contact Mike Dillon for details, miked@siena.org.)
As every youth minister knows, no retreat, no matter how powerful, is more than a blip on the radar to a teenager unless there is follow-up and support. For this reason, the Young Apostles Retreat is intended to be integrated into the youth ministry program of a parish as it already exists. Youth ministers will collaborate with Catherine of Siena Institute teachers in adapting the retreat to the particular circumstances of each parish. The Institute will provide follow-up materials to help youth ministers keep the process of discernment going. These follow-up materials will include a guidebook for finding and training mentors for youths, a workbook for youth to discern their charisms, and a workbook for youth to develop what Pope John Paul II calls a “plan of life”, an essential step in discerning one’s vocation. The Young Apostles Retreat cannot answer all the questions youths will bring, but it can offer some tools to help them find the answers for themselves.
In the long run, our goal is to begin a small, but important, shift in our attitude toward youth ministry. Youth ministry is not about “keeping kids in the pews”—it is about helping our teenagers grow into adults who love their faith and love the world that God has given them responsibility for.