Catechetical / Youth Ministry

This volume provides all who minister to young people with an effective blueprint for building a truly meaningful ministry

Christopher Wesley is on the front lines of youth ministry. He’s been in the parish trenches, refocusing an unpopular youth program and making it one where teens feel connected, stay involved, and grow in faith. In Rebuilding Youth Ministry, Wesley offers ten indispensable strategies to help you make your youth programs just as successful. Wesley coaches fellow Catholic ministry leaders on how to overcome common hurdles of ministering to young people. Wesley shares how he faced feelings of complacency, underestimated youth, and entertained rather than ministered in his own parish. Wesley built a distinctive program based on small group faith formation and sustained it with the assistance of more than sixty volunteer adult mentors. Wesley lays out ten strategies that helped grow participation in his high school program from nine teens to ninety and the middle school program from forty teens to eighty-five, including: Making your youth program about more than pizza; Pursuing authentic relationships between small groups and mentors; Shaping a dynamic youth ministry team; and Creating a space that’s welcoming to teens.

Ministry Resources for Youth Leadership Developmentoffers faith communities the resources and strategies to develop youth as leaders within youth ministry programs and parishes.The manual includes four foundational sessions on Christian leadership, ten sessions and mini-sessions on leadership skills, and two mini-sessions to help prepare youth and adults for working together.The manual also offers strategies for using the activities, sessions, and mini-sessions to create day-long, weekend-long, and year-long training programs for youth; for creating leadership roles within the parish; for inviting youth to leadership; and for working with the parents of youth leaders. Each manual in the Total Youth Ministry series includes a CD containing its electronic version, customizable handouts, and theme-related links. CD System Requirements Intel® Pentium II® processor Microsoft® Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT® 4.0 with Service Pack 6, Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2, Windows XP Professional or Home Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 64MB of RAM (128 MB recommended) 800 x 600 or higher screen resolution Adobe Reader 6.0 60MB of available hard-disk space (for installation of Adobe Reader 6.0) Multi-read CD-ROM drive Internet Explorer 5.01 or 5.5 or Explorer 6.0 or 6.1

Is your student ministry healthy? This is a question every student minister has asked. It’s a question that brings both anger and tears. You are growing in numbers, but something just didn’t feel right. It doesn't feel healthy. This is the “there must be more to student ministry than this” moment. Regardless of your ministry context, church size, denomination, or years of experience, it is possible for you to have a healthy student ministry. The three elements, explained by author Ben Trueblood, will lead you to that very thing. Student Ministry that Matters gives you and your leaders a framework to answer this question, "Is my student ministry healthy?" and help you highlight areas of improvement as you seek to lead a student ministry focused on health.

The Vision of Catholic Youth Ministry: Fundamentals, Theory, and Practice provides an overview of the theory and pastoral practice of comprehensive youth ministry, based on the 1997 document, Renewing the Vision: A Framework for Catholic Youth Ministry (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Education). Contributing authors represent a spectrum of Catholic youth ministry thought and practice and are widely recognized in the field. The Vision of Catholic Youth Ministry is the first textbook on Catholic youth ministry and blends solid research with real-life application. It is an excellent resource for undergraduate or graduate courses in Catholic youth ministry or for youth leaders who want to ground their ministry in solid theology.

Raising teenagers to be principled and upright is tough enough. Raising ones who embrace the Catholic Faith can seem nigh impossible. The good news is that the teen-tested, internationally proven, five-step program explained in these pages will not only help keep your teens Catholic but can also make them genuine leaders in the Faith . . . and in the secular world as well. This simple program, which can be employed by parents at home, confronts teens with modest, absorbing challenges that require them to exert persistent efforts after repeated failures. After a series of successes, your teens will develop the optimism and habits of perseverance that are the hallmarks of all true leaders. That's because they will have grasped the truth that hard-fought experience has engraved in the souls of all great men and women: failure is just a door to success. In short order, that conviction will empower your teens to achieve remarkable results: improved grades and athletic