Vocation Ministries
One of the best ways to produce vocations in a parish is to have a ministry aimed at singles aged 18-30. This happened in my home parish for a few years and it produced 2 vocations. It was a program called Into The Deep which challenged people to learn and live the entire Catholic faith. They had some good leaders who had just been to bible school and gotten very excited about their faith. They were very orthodox and very charismatic. It was a powerful combination and it transformed many lives. Not just the ones who went off to seminary but really everyone who was involved.
I think there is a great need for fellowships like this especially for the critical age when young people are figuring out who they are and what they want to do with their life. As a church we let to many of them go without really calling them to heroic virtue. We need to present them the faith like it is really true – all of it. There are so many slogans like “Make Jesus Lord of you life” or “Let go and let God” or “Surrender everything to Jesus”. These are great but people really need to contemplate what they mean. If God calls me to religious life am I willing to say “yes”? If God wants me to get married and have 10 kids am I willing to walk down that path? If God is calling me to be a martyr am I willing? These are not just slogans. We are called to be saints and this is what sainthood looks like.
One of the real problems with this type of ministry is leadership. You need to find people who can credibly make a challenge. They need to believe firmly in the gospel as taught by the church. Then they either need to be young people themselves or they need to be priests. This age group does not really take leadership from older laymen very well. The trouble with young leaders is they are unstable. That is not a bad thing. It is just their state of life. They get married. They go off to study. They change jobs a lot. The group we had at out parish fell apart when all the leaders dropped out at once.
With priests you have a different problem. The big one is orthodoxy. To many priests can’t inspire people to sainthood because their teaching is too wishy-washy. If somebody is going to give their life for the faith then they need their faith based on something solid. If you can’t teach that the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth then people are always going to look for a plan B in case it turns out to be wrong. Even if a priest affirms a truth like contraception and fails to teach it strongly in the parish young people are going to start to smell something wrong. Do you really believe it?
The good news is that once people become convinced that it is really true then they become very powerful. Most don’t enter religious life. A few do and that is big. The others also end up having very strong Catholic families. They get very active in a wide variety of ministries. It is like the parable of the sower. The seed on the good soil produces 30, 60, and 100 fold. That is the future of the church. It is not to prevent the seeds in the rocky soil and weedy soil from leaving the church completely. They are never going to produce much fruit. The focus needs to be on planting good seed in good soil.
