http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/
Ruth Powell: The funny thing that's happening in the Australian church at the moment is that it's going through this massive transition period. What you have in some churches is the pain and grief of older attenders saying what happened, where did the young people go, how do we continue, what's our future, when we don't have any young people - there's that pain of that - and at the same time you've got these growing churches characterised by having heaps of young people in them and young people who not only are there but having chosen to come to church, because these days you don't go because you were born a Anglican, a Catholic, whatever, you choose whether you're going to have faith, you choose whether you're going to go to church...So young people who are going to church are actually intentionally going and finding places that fit with their hopes and their needs and finding a form of spirituality that connects with them. So they are some of the most enthusiastic, keen, motivated, committed attenders around.
Guy Mason: Yeh well I think we've got you know truth, and we don't want to negotiate on truth and what the bible says and who Jesus was, but I think how we do church and what church looks like can be a little bit moveable and so we want to use things from our culture like media, like music, like drama, like preaching that engages where people are at, things like that. We don't want to negotiate on truth but we want to connect with people where they're at.
Ruth Powell: We know from our research on healthy churches across Australia, but also the US, New Zealand and the UK, one of the most powerful predictor of a healthy church is whether the church has a clear and owned vision for the future. So if the people say I know why I'm here, I know what we're about and I know what we're trying to achieve, that is a powerful thing and I think churches that can pull that off, they can be any faith tradition, any size, any context. If you can say we know why we're here, that is a very attractive church and that is as I said a predictor of growth, newcomers, belonging, growing faith, all sorts of things.
Tom McIlroy: Young people respond really well when they're given a challenge, certainly our experience here in the school is that social justice is one of the best ways to get young people involved in their faith. Give them a good cause to raise money for or an event to put on or whatever and they'll really respond. Drawing the connection between that and their responsibility as Catholics and as Christians is important and we try and do that a lot. Parishes are getting really good at that. Parishes that have vibrant and active youth groups are giving them good projects and giving them leadership roles. The other way of course is music and music ministry within the church, within the mass on the weekends having young people play their instruments and putting their own kinds of music into the old institutions of the church is great it means they have a seat at the table.
Paul Culliver: World Youth Day. A phenomenal, life changing experience where the young Catholics of the world unite and discover they are not alone. They are reinvigorated with a passion for their faith and their beliefs. That's the vision. So, what happens though when the bubble bursts, when World Youth Day ends and all the pilgrims head back to the same local Parish they've been attending all their lives, only to find it at status quo?
Luke Van Grieken: You come back becoming increasingly frustrated with your Parish, or at least I did personally. You go over there; I had some of the best liturgical experiences of my life. You'll have a room of 2000 people with probably ten, fifteen different nationalities represented in that congregation everyone is is singing along to the same hymns at the top of their lungs these really modern progressive songs and all the feelings and emotion and the depth of faith is very clear to everyone there and everyone sharing in it.
And then you come back to mass in Melbourne and often it's comparatively more dreary and the sermons aren't inspiring and the liturgy itself is not exuberant and the people come almost out of obligation and that's disappointing. And because you have that memory of such wonderful liturgy you really want that, you really expect that every week. Maybe it's unrealistic but you certainly have a different, perhaps increased expectation.
Paul Culliver: What happens when the bubble bursts?
Bishop Anthony Fisher: That's a very reasonable fear. And I have been saying to priests all around the country and to bishops that it would be a terrible let down for young people if they come home excited about their faith, wanting to learn more about it, wanting to lead and to serve to be more actively engaged and they come home to a dead parish or to people that just aren't interested in them or who say to them look we'll let you speak for a minute after communion to tell people about your experience but then we want to get back to normal please. That would be deadly, and we really have to get across to people that we're not going to go back to normal, as it were, after World Youth Day.
So there are a number of programs of preparation for young people and also for the rest of the Church, suggesting to them how to get ready for a post World Youth Day Church. There's a program called Activate For Witness which will be coming out next month and going to all the parishes in Australia, which will challenge them to look at have you got youth groups, youth masses, places for young people perhaps to be on your parish council to give a lead, ways for them to deepen their faith, opportunities for them to tell you as a local parish or community what they'd like to see happening rather than just being giving the menu that older people have written and told to fit into it? Again I'm not naïve. I think there'll be places that just stay much the same and then young people will gravitate to places where there is more life or more opportunity to express
themselves spiritually and to lead and to serve.
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