Essential Components: Prayer

Often in youth ministry, we get caught up in two extremes. We either focus on “teach, teach, teach” or on “praise, praise, praise”. What I hope that our ministries do is unite the teaching we do with different types of prayer and spirituality. While lifting our voice to the Lord in song through praise and worship has its time and place, it cannot define or fully reach the various spiritualities of our youth. As ministers, we absolutely must incorporate different styles of prayer in our regular catechetical nights.
This particular component is a big part of both our middle school and high school programs, each of course with their own personalities. In middle school, we feel that this is where the idea of a personal relationship with Christ becomes real. (Side note: don’t get scared, Catholics can use this language too.) Our wonderful pope had this to say about sharing the faith in his Address to the Bishops of the Philipines at their “Ad Limina” visit: “Your great task in evangelization is therefore to propose a personal relationship with Christ as key to complete fulfillment.”
We strongly believe that in middle school, as the world view of the youth changes from concrete to abstract, that they are able to see and make this relationship with Christ real. As this happens, I feel it is of utmost importance that they are exposed to the various types of prayer. As they start to take their relationship with Christ seriously they need to find and learn what feeds them most, with the hope that woven throughout our sessions is the fact that the communal prayer of the Mass and reception of the Eucharist is primary of course.
In our current ministry setup, we have 2 short years with the middle school youth. I won’t go into the boring details, (you’re welcome) but each year we have them in our ministry them we focus two of our sessions on Reconciliation and make this sacrament available to them. I believe this to be an essential element to a healthy Catholic spirituality, which is why this is the first spiritual prayer component we make sure to fit in. While Confessions are being heard we always have quiet journaling time, the opportunity for the youth to pray one on one with a leader, as well as some music to worship and praise God. Again, the purpose of this is to allow the youth to encounter the various spiritualities that are present within the youth group.
Other than Reconciliation, we typically allow 1-2 more sessions per semester to focus directly on prayer and actually make time to exercise that prayer. Without practical experience in what prayer is supposed to look or feel like, they won’t know if it is for them or not. Typically these forms of prayer include Adoration, liturgy of the hours, lectio divina, the rosary or praise and worship. Depending on the night and length of time available, we have also done different types of prayer within a single session. The goal is that while we teach them WHAT the types of prayer are, we are also teaching them HOW to pray.
For a Christian to learn HOW to pray is much more important than for them to be able to regurgitate facts about prayer. Primary in this “how to pray” goal is teaching them about the Mass and about Eucharist. For too many Catholics this communal prayer is lost. They know what to do during the liturgy, but they don’t know how to pray it. This will be the subject of my next post, and arguably the most important thing that a Catechist can do, to teach their youth how to fully enter into the Mass.
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