Rebuilding Youth Ministry

Christopher Wesley is on the front lines of youth ministry. He's been in the parish trenches, refocusing an unpopular youth program and making it one where teens feel connected, stay involved, and grow in faith. In Rebuilding Youth Ministry, Wesley offers ten indispensable strategies to help you make your youth programs just as successful.

Wesley coaches fellow Catholic ministry leaders on how to overcome common hurdles of ministering to young people. For Wesley, those hurdles included feelings of complacency, underestimating youth, and entertaining rather than ministering in his own parish. Working through these problems, Wesley built a distinctive program based on small group faith formation and sustained it with the assistance of more than sixty volunteer adult mentors.

Wesley shares ten strategies that helped grow participation in his high school program from nine teens to ninety and the middle school program from forty teens to eighty-five, including:

• making your youth program about more than pizza;
• pursuing authentic relationships between small groups and mentors;
• shaping a dynamic youth ministry team; and
• creating a space that's welcoming to teens.