Passing on faith takes relationship

	Jim Rauchle

Passing on our faith and the beauty of our Catholic tradition to the next generation ranks as one of the most urgent requirements of good stewardship.

The challenge is we can only help high school students see the significance of their faith if we capture their attention. We are most likely to do this through an honest, sincere and appropriate relationship with them. Without a relationship, people tend not to listen and if they don't hear the message of Jesus Christ, how will their lives be transformed?

Stewardship Stewardship: A Way of Life is the diocesan thrust. It invites Catholics to acknowledge that all of life is a gift of God and to respond through prayer, service and sharing. This series will look at ways to do that.

The days of force-feeding poorly presented Catholic doctrine down uninterested teenager's throats are, or should be, over. Why? Teens learn at an early age to make snap decisions about what is important to them and what is not.

By age 30, with junk mail overflowing our mailboxes, we learned to start pitching unfamiliar bulk rate envelopes without opening them. The contents may be important, but without opening the envelope we will never know.

It is the same with messages of traditional high school religious education. If the message is from an unfamiliar person and presented in a plain brown wrapper teens will most likely perceive it as irrelevant and unimportant.

Today's teens are bombarded with media produced by marketing experts vying for their attention. They make instantaneous decisions about whether to pay attention to any of these marketing vampires looking to suck seconds of a teen's attention.

Watch any teen with a remote control make microsecond decisions about what to watch on TV and you'll understand.

Teens are multitasking aficionados bombarded by stimulus. They can instant message with a dozen friends while doing homework, copying a song from KaZaA and watching Reuben win on American Idol. They tune out what they feel is unimportant to them faster than you can say the "Body of Christ."

Recently on ESPN, the CEO's of the major car manufacturers spoke of increasing their marketing efforts toward children. Their research showed that, by age 10, children were forming lifelong opinions about what brand to drive.

If automakers try to convince our children to drive their cars by age 10 and Nike pays $90 million to a teen to wear their shoes, what does this say about how we encourage a life-long faith journey through religious education?

How does this affect religious education? Today's teens want black and white, relevant answers to life's challenges. In religious education we're missing the forest for the trees. We prioritize Catholic doctrine over Christ's example and love.

Don't misunderstand, the point is not that we should water down Catholic traditions and teachings, but rather how do we make them engaging and relevant to a teen's (and our) life.

Those very traditions are what set us apart from other faiths and deepen our understanding of Christ.

But, the days of teaching a teen to go to Mass or risk the fires of hell don't compute. More importantly, it does not encourage a desire to deepen one's faith or embrace Catholicism throughout life.

At times, I hear criticism about the music and glitz of our youth ministry. I argue that God gave us certain gifts and talents, why would we not use them to make Christ's message as attractive, engaging and relevant as possible.

The ability to make youth ministry impactful is getting easier and cheaper. Ideas are readily available from books and technology is getting cheaper. Go explore a bit!

We don't require attendance at our youth ministry program. If we don't make our message engaging, relevant and entertaining then teens make a micro-second decision to tune us out. This means they do not attend and we cannot build a relationship with them.

We need to make a great first impression every week! It is a means to an end, the foot in the door, a way to prevent teens from making that split-second decision to change the channel. Besides, breathing your own creativity, life experience, sweat equity and passion into an evening program is fulfilling and fun.

The power of an honest, sincere and appropriate relationship with teens cannot be understated. In the last two weeks, I have heard our volunteer adults counsel teens out of drug use, premarital sex and suicide. To a teen, the youth minister is the Catholic Church and an engaging, relational program keeps teens open to hear the message and returning to church week after week.

(Rauchle is the high school religious education coordinator at St. Raphael Parish, Oshkosh.)