Set the table and open the door: How to get youth (and other troubled souls) in the church

Last updated on: August 28, 2016 at 12:53 pm by Jessica Mesman Griffith

Set the table and open the door: How to get youth (and other troubled souls) in the church 2016-08-28T12:53:02-05:00 Jessica Mesman Griffith

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“When you hold a lunch or a dinner,

do not invite your friends or your brothers
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous”. –Luke 14:7-14

Last week I did an interview with the editors of America Magazine on Sirius/XM the Catholic Channel. They wanted to talk to me about the feature story I wrote for US Catholic Magazine called “The Spiritual Life of the American Teenager.”

We talked a little about my own experience as a teenager–I’ve written exhaustively about this elsewhere, so suffice to say, it was bad–and what brought me back to the Catholic Church during that time, and what kept me there. We also talked about the kids I interviewed for the story, who are all very involved in their parishes and have richer spiritual lives than almost anyone else I know. Near the end of the interview they asked me if I had any suggestions for “best practices” for how to reach the teens who aren’t like the kids I interviewed. The kids who are like I was. The troubled teens who are falling through the cracks.

I said, “just keep inviting them in.” Note–I didn’t say “meet them where they are” or “schedule teen-centered programming.” Neither of those things would have appealed to me as a teenager. What appealed to me was the idea that I could enter the doors of a church–not even necessarily during Mass, but any time I wanted–and come into contact with something bigger than me and my problems. I could light a candle and sit in a pew and step outside of my own painful time for a few moments, and into a place where nobody was going to descend upon me and try, often embarrassingly, to meet me where I was. Every expert I spoke with agreed: teens are hardwired to hunger for transcendence, and they respond to the timeworn traditions of the church, especially silent and contemplative prayer.

Once you’ve got the teens in the church, then pizza parties and retreats and faith sharing groups and whatever else a youth minister can dream up might very well be the way to go. But to get them in the door, I say, Church, just be who you are: anachronistic and other-worldly, completely unlike anything they experience anywhere else.

How do we get any troubled soul to come to church? I’d argue for the same approach. Stop proselytizing and open the door–wide. Set the table for the feast and keep inviting them in. No matter how many times they say no. Keep asking. Let them know there will always be a space at the table.

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