Mission Statement:
To go out into everyday life and evangelize the good word of God and bring people into the Catholic faith.This is what I want to be the ultimate end goal of the group. I think Isaac had the right idea with apologetics and defending the faith and believing what we do and why we do in the Catholic church. And defending from both Atheists and Protestants. What the final words of the mission statement are up for debate, but essentially this is one of the most important calls to action. We need to do every action possible to stop the hemorrhage of believers. There is a vast majority of people leaving the Catholic church, and for every person that we convert to Catholicism there are 6 that are leaving, many of which are converting to Protestantism. So essentially, what I have going to be laid out next is some things I’ve thought that needs to be in place so that we can get to the final mission stated above.
Core Faith Building Workshops – Catechesis
I am not the most knowledgeable about the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), and so going out and evangelizing would be terribly difficult for me to do. Fortunately, much of what Bishop Robert Barron produces with the Word on Fire ministry resonates with the mission. When trying to form the basis of this ministry and mission, I searched for different resources and Word on Fire is the one that I came back to most often as I found it the most understandable, relevant, and real. I would think about one aspect of the St. Martha Young Adult Ministry, then think & pray about it, start to form ideas, and then listen to something on the podcast that is completely relevant to what I’m thinking, and Word on Fire already made video resources for it. We cannot go out and evangelize without know how to do so. Essentially, to build the base of apologetics, we need to teach core concepts about the faith so we can defend it, and then also teach how to evangelize. Word on Fire has produced HOURS of video content that will give us all we need to get started and get educated. My initial proposal was to just get the group started. Sundays after mass would be the regular meeting days because that’s when most of the people are free to attend mass anyway. Every Sunday session could be different, so it would be like a variety hour. One day would be watching a video, another could be bible study, another game night, another session could be praise and worship with Choir. This is a community group, and it’s for our own needs to grow. To start off the sessions would be something like every other week. Then the other day I found out that the core faith building videos from Word on Fire is 10 episodes and 1 hour long, and even the videos about the mass that I really wanted to get into is 25 min each, 6 episodes…. so now I’m proposing the video watching sessions every week after mass. We can have it a potluck, or put in money to order pizza, or be self funded/get donations from parishoners… as I will discuss later. The core content should be watched and finished ASAP which will be a few months, so this would be scheduled after the 5 PM life teen mass. Then every other week we could have the variety hour style of programs for us. But also I’d really want to watch the program on the Mass asap because it really is the way to the source and summit of our faith. Essentially Sundays might be a really long day at church, but if you look at some of our Korean Christian brethren especially, they close down their businesses on Sundays so that they can part take in their church activities all day. We can definitely learn from their passion and devotion. Everything here is still up for debate and scheduling, but the purpose for cleaning up the life teen center is to have a home base where all these activities can happen. It should be more like a home or a hang out area where the youth and young adults can feel free to explore their faith and have somewhere to be in community. Community When starting this, I’d like this group and program to be open to all so that everyone can learn, but the group and reach will be primarily focused on youth and young adults. Again, my hope is to have the Life Teen center to be a Home base to where these activities can take place. Something usable for every group in the Youth/Young adult ministry to use. As you can see, there’s a website here to be a central source of information and storage space. Discord can be used as a center for communication as well. It’s primarily used for gaming groups to keep communion while gaming, but it has lots of features that are comparable to slack and other business tools. There can be one central chat room for everyone on the server, but there can be multiple sub channels for different purposes or ministries. There can be a channel for confirmation class announcements, retreat meetings, a prayer request corner, etc. And a notification can be sent out to phones whenever someone does the @everyone or @here tag. There’s so much we can do with it. One idea that I’d like to be started is to have accountability groups to keep up with each other, and they can be set to private so no one else can see it. And as an extension there can be Men/Women groups to take care of each if their own sets of issues. Programs These are just ideas for the programming or events that take place. How often.. who knows. The way things are working I’d like to have Sundays 2 to evening with Mass as one of the events because the Mass is the way to get to the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith, and really I want to stress the importance of going to mass. Now what I’ve been proposing is a program based on the Word on Fire ministry, but there were other young adult programs out there such as Cristus Ministries, or FOCUS on campus ministries that we can take stuff and learn from. There’s also other events outside that aren’t hosted by us that we can attend such as the Joy of Evangelization at St Joseph’s retreat center. Other things might be a Bible night, not like Bible study, where we can read one of the ENTIRE gospel books. Although Bible study can happen as well. Or even Bible readings where we read and don’t analyze it, but let the Word permeate in us. There could also be fellowship with a game night so it’s not entirely learning all the time.. we gotta have fun. So maybe on Saturdays the Life teen center can be opened to people to to do whatever. I need a place to study that’s out of the house, and frankly I’m getting tired if studying at Starbucks all the time. It could be used for other things. And this is where it’s critical that the cameras are set up so things aren’t stolen or individuals are held accountable for what happens in the room. So other activities can be proposed by other people’s and should be decided on as a group as to what the schedule should be. Outreach Essentially we need to have something for ourselves to keep us spiritually nourished. But we shouldn’t be complacent and leave it at that. We need to go out into the world and spread the faith. We need to keep challenging ourselves to do more and to do better, and this is why I’m challenging to do more than just what’s for us. We need to reach out to others than what we already have set up for Confirmation. The obvious ones are social media. Facebook. Snapchat. Twitter. But we need to fill it with not just ourselves, but with other good news that’s happening. We need to have a social media manager that can keep posting on a regular intervals or have stuff scheduled to go out at the best times. Another option is to use Discord where we can talk about video games and God. We can use games to reach out to others, for example.. using Pokemon Go to build a way in to talk about God and church and stuff. Lastly it brings us to this website.Website
This website should be used to host and centralize all the information that’s important to us. Calendar of events. News, especially Catholic sources. Twitter, YouTube, etc updates and links. I don’t know of any but there are YouTubers that preach and have good info. Even the old stuff are great and all this content can be scheduled to be posted and viewed. When we have events, post pictures and promotional videos. There is a section already for confirmation and this can be used to show information and host documents like registration forms. On the home page I’d like to have easy access to the daily readings and other great information. Essentially I’d like to have this set as people’s home page or something people visit everyday and can click through to read other stuff. Not only info, but we can also use it to sell stuff. Funding So from the donations page i already made: Currently the Young Adult Ministry is starting off and does not have the Non-profit organization status or sub-affiliation with St. Martha Catholic Church, however this may be an option in the future as the group develops. Any donations will be placed into a bank account separated to prevent any commingling, accounted by other individuals, and will be used only by the Young Adult Ministry. Any electronic payments will be accepted through the Square application. I already have these set up. I also have something of an Amazon affiliate account set up. So if we click through on this link and order through it, we can get up to 20% of the sales or profit. So we can post stuff about things we recommend and if people buy it then a portion comes back to us. Also do your regular shopping on Amazon with the link. You’re already buying stuff through Amazon anyway. A portion might as well come to us than entirely to Amazon’s pockets. There’s also stuff in the Life Teen center we can sell. The fuzzy crosses we can sell – I have no idea who bought it or why it’s there. Fr. Thomas gave us all those boxes of friendship bracelets that were free. Anything of that we sell is pure profit. We can even sell apparel. If anyone designs a shirt, we can advertise it. We don’t even have to have things physically, but if someone wants to pre-order knowing that it’s a fundraiser and based on images of someone modeling, then we can batch out the order and have them all made at the same time, and maybe make a few more so that we have some physical inventory to sell next time. This is essentially how threadless works. If we wanted to become a shirt producer/manufacturing for other groups, we can as I have the equipment, but I just don’t have the time to work with it. At the end of it all, this is all about the steps to get to the core mission of what I’m proposing and one goal to work towards..In the coming year bring one person into/back to the Catholic Church.This won’t be easy. But God calls us to spread the good news. This is my call now, and I’m inviting you to take part and grow in faith with me. John
John this is a brilliant idea! Overall this website will serve its purpose to evangelize over the media. Exactly what Bishop Barron is doing and Word on Fire cannot do it alone. Yes, there is a very big need for us to do this. I pray and hope that our core can become on fire for this. Please take a look also the Augustine Institute website and Ascencion Press website they also have good resources.
This is just awesome. It’s the perfect time to establish this and have everyone get connected and fan the flame that has begun to ignite in all our hearts. I will always be proud to have been a part of this group and I will always be praying for your success. May God bless all of you and guide you as you become his evangelists.
This is pretty extensive john!great job with great ideas
This is EXCELLENT. Very extensive plan that I look forward to taking part in. Thank you so much for taking this first step, John. Keep us posted as far as how we can help.