Ministering to Youth

The Church Fathers had a distinctive approach to youth ministry. I discovered it in the course of an afternoon’s research. Scouring the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, I found nothing to suggest that Ambrose had ever led teens on ski trips to the nearby Alps.
Digging through the Eastern Fathers, I came up even drier—no junior-high dances—not even a pizza party in either Antioch or Alexandria. In fact, in all the documentary evidence from all the ancient patriarchates of the East and the West, there’s not a single bulletin announcement for a single parish youth group.

Yet the Fathers had enormous success in youth and young-adult ministry. Many of the early martyrs were teens, as were many of the Christians who took to the desert for the solitary life. There’s ample evidence that a disproportionate number of conversions, too, came from the young and youngish age groups. How did the Fathers do it? They made wild promises.

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Article by Mike Aquilina