 Hey everybody out there, welcome to the webinar. So glad that you could join us during this holy week. Hi, this is John, the Christian Outreach Officer. I'm joined here with Sarah tonight. And we are really excited to be able to talk to you about discipleship. It's a great need in the church. It is a great need for young people today to be taught and led into a deeper relationship with Christ that will last them from their teen years into eternity. And that is our hope, that is our prayer. I want to start just by thanking everyone who's here and you're committed to the young church, you're committed to esteemable conferences and you're committed to Jesus Christ and his church. So let us begin with the prayer and just ask the Lord to bless this time because I really feel like, you know, this is such a topic that I'm very passionate about. I loved it. And I just love being able to talk to you about it tonight. But I know that my words are not enough. God's grace is gotta be a thing that works in our hearts so that we can really be the kind of people that it needs us to be to make disciples in the church today. So let us pray in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Good and gracious Calvin, thank you for this evening. During this most holy week as we prepare our hearts to go through and reflect upon and be touched once again by your passion and resurrection. And Jesus, we thank you for your sacrifice, for choosing to cross on our behalf, for paying the price that we could never repay, for paying the price for the sin of the entire world upon that cross through most precious blood. We ask, Lord, that through our unity with you that we would continue more deeply in our sufferings, but also that we could come to know a deeper outpouring of your joy as we move into Easter this year. Thank you for the young church that we serve, Lord God. And we ask that you pour out your Holy Spirit upon us that we would be disciple makers for your kingdom, that through our humble and sometimes just fragile gifts of faith, that you would be able to bless it and strengthen it and use it to do your well. I just thank you, Lord God, for your never-ending love and mercy. Thank you for the call that you put on each of our own lives to live with disciples. Just be with us now and walk with us during these next few minutes as we impact discipleship a little bit and talk about how we can build your kingdom for the salvation of the souls we serve and for the glorification of your most holy name, Jesus. Amen. Some holy spirit, amen. All right, well, once again, welcome everybody to the webinar. My name is John. All you I work here in the Christian outreach office at Francis University and a half of past 13 years. Prior to that, I was a youth minister in Perishes, in Texas, in North Carolina. And I spent two years in that missionary and have been involved in various outreaches and conferences and whatnot on the parish level, regional and national, but honestly, we're my greatest passion right now is just working with leaders like yourself and helping to strengthen you to do what God has called you to do. And just to let you know, in this webinar at any time, well, actually, before I get into that, I'm not alone tonight. And I'm really glad that I'm joined by another awesome member of the Christian outreach team, Sarah Baches. Sarah, why don't you just tell people about your role here in the office and how you're doing that? All right, that's all good. So I'm Sarah and I'm the manager of youth programming here in the office. I've been here just under three years and it's been a wonderful opportunity to be a part of these conferences. And my primary role is to work on the programming, the theme and the schedule with a group of wonderful people. It's really praying to serve my friends, calling us to do the programming. And I also oversee Francis can lead, which I'll talk about a little bit later in this webinar. And the conferences have been a huge blessing to me in my life. I was a high school student and had a wonderful experience there to really further my conversion relationship with Christ. So it's a blessing to be a part of it in this webinar. And I'm doing great tonight. It's good to have you all here. I first met Sarah, gosh, it was like over 10 years ago now when we first started the lead program and I was one of the lead directors and you were one of the facilitators on my team. And I was, and I think I shared this with you after the first week, how impressed I was by your ability to share with faith and just your passion for the Lord. And it is funny how God has kind of sort of grown and brought you back to the office a few years ago and just going to work with her on this level. She's a real blessing in this office and a real blessing to everything that she does for us. So, she's going to give a blessing to this webinar as well. Yeah, walking with teams in discipleship is very key because I think oftentimes when we start talking about discipling young people, we realize that it's such an overwhelming task and yet it doesn't have to be. It is a challenging task. It is the great commission. And so as we talked about what the discipleship is tonight, I want to be able to, and Sarah wants to be able to with me respond to any questions that you might have. Now, on the side of your screen, you probably have to go to webinar control panel and one of the tabs as you go down says questions. And all you have to do, any time you have a question about anything that we're talking about is type your question into the dinner. It'll pop up on our screens. We'll be able to respond to it within the webinar. We'll repeat the question out loud so that everyone can understand what the question is being asked. So, we wanted this to be interactive. It's not going to be distracting. It's not going to be a burden for you to be asking as many questions as you need to ask as we go along. All right, so, you know, okay. One of the things in this attitude, you know what I mean? One of the things that I've kind of come to grips with and it wasn't really always my view of ministry. When I got first in the youth ministry many years ago, it was about, let's give as many kids into the room as possible, put on this great program and get them excited for their faith. And I realized after a few years of doing that that we were reaching a lot of young people but not really impacting their lives the way I think Christ would want us to. Now, we're called not just to go and build programs. You know, I think that's the great challenge. We've sometimes substituted the great commission of go-made disciples with go-build-a-youth ministry program that's really very exciting and fun. And, you know, when we do, when we miss the focus, oftentimes the real work of discipleship kind of falls through the cracks, right? It isn't given the amount of tension that it needs to be. So, whether you've tried a discipleship and you haven't done it well or you've never tried it and you're concerned about it or whether you've been a disciple for years and you just wanted to spend all the time here are some other views to kind of strengthen your game. I think everyone in any of those categories is going to find something to learn through this webinar. You know, discipleship itself, you know, is a process where we accompany, where we mentor and we walk with young people as they learn to become more like Jesus Christ. And I think oftentimes we're looking for sending a package, sending a program on how to disciple, but discipleship really isn't a program, it really isn't a package, it's about people. It's about you as a minister taking the time to make Christ incarnate in a life of a young person in a way that they can see you live in witness. And in that relationship that we build that's built upon trust, that's built on authenticity, you know, they begin to walk with you and imitate you as you imitate Christ. And I think that all that is just true. The only people that can truly disciple in another Catholic is a Catholic disciple because it is something that's caught, it's not taught. And you know, sometimes you can teach something that you're not really fond of. And I think some math teachers do this hub at times. They're not really thrilled with math but they're excited with the math teacher. And you can always tell a math teacher who loves math versus a math teacher who doesn't love math. When I was a freshman in high school, I failed algebra. I was a straight C student for the first three quarters or periods in my semester. When I took the semester exam, I failed. And I thought I was the worst math student ever and I thought I could never learn math. And then the next year I had geometry. This teacher was just passionate about geometry and he was a real nerd. And I appreciated his nerdyness in passion for geometry and I aced his class. And it really was a kind of a shift in my mind is like, as we teach young people from, whatever you want to teach young people, whether it's math or how to follow Jesus, when we have an authentic passion for that in our lives, it comes through the way that we work with people. But there is a path that we can follow. Discipleship is not just, okay, let's grab a few teens and blindly walk into the jungle of discipleship and try to find their way through it. There are some really key moments and stages that we all need to be aware of in the discipleship process. All right? The first thing that you need to do in order to do it, to be in a discipleship relationship with teens is be in a relationship with teens. So I'd say the first step, the first stage of the framework of working into discipleship is just living out your fate and being a living witness. Why is witness so important? Well, if you look at the other people we serve today, they have lost in many ways, complete faith in any institution. They don't trust government. I mean, they don't trust religion. And if you look at the political landscape, you know, that kind of thought process, this lack of trust in institutions, it's what's given rise to someone like Donald Trump who's kind of feeling this right. People don't want to admit that, but it's really a lack of faith in government that has led to the rise of Donald Trump. And, you know, in the same way when young people don't see an authentic witness, the living out of somebody who says what they believe and then follows that up with authentic living, then what they begin to do is doubt what the institution that we stand for is so that we say to a young person, this is what the church teaches. In many cases, young people will actually shut down. They don't want to hear the authoritative word of how they should live their lives. But what they are hungry for is someone who will get to know them, kind of get in the mess of their lives and give them the hope that they can change, that we'll build a relationship with them and walk with them even when they are not being good cattle, even when they are failing as young Catholics to live out in the hospital in Spomans. And we'll still love them and witness to the love of Christ. And so that primary witness, that first witness that we give is absolutely essential to the discipleship process. Young people won't care about how much you know about the faith until they know how much you care about them. And so, I think I was a little, at first I was a little frustrated when Pope Francis came to America because I wanted him to say like, start preaching the truth and start really saying what the church needs to hear. We need to come back to God. We need to just be more Catholic, more orthodox in our approach. And I realized that he had started that way. He would have had my attention and he probably would have had every other person who's already in the fold, so to speak. That way he would have had their attention as well. What he wouldn't have had is the attention of the world outside the church. Because the world outside the church, they won't care if the church was true until they know the church was good. And so I think Pope Francis came to the United States to show the world, to show the church in America and to show people outside of the church that the Catholic church is good. And we have a heart for those people that have been marginalized and that we really do bring the wealth of Christ to people who may have already been or experienced rejection in their lives. So that initial witness is the first step. And that happens in the context of just bringing young people together at your parishes. Serious, do you have anything that you wanna add to that phase in terms of relationship, William? I don't think so. I mean, like John said, just when people, when teens see the way that you love them and you're living your life, especially other teens, possibly in your youth group that are already on their journey, it's a huge inspiration. And when you talk to them and ask them what impact to them, a lot of times they'll mention someone in their life that was that initial spark encounter with them. Like, how did you follow Jesus or how did you come to know them? A lot of them will pinpoint someone, whether it be a family member, youth minister, classmate, that really set them on the journey, so. Yeah, and I think, you know, I've been teaching youth ministry courses here on campus and I've always asked the young people that are in my class, you know, what was your youth ministry experience about what made the difference? And inevitably, it never comes back to, well, my youth minister, he taught me or she taught me all these amazing things. They talk about the love this person had. They talk about the investment that these people made in their lives in times, presence. And I want to encourage everyone, that's really the game changer. If you want to disciple us, just be a good friend in Christ. You know, the next two phases, you know, stages in the process of leading kids into disciples should have to do with evangelization. And the first is proclaiming the gospel. You know, young people, oftentimes, and I know this was my case growing up, I didn't really hear a solid presentation of the gospel in a way that I could relate to until I was a junior in high school. And I think we also assume that by sitting in church every Sunday through some sort of osmotic process, young people are going to be converted. You know, young people are going to come to know Jesus. And the truth is, you can sit in a church as many hours in the day that you have available and that won't necessarily make a difference until you hear the gospel and make a decision on it. You know, love in its essence is a choice. And what we're called to do is to love Christ with our whole heart, our whole mind, our soul and whole strength. And young people need to be invited to do that. You know, the invitation that goes forth is, you know, come follow me. And come follow me from Christ is not so much a, you know, out of distance. It's come follow me, be with me. You know, the way Jesus's followers were with him, we're not following him 10 feet behind. They walked with him, they dined with him, they rested with him. You know, they spoke with him, they communed with God as friends. And so the call to come follow Christ is one that we need to invite other people to do. And, you know, we need to understand that part of that is proclaiming what we call the curriculum. The curriculum is that core, that kernel of faith that is the heart of the gospel, which is really what Holy Week is all about. You know, it can be summed up in this. God created us to be in communion with him. And through our choice, through the sin of man, we experienced separation from God. And yet God did not leave us to die in our sin. At the appropriate time, he sent his only son into the world to be a sacrifice that would pay the price, that would bridge the gap that existed between us and God. So we could be in a relationship with him. And that through our confession of faith, through our belief in Christ, we can come to know his love and share in not only his death, but rising to new life, eternal life with Christ in heaven. So again, it's clearly proclaiming that. The core of the gospel is, we're called to be in communion with Christ through a personal relationship. And of course, that is expressed most fully in communion. And this is why youth groups have such a great opportunity to be a place where young people can discover for themselves the love of Christ and make a commitment to it. But it's also something that I think we do really well. We proclaim the gospel really well at our conferences. A matter of fact, I think the core of what we do is found in stage two and the next stage, which is stage three, which is leading them to conversion. I can clearly look at my life and say, when I was 18 years old, I made a decision that I was gonna follow Jesus. And I would say prior to that, if I had to say what my posture towards God would be, it would have been like this. I had my back to God. And then when I made this decision, I turned to Christ and said, Christ, I want you in my life. And that's what we're asking kids to do is to turn from the world, turn from all the temptations and all the sin in the world and come back to Christ. And Sarah's gonna share a little bit more about how we do that at conferences. If you're on this webinar, you're probably planning to bring young people to one of our conferences this summer. And how do we prepare them and how can we make the most of this moment of hearing the gospel and accepting the gospel in a moment of conversion? So Sarah, why don't you share with everyone a little bit about the conference weekend and how this can help in this portion of the discipleship process. Sure. So starting with one of the first things John talked about with witness, I think a powerful witness is seeing a couple of teens coming together for a weekend for the same reason. Whether or not they're 100% there for all the right reasons, maybe a friend invited them and they didn't really know if they were getting themselves into. However, when you get there and you see a couple thousand teens singing and dancing and having fun and then really entering into prayer throughout the weekend, it's a powerful witness. All of our presenters from the stage, we really emphasize to them to really share their witness, to share their story about how that worked in our life. And so the teens are able to hear and see from the stage a witness of someone striving to follow Christ as a disciple. And then also the witness of everyone they came with. You as a group leader, chaperones, to really, it's a weekend away to really see and experience the witness of others and those around them. And then as John mentioned, the heart of our, the goal of our conferences is to make the love of Christ known. And we do that through the sacraments, through their encounter with Christ and the Mass and Eucharistic adoration, through prayer, again, through the different keynotes and talks that are on the weekend. And all of this is really to set them up to encounter Christ in summary and to have that initial conversion experience to know Christ in a new way and to make a decision in their life. I wanna follow him and move forward in that. A powerful moment of our conference is Saturday night. After we've gone through the weekend having some of those things I mentioned, having Mass, Eucharistic adoration, the host of the weekend will invite the teens to stand up and commit their life to Christ if they feel called. And almost all of the teens stand and they lead them in a prayer to really give over their life to Christ. And that's the beginning of their journey. Now that isn't their entire walk as a disciple, but that's that initial conversion desire to turn, like John mentioned, turn toward Christ instead of away. And then it's the launchpad for a life as a disciple. And all of the talks, though, every year that might be a different theme and slightly different content and keynotes and schedule, the heart is the gospel proclamation like John mentioned. We really wanna preach the love of Christ and what he's done for them, just as John mentioned, the basic charisma that Christ loves them. He died for them and wants to be in a relationship with them. And so those shared in different ways by different people that's the heart of the content of our conferences. On Sunday, we try to wrap up the weekend and really send them forth to be rooted in everything they experienced on the weekend, really encouraging them to have a life of prayer to surround themselves with people that will call them on to holiness and to encourage them in the right things instead of pulling them away from God and again, encouraging them in that. And so you all play a tremendous role, though, in their walk in discipleship with Christ because we provide them that in place of initial encounter and experience, but you are so blessed to be able to walk with them every day from the conference. And so kind of backtracking, it's so important. We talked, we did a webinar earlier last month about how to prepare for the conferences. And so just to remind our huge part of that witness and initial conversion on the conference weekend is the relationships that you're able to build with them prior and then post-conference after the conference having a plan with how are you gonna follow up with them? How are you gonna help them in this walk? A lot of teens will leave our conferences on a quote unquote retreat high, which we may have heard them say many times. I've heard teens say, I need to go back to Steubenville to get that back, to experience that feeling again. And they're very focused on feelings, which teens are emotional people and God gives us that gift of his experience and that love and joy and peace that they might feel on the conference weekend. But as you know, that's not the everyday experience that they'll have. So it's really important that they have someone like you and your other chaperones and maybe other people on your 14 to walk with them and show them what does it mean? They had this incredible experience and a count of Christ, but what does it mean to live it out every single day in a life of prayer? Even when they're not feeling it, even when they don't have those emotions and aren't super excited, how can they still be faithful to Jesus and walk in their life of prayer and the choices that they make every day? And so it's really key to have that plan of how we can continue to walk with them. And again, you can't do it alone to really empower your chaperones or perhaps other leaders and your youth group teens who are on their walk with Christ to be that witness and to be that guide with them. And also that reminded me just when I mentioned to you, you might have teens that we're talking about initial conversion and all of that. You might have teens coming to these conference that are on their journey with Christ. Maybe they've come and they've had that experience and they're faithful and still on fire for the Lord. But the beautiful part of the conference is there's always an opportunity for deeper conversion. Maybe a truth to take deeper root in their heart. I know for me as an adult working in the conference as I'll hear something that a speaker says or have an encounter with Christ during adoration, even though I'm working in the conference, that brings me closer to him. So there's opportunities for those teens to reap life to Christ and to have the truth of his love take deeper root in their heart and also serve as a witness. So it's not a one and done deal. So even those teens in your group that maybe have had that initial conversion can still account for Christ in a new way. So that's what John and I would give, I think that. And to that we can jump into the plan for post too. And if you have any questions, just a reminder you can type them into your box too as we go. Yeah, I just want to say that was great sharing. I think one of the things, my first experience with student was not as a high school student. I did not have the opportunity to go as a high school student to a student conference, but I first brought young people when I was a youth minister. And one of the things that I was committed to doing as a youth minister was the ongoing acceleration of my teens. So I would do a retreat in the fall. We would do a retreat this spring. We would always have part of that, a chance for them to once again respond to the gospel. But nothing was as powerful in the lives of my young people as taking them to a conference because there's something beautiful, a grace-filled moment when you're in a room with 2,000 other young people there to experience the love of Jesus Christ. And you see the faith of all your peers around you. People are giving their hearts to Christ in this moment of prayer. And it just, it inspires and it draws even the hardest nuts to crack. I always knew that if I had a young person who was a tough nut to crack, we'd get them to stupid one. Because even if God didn't break through all the way, something would happen that would leave them ready for more evangelization or even ready for discipleship. God has done miracles in the lives of thousands of teens and he does it every summer. We see this, I have friends who, and Sarah is one of them at a student conference where they first have their initial conversion who've gone on to do amazing things in the church, serving and giving others to Christ. And the beauty of it for me as a youth minister is and when you're running your own program, right, you get so caught up in the logistics and making sure everything behind the scenes is running well that sometimes you can be so overwhelmed and you don't have time to actually ministry your teens on this retreat. And that's stupid when you used to come and you just be with your teens. And you just walk with them together on this journey. You don't have to lead anything, you're not in charge of anything. You're just there, right? And to witness and to love them and all of the effort is being done by an amazing team of speakers and our partners at every one of our conferences across the country. They just do a great job of creating an environment where you can just be a minister and a witness and help guide your young people as they experience the love of Christ, if not for the first time, in a new way. And it's beautiful to see the lasting fruit of that encounter in the lives of young people. But I would say one of the dangers, and Sarah, look at this too, I should tell you about the young people who's come back and say, oh, I need to go back, I need to go back to student because that's where I can find Jesus. And I think this is where we understand that the most important ministers in the room at a student conference aren't on the stage. They're sitting in the seats with the young people, it's you and your team, your chaperones with you as a group leader, if you are a chaperone, your presence there is more important than any other person's presence there because you're the one who's gonna be walking with these teams after the conference is over, when they're going to need a helper to pick them up the first time after they fall. After that high is worn off and they're like, where's God? You'll be able to show them this is where God is. You'll be able to help them stay connected because you gotta believe in it. When Jesus tells the parable of the path and how he's out there so in season, some of it falls on the path where it's trampled, another falls amongst rocks where it can't find root, another falls amongst the thorns where it's choked off. And the heart of their soil can be in very different places. Some people might have a lot of these, some people might be more rocky and so the word of God falls upon their heart and they respond, but it's up to you to nurture that young plant, that young faith, make sure that the soil is rich, make sure that it's being nourished with prayer and the sacraments and the grace that it needs to flourish and walking with teens and making that happen is key to the discipleship process. And that starts with, I'm sure, our literature with having an idea of what you want to see happen and forming a plan to make that happen and creating an environment within your youth group to help make that happen. So Sarah's gonna talk a little bit about come out of the conference, what kind of things can we do? So very simply bringing back the same, the group together and, you know, the small groups are a huge part of a conference weekend and so I think it'd be really important to post-conference to get those groups back together again to be able to share and process what God has done. Perhaps there's time for that on the bus ride home or things like that, but even after a week or two, it would be good to get back together because again, this is when you start to see them tapering in their experience, perhaps being discouraged or like John mentioned, falling away or going back to us and that they've really resolved to turn away from at the conference and being discouraged and disappointed. And so it's really important to bring them back together to hear them, hear where they're at and really offer that encouragement and maybe share more witness to your life about how you've gotten back up when you've fallen or have been able to keep on your journey with Christ even when you're not feeling it or what it's difficult or you're busy. All these things, when teams are away on the conference weekend, it's really easy for them to pray and to focus on Christ, but then teams were finding more and more just so busy and so caught up in school and sports and extracurriculars and social media and all these things and they're bombarded. Whereas on the conference weekend, and we have their time and attention where they can really encounter God, but what does it mean for them to live that every day and to really talk through some of those things that might be challenging for them to remind them of the things that they experienced on the conference weekends of prayer and silence and community, to really remind them what the key parts are and how they can live that out every day. That'd be the first thing I'd say. Yes, because it's important to remember and I think if you talk to anyone on our team, you're gonna hear this from everybody in our office. We're not here to put out conferences. That's not our mission. Our mission is not to build the biggest and the best conferences. We wanna do that, but only because it serves our mission of wanting to build the church. And Jesus said, you'll make disciples. So we see within this discipleship process, the witness, the proclamation and inviting people to conversion. That is the area of this process where we're the most effective and where our conference average, I think, really has been gifted by God to help build the church. But the majority of the work, the tougher work in discipleship, falls upon you and working long-term teams. When they get back to their parish and what you're doing is absolutely essential. You know, I think I already said this, but it's only going to happen in relationship. And this is why you're gathering young people together, building that community, asking them how their lives are going, how's your prayer life, how's everything going in your relationship with Jesus, talking to them about that. You have to have a level of trust in order to get there. And so these things take time. You can't just say to the other person, coming to the room and right away I was going to say, all right, listen to me, I want to tell you how to be a disciple. What you need, what the first movement is, cool, what's going on in your life and how can I help you grow closer to Christ? Because the disciple, all right, is not one who's the lower or the master over the one that's being a disciple. The disciple is one who's actively pursuing Christ. And they become a disciple when they grab another person alongside him and say, let's do this together. It is really a movement where disciples are reaching out to other people and saying, walk with me as I walk as a disciple, guess what, together we'll be disciples in Christ. And it changes the nature of the relationship if you understand that you're there to serve and come to the young people, to guide them and to be able to help them overcome the obstacles that are on their path. And Sarah mentioned some of them, you just look worldliness, social media, all the distractions and noise of this world that seeks to rob a young person's ability to find peace and center their lives on Christ for a ton of meaningful prayer. It's an art, it's a skill, it's a gift that needs to be passed on in the context of a relationship with that team. And if you look at the model of Christy, right, he didn't go out and create a thousand disciples. He created 12 apostles and on those 12 he had a very intimate relationship with Peter, James and John. And he trained these guys and he got them rooted in prayer and filled them with the Holy Spirit and empowered them to go out and do the same in the lives of a few other people. You know, and as you see this happening where we take time to invest in a handful of young people within our group and wouldn't we disciple them? We will have more of an impact on the church by disciplining a handful of young people who work very well in serving 100 young people but not going to be able to take a great deep. And we've seen this born out in the statistics of our church today. And you know, it saddens my heart but the reality is as we look out across a room that may have 30,000 young people worshiping Jesus and just on fire in their faith in this moment, then more than half of them are gonna be non-practicing Catholics who would have been college. That's heartbreaking. And these young people are being called like Christ in the ultimate relationship. And yet, as soon as they accept Christ they're actually stepping into a life battle and challenge. And we really need to do a much better job as a church of really teaching them how to walk with Christ on a commitment to ongoing converting. You know, I talked about the first three phases and I kind of want to transition to the next four because this is really where you're gonna pick up the handful coming out of the conference. And you're really gonna walk with young people in these different stages. You know, the next stage after they make their initial conversion is that's when we start the process of having catechesis. And I think we kind of sometimes get along in the church. We keep trying to find catechesis and find young people who think catechesis will make you a better Catholic. Catechesis will make you a stronger Catholic. And I would say, unless there's a place in our heart that loves Jesus and wants to know that truth about Jesus, all the other truths that we teach as a church don't really have a land in place yet. Now, I'm not saying that you won't plan to cede to that kind of catechesis that might, maybe in the future, but ideally what we want to do is to lead young people to that initial conversion. And this is why I think the student conferences are a gift to the church is we do that well. And when they leave, you know, the feedback I get from so many youth ministers is like, this kid used to go nowhere. And he kind of used to sit on his hands and he was disinterested and they went to the student room. God did something in his life. And now he's had everything. He's asking questions and he's growing and he's praying and he wants more. He's hungry for more. So I think that encounter with Christ a lot of sparks of deeper hope. And the catechesis, you know, has to do with just enhancing their life with relevant truths. Like this is how you live the life of a young Catholic in this time in history. Now, I think standard catechesis, there's literally an endless supply of catechesis that our church has. We could literally spend in the next 100 years of our lives reading book after book after book, learning more and more about our faith. But the catechesis that they need right now is what are we dealing with in their lives? You know, and I said earlier, it's like, well, how do we teach them your prayer? Because if the fundamental building block and the life of discipleship is a relationship to Christ, then that's where we should start. Teaching them how to have a relationship with Christ and that's Christ taught us in the apostle John and he's a personal firm that we say we love God but hate our neighbor, we're an hypocrite. Then the other thing that youth groups should be teaching is the proper nature of love between people. Now, I would say that for catechesis, make your youth group a school of love. Teach them how to love God, teach them how to love one another. Talk about what love is because it's not being talked about in any good way in our society today. Love has been kicked around, dragged through the dirt. It's had mud thrown on it. It has been so twisted in the eyes of young people that they don't even know if they believe in love anymore. And it's essential to our hope. It's essential to our identity as Christian that we have a firm belief in understanding what love is. So the catechesis coming out of school is take that further, that love that they've experienced and build upon it with. This is how we build the community of love. This is what true love is between friends, between people who date, between parents and children, between the relationship you have with teachers. Everything should be taught. This is how you love one another as price loves us. And through that, we're going to be loving God. And because until we once again create schools of love, you know, all the other catechesis will kind of come up short, especially for kids who are just starting to know what it means to love God and how do I love God? You know, and as you grow, there's obviously we want to teach them how to be good Catholics and reveal the beauty of truth. Things like the Eucharist and other beautiful symbols and signs in our church of God's lips. So when you come to Eucharist to help them understand that that is the reception of Christ's love in the sacramental formulae. You have to bring in all aspects, but it needs to be taught from a framework of what is love. You know, it was Pope, I said, well, now Saint John Paul Ray, who talked about the family and familiar it's been sort of through as a school of love. And in my last year's group, I mean, half of my kids didn't even have intact families. Half the kids in my youth group weren't being taught what love was between a man and a woman and what laying down your life for another person looked like in their home. It was, you know, undermined by divorce and separation and oftentimes rejection and abandonment. And so it's so important that we create these schools of love and intact pieces. Siri, you got anything you want to add on intact pieces? Not necessarily intact pieces, but I did have two thoughts as you were talking. Just two things to help them see on their journey as we've been working on developing a lead program and how to help them in this daily walk. Just that idea of how to serve the Lord in the little things every day. And like I said, in the life of prayer, but it's not about this big crazy experience of going out and serving the Lord or springing them into tons of people, but like in the day in and day out, offering things, little things to the Lord, doing things for the love of the Lord and even in their gifts and their talents and their sports and things that they're doing that everything that they can do can glorify him. And the other thing too that we've been talking a lot about is that idea of them struggling with the double life. And so in walking with them, kind of in that between the initial conversion we talked about in this catechesis, like not having one foot in their relationship with Christ and then their one foot in the world. So, and I think catechesis and teaching of faith can help this and it can help in that, to see deeper roots in their lives, but to help them realize that too, that it's the everyday, it's not just about knowledge, but also of just doing everything that they do. There's schoolwork, everything for the glory of the Lord and not that double life. So I backtracked just a little bit. Those are two things I thought of when you were talking about just before catechesis and then the catechesis can help supplement that and give them more knowledge to grow on that. So. Yeah, and like I said, it all goes back to number one, helping them fulfill the greatest command and loving God for all hearts and whole mind, whole strength and secondly, just loving their neighbor like themselves. And I have a son who's 21 years old and all through high school, I languish with whether or not all the things that I was trying to instill in God, the character and being a man of God was gonna take root. At age 18, I had this rap conversion and I was determined that I was gonna help my son, boy, all the pitfalls I landed in at high school and rise above it as a young man. And he did not make it through high school without his troubles. He had his challenges and he grew like everyone else had to grow. And you know, when I had my conversion at 18, I went and joined and started with that as a missionary spreading the gospel. And you know, as a father, I was like, oh, let me have my children follow in my footsteps. And you know, none of my children have. So I'm like, am I here? Well, my son spends every one of these Friday nights with a group of guys here at Francis University, praying in front of strip clubs across the river in Western Virginia. And witnessing the Gospels, the people there who would want to degrade and dehumanize and objectify women. And I didn't push him to that. I didn't recommend him to do that. He did it for months before he even told me he was doing it, you know what I mean? And when he told me, I was just so profit. You know, I think as we walk with young people with discipleship, even our own children, you know what I mean? There is a way that what God is doing, you know, as long as you continue to be that constant witness of love in their lives through your ministry, it will have a transformative effect. You know, one of the things though that has been very clear with my children and helping them grow and also in the young people that I've sort of in youth ministry is there needs to be a level of leading them to a phase called adherence in the face. So we talked about witness, we talked about proclamation, we talked about taking them to a point of catechesis. And after catechesis, we really need to teach young people how to make this faith stick. So, you know, the stage is called that here, but I would say we want to give young people sticky things, faith that clings to them, that they own, that is a part of them now, that doesn't fall off. And adhering to Christ means two things. Number one, it means teaching them how to renounce the world, how to say no to sin and things that aren't God. And I think as long as we continue to teach them how to say yes to Christ, but not how to say no to things that would pull them away from Christ, we're only giving them half the message and we're not setting them up to the greatest level of success. Adherence to Christ means rejecting the world. You know, Jesus himself said, you can't have two masters who either love one hate the other. And Sarah, with this too, this is what we're trying to teach the leaders. Don't have a double, don't have a one area here life that is under the lordship of Christ. And another part where you just live for yourself, that we need to be integrated, faith is being integrated into everything and we need to reject those things and live away from those things. And that's on us too to be our witness because I know a lot of adults who still struggle with sins who haven't learned how to say goodbye to their sin. And I'm not talking about the little sins that we all struggle with even, but major sins in their life, addictions to pornography, different substances, you know, sinful lifestyle choices that they're just not willing to let go of. And until we have complete lordship in our lives, you know, it's gonna be hard for us to witness that to young people. But this phase of teaching them how to, number two, not only to say no to Christ, but then when they empty themselves we think, how do we live our life in the Holy Spirit? How do we pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes the interior master in the illuminating factory of life so that through the power of the Holy Spirit they can see themselves rightly. They can see what God is calling them to do. They can see what they need to grow. And they're no longer living a faith that is riding your coattails when their parents coattails that they're really living their own faith. And in that, I'll just be honest, they're gonna fail a lot as they're wanting to do this. It's like the baby's learning to walk. And I think when we see a baby learning to walk and they fall, you know, flat on their face and just kind of collapse onto the bottom, they look up. You know, I don't know any parents who when their babies fall, walk over them and smack them in the head and say, you stupid baby, we're not a walk. What am I trying to teach? We're not a walk and shape the big walk. You know, we hug the baby, we pick the baby up. It's gonna be okay. You can do this. We put him back on their feet and we said, go for it. They take two steps and fall. We have them back up, you can do it. And eventually these babies learn to walk. And it'd be more, it'd probably serve us all well to remember that as we work with young people. I know I need to be reminded of this. They may have facial hair and tattoos and piercings that kind of like, oh my gosh, that's an interesting choice. And that's a good look, that's a look. But really they're God's chain ring. Trying to learn how to walk with Christ. And we need to be constantly lifting them up when they fall and helping them stay walking with Christ in this phase of adherence. Once we get them to own their faith, then we can get into the stage six of this kind of progression which is to help form them as disciples, right? And oftentimes, we try too quickly to try to form people into something that they're not ready to be. Because I'm not somebody as hard as open to Christ and they've experienced that love of Christ unless they have made a decision to follow Christ and I've actually started to own their faith in some level to try to steer them, guide them, mold them into something is going to be, it's like it's too early to do that. You know, as a sculptor, you know, the first thing you have to do is you gotta get the right ball of clay. You have to make the right level of wetness to put it on the wheel and start forming it and shaping it to whatever you want it to be. And young people in the same way, it takes a while for them to get there. I don't think we need to rush this process. I understand that if you have four years with a young person, they might just start to become a disciple that you can form when they're a senior in high school. It takes longer. There's no set thing that says, okay, I'm gonna do stage one and do this and then every list will progress at the same level. But we can get young people to the point where we start to form them and that means continuing education, formation, and prayer. Now, I often say when we're teaching young people to pray, teach them how to spend five minutes in prayer. And once they've mastered five minutes in prayer, teach them how to do 10. But as we teach them how to be disciples, we can teach them how to pray more and more frequently. We can teach them how to have set times in prayer. We can teach them how to pray always as St. Paul encourages us to do. We can teach them how to pray with the scriptures. We can teach them so many things. And all these things will come into play as they continue to progress and we can continue to form them within the context of community. This is key because none of us, although we have this personal relationship with Christ, it's best expressed and experienced in the context of community when we are with one another and loving one another. Because like I said, it's easy for me to sit in my room alone with Jesus, I love you. You're so amazing. You're so wonderful. I thank you for your love. It's a very different experience for me to walk into a group of people in love and Jesus challenges me and calls me to love them. I have to die to myself in those moments. I can express my love to God with very little self-denial. To love other people, that's what I'm gonna really learn what it means to take up the cross. And I do that as a father. I do that as a coworker. I do that within groups that I gather with to pray and to share my faith with and be comfortable with him. And this is what the goal of Youth Ministry is, is to create that environment where these things are happening in the lives of young people. And finally, you know, after you've had a chance to build up an inner person, ultimately our goal is to send them forth. In the last phase, the last phase of walking with teens in discipleship is to get them ready to go and do something. You know, to give them some sort of missionary initiative. You know, the ultimate expression of being a disciple of Christ is then going forward and making other disciples. And that happens after a time of formation. So I'm like, okay, what are we gonna make, you know, we're gonna come back from Steubenville and the next week, everyone's gonna go out in a man's life somewhere. Man, that's not a realistic expectation. They need to be formed and built up and sent forth with that. But that should be our goal. Our goal is to be able to look at young people and get them to be assuming a role of mission within the church. Building it up in some way, whether that be service of the poor, whether that be categorical ministry, whether that be helping. In my last ministry position before I came back to the university, we're here, I had a group of amazing, I mean, I had 15 of these amazing high school students that together, and they were friends before and they kind of all went through this conversion together and it was really weird. All of a sudden, they had this tight knit Christian community and they were setting low to the world that they were really banding together and they were really strengthening one another to walk with the Lord. And they were getting rejected at school because of it and it made fun. And after a while though, they started to get restless like, okay, what is the point of us doing all of this? And if it's just so we can put together and say, okay, let's just protect one another and form a little cocoon. And I realized at that moment that they were ready for missionary activity. They had grown enough in their faith and by the time they were juniors in high school, this was after almost two years of working with them in small group discipleship and working them and ran them to a couple of student conferences that I was able to form a youth core team in my youth group and these young people would come to senior high youth group on one night and help go and lead the junior high youth group on the other night of the week. And they became the core of the leadership of my junior high ministry. And this is what we see happening. This is what we see more happen. You know, when young people are brought into that faith that adheres, that they're really taught how to say no to the world and yes to Christ in challenging circumstances. When they face their first set of challenging circumstances and it usually happens within the first week of stepping on to the college campus, their faith gets picked off by safe or trampled by the world around them or choked off by the sin that they fall into. And we see too many, way too many young adults falling into the fallen back into the world and becoming disconnected from church and many of them are never finding their way back. And so it's essential that you as a minister of the church in whatever capacity God has called you to serve that we be active about making these young people into disciples that are strong and courageous and have learned enough about themselves and have experienced enough victory in their life through prayer and through growing in the faith that when they leave your group, they're not gonna fall apart. They're gonna be stronger and witness when they go to these campuses. This should be our end game. You should look at every young person that walks in in your group and say, my goal for you is to send you forth as a disciple to change the world. That's what I wanna do in their life because that is what we're called to do as church and our youth groups are not designed to do that. And I think we're falling short in the mission of what youth ministry is supposed to do. And once again, I'm not trying to beat anybody up. This is hard work. It has to be covered in a ton of prayer. This is why we have to be praying for ourselves and having our own relationship with Christ. When we've been praying with our core team members and other people that we serve with, we gotta be praying with the teams because if the Holy Spirit is not saturating that new part of this effort, it will fail because ultimately the conversion we seek to see in young people's lives is a gift to the Holy Spirit and not just our efforts. And our efforts are essential but there will never be enough to create the kind of disciples that we wanna see being formed within our youth groups. So that's, you know, I think one of the cool things and I wanna let Sarah go, that we've done is we've created a program that can help you get some of your teams on the discipleship path. And I'm just gonna turn it over to Sarah. She's gonna speak more about this now. So Sarah, take it away. Sure. So I've mentioned that a couple times and maybe some of you already know about this program but Franciscan LEAD is a week long discipleship leadership week before all of our youth conferences. And the foundation and principle behind this program was to really put teams in relationship with Christ to emphasize the fact that the Lord wants to love them more than he wants to use them. And the core, one of the heart core messages of Franciscan LEAD is the life of daily prayer that we've been talking about every morning, speaking about prayer and setting them off for 30 minutes of personal prayer time. Again, before we even start talking about witness and evangelization and leadership, really emphasizing there needs to be a relationship with Jesus Christ. And all of the evening sessions are focused on that encounter coming to know him more and responding to his love and worship to encounter him in Eucharistic aggregation, to experience his mercy and confession. Again, really fostering that relationship. We have men and women sessions and opportunities for them to grow, our understanding of their identity as men and women and living in a life of virtue and chastity. Again, at the foundation and core of who they are. And then one side of that foundation is set and throughout the week, we do give them tools and equip them to, as John was talking about in the missionary at a stage of discipleship to make disciples themselves, which teach them how to give a three-minute witness, which is one of my favorite parts about the week. We ask them to sit and think and pray about what they want to share of how God has worked in their life. And a key thing for their faith to stay rooted even after high school is for them to articulate what God has done. And we see that to be a correlation those that those teams are able to experience and encounter Christ, but then to articulate how he's worked in their life. Their faith has taken even deeper root and it's harder to shake. So it's beautiful for them to sit and thank some of them struggle with it, but to sit and think about how that has worked in their life and then to be able to share it with them, the teams on the week, and then with their youth group when they go home and people they encounter in their life. We talk a lot about similar leadership and humility as being foundations for all of that. So the LEA program really is a benefit to you and to your youth group as well again, and all of these teams have conversion experiences on LEAD, grow closer to Christ, but also we send them off to serve their youth group, particularly on the weekend. We also asked them that they've had this incredible encounter, but they're not supposed to stay there, go out and maybe reach out to those that came with you on the weekend that don't wanna be there or don't really know what's going on, to just be friend them and not even necessarily tell their story, but to just walk with them and be with them and make friends with them, possibly share that with them on the weekend to really serve you and ask you, how can they help? Possibly they might be able to co-lead a small group with one of your adult chaperones again, to foster that community and to share their witness and then even going forth from the weekend to serve your youth group. I know tons of youth ministers that have really utilized their teens who have gone to LEAD to build up their youth group and to just reach out to those that might be on the fringe or wanna bring them in deeper. So I'd encourage all of you, if you haven't sent teens to LEAD, it would be a beautiful experience for them and also a great benefit to you and your youth group. And then there's lots of information about the program on our website. So feel free to check that out as well. Great, thank you, Sarah. You know, when it comes down to the student conferences, who do we serve? We serve you. I mean, we can evangelize kids every summer, and we do. We've already got 48,000 teens coming to conferences this summer at this point signed up already. And by the time it's all over done, we're gonna have over 50,000. And it would be great to say, oh, that's such a great, it is a great thing, it got us moving, but really the strength of our ministry lies in the end in the hands of people like yourselves and what you're gonna do when you get back to the parish to build upon this, this conversion of the experience is not the end, it's the beginning of the discipleship. And so we stand in humble appreciation of all your efforts to evangelize. And know that, you know, if you don't bring teens we can't evangelize them, we don't evangelize them well. They might not be ready for discipleships. We wouldn't want to partner with you. And as a result, we've been very purposeful in our office about helping people grow as a disciple after our conferences. Last year, we created a set of 30 videos for young people and you can still find them on our website at app.via.disciple. We also created 30 videos for adults to help both adults and teens on your discipleship journey. That's on our student field website. The field was developed this fall and launched with the goal of helping people grow in their faith all year round by providing resources that can help keep the fire burning. We know that for most of you, we're one weekend out of the year in the life of your youth ministry. And there's so much more that you're doing for them than we are. But we're just glad to be able to partner with you for that one weekend to provide an opportunity to create an environment where your young people can encounter Christ's love and be transformed by that encounter. And as you go up in discipleship, it's so important. Probably the best analogy, I think, of a disciple is, you know, I want to set a young person on fire. This is what I have to do. I gotta make sure that my own heart is burning right with the love of Jesus. And I gotta draw that young person close to myself and be in a relationship with them. If I draw them close enough to my own heart, they're gonna catch on fire. And I have to be praying. I have to be going to the sacraments on a regular basis and praying daily and immersing my life in truth and avoiding sin. These are the calls of the disciple to love and to live and to follow. And, you know, if you become that person, you will not just be a youth minister or a chaperone or a group leader. You become a hero because you will have a lasting impact. And you'll never know where it's gonna come. One last story I want to share. I had, you know, an opportunity when I was youth ministry, I had a membership that was paid for by a family at one of the local pools, you know, which was nice because I couldn't afford it, I mean, that's just how it is. But I was there with my family one afternoon. One of the guys from the youth group, Greg, I love this kid and he was a wide man, but just had, you know, just a passion for life. And I always had a witty answer for any stupid question I throw his way. It was just a lot of fun to do this. So he sat down at this table and actually pulled me and I was sitting there with my wife and we started talking and we really didn't, we were talking about anything. So I just, it was August, he was getting ready to go back to school in a couple of weeks. I said, yes, what are your plans for this fall? What are you gonna do? Well, we just started football practice and I'm gonna be the captain of the football team. Well, that's awesome, you know, why do you want to be captain? I want to go out there and I want to tackle and I want to hit and I want to score, touch on whatever I can to just have the best football season ever, you know, and I want to be, and I want to be this guy who's just, people know that I've had this passion for football. I said, that's cool, you know, because he was, he was a great football player. And so what else? He said, well, I'm excited to take guitar lessons because I want to learn how to play guitar as well. He said, well, that is so amazing. You know, I love playing guitar myself. I'm like, that's so cool. We started talking about 10 lessons he was taking. And you know, I asked him, well, what else? He was like, well, you know, I'm getting really involved with school with a student government and I have a shot at national honor societies and I keep my GPA so I can do national honor society. And you know, I just listened to him. I said, every time he said something, he said, oh, that's really cool. And finally, after listening to him, I just asked him the question. And I think I might have, I probably said a short prayer because this question didn't come from me. But you know, I just said, hey, you've got so many great things going on. What is your plan for God this fall? And what are you going to do to amaze God? And he just felt silent. And he didn't answer my question. He just quickly changed the subject and as quickly as he could walk away. And I sat there thinking, gosh, what did I do? And I ended up making that. And I hope I haven't blown it, you know, because I don't want to cut this kid out and take it that I'm just going to be, and it came back to me a couple of weeks later as we were getting ready to watch you through. He says, I'm mad at you, I've been mad at you for two weeks. Well, what did I do? He says, hey, you asked me that question. I said, so, I mean, it's just a question, it's no big deal. He's like, I haven't been able to get that question out of my mind. I go to bed at night and that question has echoed in my ears. I wake up in the morning and I want to, you know, I feel like God is not going to let me forget that question until I have an answer for him. What am I going to do right now to amaze God? He was helping me. I wanted to do something amazing for God. And it was that one question that got this kid off from the fence with God and just hungry for more. And he was open. He had expressed a personal openness to be a disciple. And that's how I think he was ready for the discipleship. You know, he made it to Christ, but just not really, you know, I'm not going to go too far. Enough Jesus in my life, not to feel bad, not enough Jesus to go crazy and make my life too chaotic. Just that, you know, $3 worth of God, you know, that I can slip into my wall and it doesn't take up too much space and attitude. And this kid went on to one of the greatest leaders in my youth group that still has a strong faith and is an activist church today. And how do I do this? When will I know how will God send me the right person to be a disciple? How do I know out of 50 kids in my youth group which are ready for discipleship? Very simple. You can pray and let the Holy Spirit show you. We can't bring people to discipleship. The Holy Spirit's got to do that. So this is why I say the worst college discipleship, that's pretty prayer. And trusting God, he's going to raise up the leaders in your youth group. If you say, God, I don't have any teens to disciple, it's kind of like what they said in Mary at the wedding of Canaan. We have no line. It wasn't a specific request, it was just an attubation. So if you're sitting as a youth minister saying, I don't know who the disciple, I don't have any disciples, offer that class, you know, let that statement up as a prayer and let God do something miraculous to solve your problem. You know, Jesus showed up, Jesus at Mary's request turned, you know, the water into wine for him, not just cheap wine, but best of wine. So don't look to make this happen. Trust that God's going to raise up what you need this have happened in his divine plan. But be asking God in prayer, God, I don't have disciples in my youth group. And boom, you'd be surprised how God's not in that desire. And he's going to equip you to disciple. He will give you every spiritual and temple gift you need to do this because it is his mission to do discipleship in you and through you, to bless the church and to help it grow. And we are here, we are hemorrhaging faith as we're in thoughts in here. How much more will God give the Holy Spirit to his children who ask? I mean, that's, Jesus is there for us. And I just don't want anyone to feel like it seems so overwhelming, how can I do it? We all can do it, we're all called to do it. And we will all be equipped by the Holy Spirit to do it. I can make ourselves available to do it. And I have the faith to know that there's nobody listening to this who isn't going to be equipped to do amazing things in discipleship with young people in their ministry. So Sarah, do you have any final thoughts as we wrap up here? Hey, we did get one question if you don't mind just getting us that real quick. And then I do have a couple final thoughts. So our question was how many teens do you take for a lead? And that's a great question. And I would encourage, so Franciscan Lead is an application process. And so we have the teens apply, that link is on our website. I would encourage you to think of three to four teens. And if you don't have three to four, that's okay too. But it's nice to send a few teens together so that when they come home from lead, they've had that experience together and have that mini community within your youth group of support because they had the same experience. And we will take as many as we can. If they have our strong applicants and all of that until we fill our max capacity. So unfortunately, I can't give you an exact number. It just depends on how many teens apply every summer and we take into account our desire to serve as many parishes as possible. So if we have a ton of applicants, you may be only be able to accept two from your parish or we might be able to accept six or seven. Every year it's kind of different depending on the number of applicants. But I would encourage you to think of three or four. Think that's a good number to apply just with letting them know it's an application process. But I would encourage you to apply, but not committing 100% that they'll be able to to be accepted this year, but encouraging them to apply. And if for some reason we had to place teens on a wait list, we really look at that for the next year. Again, three to four, but the numbers vary. So I hope that helps to answer your question on that. We'll stay on, go ahead, Sarah, and get us final thoughts. And I just want to quickly say, if you have any questions, feel free to type them into the question tab, hit enter and we'll pop up on our screen any question you have about discipleship, conferences, or anything that we can serve you in. Just feel free to enter your input now. You go ahead, Sarah. And my final thought was very similar to John's of just encouragement. I know there have been many times in my life where, especially here on campus, I've been blessed now with youth teens, but I get to work with some college students here on campus and just have had a desire to walk more closely with a few. And to kind of speak to what John has said, that has happened. I've had a few girls reach out to me to want to meet with me one-on-one and things like that. And it wasn't anything that I elicited that they knew I was available. Again, with the relationship, I worked with a group of girls here on campus because I knew I was there for them and because they knew that I truly love them. They were trusting and courageous enough to reach out to me and ask if they could get together one-on-one and have coffee and you've had some really beautiful conversations. So again, that relationship of love and trust will really set the tone for them to be able to reach out to you and for the Lord to really send those teens in your path. I've seen it in my own life. And again, I'm sometimes there with some, not sure what will I say or what are they gonna wanna talk about? I don't know if I'm gonna have the wisdom, but that's me relying on myself. And again, like John said, just that part of the Holy Spirit, I've just used me, used me in my experience and just helped me to say what you wanna say through me. I've seen it in my own life. Again, nothing to my own credit or to my own ability, but I've seen the Holy Spirit work in and through those conversations and opportunities. So to be encouraged, the Lord, as John said, will bless that in your desire because the Lord wants to use you. So that's all. Great. Got another question and then one of the questions that's popped up, are there any other practical things that you've heard or seen done that work well for follow-up after the case? And this is a great question. There are many approaches to ministry afterwards, but when we talk about the fundamentals, I would say, set a time for everyone who's gone to student middle to gather every week if possible, if not at any other week, and do a holy hour together. It might not be at a time where the Western sacraments actually are exposed to the monstrance, but just praying before the tabernacle. Now, I think oftentimes there's a hunter for ministry at parishes, but parishes, we serve a lot of people who the super conferences, almost all they do, it's like the one thing they do. They're not really coming from a parish with the youth ministers. We get this question a lot. Number one, gather the young people to pray and ask God for what you want to see happen. If you want to see your ministry strengthened, gather these young people together and have you start to pray again. Number two, we created a resource last year which was a Bible study based on the foods of the Holy Spirit where you can take this back because we did a workshop and you need to pray it on somewhere in a particular way for different foods of the Holy Spirit to be poured out. And it was a way of following it up. And right now my team is developing a resource that's gonna be available online in June where you can have a package that you can download, look for videos and different things for following up the conference. Some of it will go online in June, others will go online in August, but it will be available to help groups and a lot of students will. But the most important thing that you can do to keep the fire burning is gather these kids together and pray. Number two, get the kids to go to confession on a regular basis together. As long as they, you know, it's like God wants to pour, you know, the hearts, his love and the young people, but the sin can block it. So when you go to confession, the block is removed and these kids are staying in communion with Christ. And a lot of times their parents are not encouraged in their students' act. And not even during the Holy Week like Lent or even during Advent. So there's really no one encouraging them to come close. And at a similar conference on a typical weekend anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 kids will receive confession and receive that mercy and grace. And that's what opens the door for a lot of this conversion to take place. So get them frequently in the sacrament of reconciliation. There's a lot of resources. You think there's a great resource called Why Disciple, that can really help. If you're interested in launching a discipleship ministry, a lot of why you work at Disciple. Google it and it will take you to your site. You can learn more about what they provide. Life Team has some great resources for developing discipleship groups. And we're actually working with them to create a set of tools that can be used by youth men, the parachute that don't have a full-time youth ministry that just want resources to help form small-paid community. Yeah, another thing is just, you know, read the Bible together. You know what I mean? I assigned one of the kids in my youth group to do this. His job was to every day was to text a piece of scripture to everyone else in the youth group, you know, so that every day, everyone in the youth group would be receiving a scripture and anyone could sign up and he would add them to the list and they'd all read it. And then on Sunday when we would gather, we'd talk about the scriptures, you know? Even if you're in a formal youth ministry, gather young people together, talk about the Sunday readings, but for Sunday, you know, like start on Wednesday night, warm up, call it, you know, just gather your people together, pull out the gospel for the upcoming Sunday and talk about it and how does it apply to the life of the young person? You know, they're, for all the, all the negative things that are said about this young generation, they're extremely spiritually hungry. They're extremely relationally starting with anything that you do now, gather them together and build them up in their faith is going to be received. And they might not actually show it on the outside because they do a very good job of hiding their true selves even when you're with them. There's sometimes young people can be hard to read, but don't give up, draw them together, talk with them. You know, if you are looking to build relationships, spend time, you know, and build relationships one-on-one with them. Now, I mean, I know a lot of guys who's having the policy where you can't be a clerk with the same person, you have to meet somewhere, but meet somewhere in public place and just spend time over at basket of fries and help talking about their lives. If you spend 20 minutes of quality time talking to a high school student about their lives and what's going on, sadly to say you probably have spent more time than most of their parents have that week investing that kind of effort of attention to my race, we're hard to think about that. But yeah, that's where they come from. Sarah, what other ideas would you want to recommend? Yeah, possibly, you know, to get them together again, maybe a service project, and you may have thought of that, but an opportunity for them to put that load that they experienced in action, one would bring them back together and also just for them to be able to give what they've received in some capacity. And I always come back to you, and I mentioned it earlier, having them share their witnesses for the group, I remember, because we do it on lead, I remember reading something from Pope Francis just about how our memory inspires hope. And so we remember what that has done, not that we're supposed to stay there, we're supposed to be moving forward, but if they can remember what that had done on the weekend, it will offer them hope. So I think that's a wonderful activity is to get them together a little bit later when it's not as fresh for them to share, to remember to be offered that hope. But like John said too, and one-on-one, I haven't, I have never been a group leader actually during the conference, but if I was and that was bringing teens, I would really want to have someone, whether it not be me, but maybe my core team, to have a one-on-one conversation with them too, because everyone's journey is different, everyone's experience is different, so all of these things that we can do as a group are wonderful and super important, but every single teens walk with Christ and path is gonna look a little bit different, different struggles, and so to be able to connect with them one-on-one and cater to them is huge, so. That's what I would add. Yeah, and then the next question, any practical tips on dealing with adults that kind of chaperones, but aren't much further in the faith than the teens are? How do we decipher the adults? Excellent question, I'll tell ya, that's probably the more difficult question. I find now that I'm spending more time deciphering the adults who are wanting to start to live as disciples, I've moved away from the ministry, but I'm doing a lot more work with deciphering the adults. And the key is once again, it doesn't really change. You have to form relationships. When I came into my last parish, they had tried youth ministry twice and they had failed. Those are the person that the higher wasn't the right person. There were some really weak attempts. When everyone, when I showed up, everyone was gun-shy like, okay, do we have another joker, or what is this program gonna be like? The other ones worked around for six months and the person quits or gets fired. And the adults were the same way, like, oh, I don't know if I wanna commit to this, you know, because we had committed before and the bottom was dropped out. And I realized very quickly, you know, when I went to this parish, I didn't want a lot of active ministries developing lifelong disciples and doing a lot of good work in deciphering the adults. You know, there were Bible studies and you know, there were a few prayers. The parish, of course, wasn't void of disciples, but to those that were formidable enough to get involved in missionary activity, I would say it wasn't a tremendous weakness. And so what I did is I joined myself to ministries that were already intentionally trying to build up disciples and got to know people within those ministries and asked God to open up doors. And when it kind of became clear that I needed to invite this person to join in the youth ministry, I knew that I wasn't taking them on just as a core team or a chaperone, but as somebody that I was going to disciple. You know, I spent half my, I spent more time discipleing my fellow core team members and the adults I worked with than the teens I worked with. Why? Because if I could form 10 adults on how to disciple the team, I'd have created the ability for 50 teens to get disciple in my youth group in a year, whereas I could only at best disciple five kids at a time. And so this idea of multiplying yourself, it is investing. Now you say, well, what's the investment I'm just bringing them on as a chaperone for the weekend. I think, you know, the investment is you need to show them and witness, you love to them and get them open to have their own encounter through the conference. I had heard so many stories about a chaperone who was like, I'm just, I'm like the hockey goalie. If the kids come to your room and kick it back into play, you know, I got my pads on so they don't hit me too hard. You know, and then they had this encounter and they see what happens in the lives of people. They're like, I want that. I mean, I'm all in and they come that year after year as a chaperone and they're growing in their faith. So I think adults do the same thing the teens do. They need to have that encounter with Christ. They need to have a living witness. They need to have catechesis. You know, we are, we have a number of resources available and we're creating more all the time and there will be something much more intentional coming up next year on how to form a team and bringing the student to get the most out of it. It's absolutely essential that we spend time forming the adults that we seek to bring in ministry with us because they need it. If we want them to be able to help make the cycles with us, then we need to be making them into the cycles. And what I mean by that is company them on their spirit journey. My first year that parish, every night of the week practically I had a different family having dinner with us. It would be, and it was interesting. I had two couples that came on who already had two children each. It was clearly said when we first started meeting with them, like, oh, we're gonna have kids. We're not open any more, like, you know, forum, you know, one. You know, it's like it's hard enough to raise two kids. And so, you know, they were, and they were honest with them. We had raised contraception, that's what we did. I mean, like, I know it might be a sin, but we're afraid to have more children. And after a while, just getting to know them and loving them, I, you know, I bought a copy of Christopher Westbrook, The Truth About Sex and Marriage. And I gave it to one of us. I was just looking at them, just read this and tell me if anything clicks with you. I'd be glad to talk to you about it. And then both these couples came back and said, wow, I've never heard the church is teaching. And they saw the witness of my wife and I, we had, you know, four kids under the age of six at the time, and yet we had all this joy in our family. And they said, whatever we're doing, we're not doing the right, you know. And they made a radical choice to, you know, stop contraception. They both went on to have like four or five more kids by the time it was all over. And now both of them have big, beautiful families and they're living authentically Catholic lives in a way that, you know, they thought they were coming on to serve in a youth industry program. My God said, and I got something for you. And, you know, I was very blessed to be a part of that. But, you know, I always got spirit more than anything touching their hearts in ways that was just beautiful to see. So, you know, with adults that have their own faith walking, maybe at different levels of strength in it, you need to find out where they are, how they've been led to make a commitment. And just because they don't necessarily have everything they need to be the perfect coordinator, it doesn't mean they're discarded. There's ways that you can bring them into the experience of students that will bring them on to chaperones and prepare them for their own kind of their own transformation. You know, I think we need to realize that as youth ministers and people who want to lead ministry, we need to be investing in those that we want to bring on. We can just say, hey, show up and give me what you got. Especially if we know they don't have anything to get. And if we're not forming our leaders, to be the people we need them to be, then no one else is going to do that. So, you know, take the time to get to know them, to pray with them and to help engage them in conversation. You're going to be a spiritual mentor for them. Because if they feel like they show up to youth people, it's just take, take, take. And there's no give there. Then they're going to get burned out. They're going to leave. You know, and if you find someone you want to commit, you want to treat them like heroes because they are hard to find. And the more you invest in them, the better they'll be at what you want them to do. It's absolutely essential that we do this as ministry leaders is to build up the adults that are with us. And we're going to do, like I said, we're going to have a whole package. We're going to be producing more videos that will go up on our line. We created a whole section on student appeal for youth ministers. And how do we recruit and build up people who we would like to see served as chaplains at our conferences. To keep them from being just a warm body of a pulse that passed the diocese and state environment test. But really are going to help us lead young people in Christ. And we'll have more resources to just get them into a discipleship relationship yourself. And God will use you to do the best. So there's no more questions. And we've got eight more minutes. And I'm not opposed to wrapping things up early. But if you have another question, feel free to type it in right now. But I just want to close by saying, first and foremost, and we hope you have a blessed holy week. You know, it's always great to walk with Christ in the sufferings and the struggles. It's always great to be given a cross because there's no other pathway to happen for us except through the cross. And if we are willing to suffer with Christ, we will enjoy eternal life with Him. You know, the suffering is, well, life gives us. And our response is what we give to God. And it's so true that Jesus makes Himself so present. So just let Christ continue to make Himself present to you during this holy week. And we pray that you have a blessed Easter. Be sure to check out the Student Book Conference website, studentbookconferences.com. There you'll find information about, you know, what we have going on with the lead, especially obviously a lead tab, a little bit of the youth page. You can learn more about the lead program, which both my older children have gone through and it's been transformative for them. And I can't say enough about how awesome the lead program has been for my own young people. I have two more in high school right now. They're gonna be going through it, whether they want it or not. So, okay, I'm just kidding. I'm gonna be in there and they want to go through it. But, you know, also go to our Student Book Fuel website to see what resources we have. Maybe a lot of blogs and videos and more podcasts and stuff are going up all the time. There you'll also be asked if you haven't already to sign up to receive different bulletins and updates from us in information. Lord, know that we take serious our partnership with you and our desire to work with you to build the church. It really is our great honor to be able to serve you in this capacity. And we pray, we have a holy hour in mass every week that we offer up intentions for everyone coming, your youth, your chaplains, yourself, everyone's wrong. We are on our knees praying for you guys because we know that we're all in this together. We all want to build the church and we all want to see great things happen. But it's not easy. It's not easy to do what you do, I did it for many years. So, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Sarah, thank you. And do you have any closing thoughts you want to share? I love you, sir. Great. Well, let me close it. Go ahead. What? No, you're good. No, I'm good. He's good, so let me close this up. Sarah, why don't you close this and pray then? Is that it? Yeah. I'm going to call it Holy Spirit Amen. Oh, God, we just paused, just grateful hearts for the work that you've done in us and for the work that you will continue to do and in the lives of all the routines that we work with. Just pray that, Lord, we may enter into this holy week more deeply and keep our eyes fixed on you. Just pray for all of those on this webinar, for all of the group leaders and chaperones that will be coming this summer. God, that you bless them. Give them your grace, your Holy Spirit, your wisdom that they may do your work. Amen. Amen. We'll leave the webcam on here for a few minutes. If there's any other topics that you'd like to see addressed in future webinars, feel free to type those in and send them to us now. We'll record those and we'll put that in the rotation. We're going to be doing these, we do two or three a month now. Once the summer hits and we're in conference mode, we really can't do the webinars, but once we get to August, we're picking them up. And these webinars are to help you grow in your faith and help strengthen you and your desired region and people at the gospel. And so if you have any topics or ideas or suggestions, you can either email me at jbolyouatprincess.edu or type it into your question box right now, hit enter and we'll be glad to add it to our list and plant that out for you. So once again, thank you, have a blessed Easter and we will see you all again soon if not, but the summer's not a secret, all right? God bless.