Starting A Fire: Catholic Charismatic Renewal and its Footprints in Youth Ministry
After exploring the mission of theASCENT and the Metanoia Project, Youth Minister Jack Regan has concluded that CCR has had a huge impact on 'vibrant' youth ministry in the UK — and he believes the best is yet to come.
I’ve been working in Catholic youth ministry for more than twenty-five years now, and I’m also a card-carrying member of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. We don’t have cards, obviously. I mean, what would they even look like? Probably some sort of fire or dove image representing the Holy Spirit, I’d imagine, and a cross. I digress.
I’ve just published my first book. It’s called ‘How to Start a Fire: A Blueprint for Catholic Youth Ministry’, and it focuses on three successful youth ministry projects operating in the UK and Ireland. I didn’t write the book from a CCR perspective, and it wasn’t specifically aimed at people who, like me, don’t really carry those cards, but it did give me a chance to think about the impact that the Renewal has had on youth ministry in this part of the world in the last few generations.
There’s little doubt that it’s an area the Renewal has definitely impacted and very definitely moved forward. The three projects that the book focuses on were theASCENT (that’s how they write it), Youth 2000 and the Metanoia Project, with bits and pieces from elsewhere popping up here and there. Youth 2000 are careful to avoid the charismatic label (“it’s just Catholic”) but the other two are overtly ‘out’ as charismatic entities.
Renewal has influenced 'almost everything vibrant in youth ministry'
At this point, I suppose, I need to flag up a slight difficulty because, away from those things that are overtly charismatic, it’s tricky to say what constitutes a charismatic thing or a charismatic influence. Is prayer ministry distinctly charismatic? Worship music? Free expression in worship? Words of knowledge? Creative approaches to adoration? What about charismatic (in the other sense of the word) and fiery preaching?
For most of those, I’d say that the Renewal at least played its part in moving the thing forward. For many of them, the Renewal can rightly claim strong ownership. I’m not going to litigate each one, either here or anywhere else, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that almost everything vibrant in youth ministry has been at least influenced by the Renewal somewhere along the line.
TheASCENT go big on prayer ministry, for instance, training their team properly in how to do it well and coming alongside some mature ministries to ensure good practice. Metanoia, likewise, go big on prayer ministry, and many of the other renewal staples.
Starting a fire and stirring hearts
But then there are those other things which the wider Church wouldn’t say are overtly CCR. All of the projects I studied have a strong emphasis on personal prayer, on discipleship, on having well-formed ministers who are living their faith in practice. The Church at large would say that the Renewal owns none of that, but the Renewal surely did a lot of work to make those things normal in arenas where previously they just weren’t.
The Renewal didn’t just give us new toys to play with, like praying in tongues and lifting our hands. It also helped us to recover some basic dispositions, things which never went away, but which did need recovering.
When looking through Renewal eyes, one of the more fascinating projects was Youth 2000. They shy away from using the word charismatic because they thought it might put some people off. Fair enough. But Renewal folks are very much at home there and the CCR fingerprints are almost as strong.
‘HOW TO START A FIRE: A Blueprint for Catholic Youth Ministry’ is available now on Amazon UK in Paperback and Kindle formats https://amzn.eu/d/0do48hFc
Jack Regan is the Director of Youth Services in the Diocese of Lancaster
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