Purpose

Our ministry exists to REFLECT Christ to un-churched teens, to PLUG them into a community that will ROOT them in their faith, and challenge them to SPREAD that faith to others as they GLORIFY God with their lives.

High School MinistryHere at St. Peter’s, we take our faith very seriously.  We believe that Church shouldn’t be something that Catholics do once a week, but it should be what we relove our lives around.  We strive to show young people and their families that our faith is something we live day in and day out, in the good moments and the moments that it seemes we can’t find God - since it is in those moments we need Him the most.  Our ministry is both formational and transformational – we form our young people in the truths of the faith, all-the-while offering experience that gives God an opportunity to transform their hearts.

We recognize that not all young people are the same, and they are all at different levels when it comes to their faith.  We’ve identified five catagories that young people fall in.  These catagories are:

1. Community – These are the potentials.  They don’t come to our programs, but they could possibly come if the invitation were there.
2. Crowd – These are the young people who come only because they have to in order to make their Confirmation.
3. Congregation – These young people have decided to get a bit more serious about their faith, and they have decided to take that step to deepen their faith by coming on retreats, to worship nights, bible studies, etc.
4. Committed - These young people have begun to make their faith their own, by studying on their own, reading about the lives of the saints, make a committment to deepen their spiritual life and their realtionship with God.  They are no loinger dependant on a program to boost their faith, but they have made a daily committment to  strive for holiness.
5. Core – These young people have come full circle and have started evangelizing their friends and mentoring others in the faith.

After identifying the five potential catagories a young person can fall in, we began to be more purposeful in how we design our programs.  Each program began to target a specific audience, for a specific purpose.  We stopped doing things just for the sake of doing something.  We recognized that our mission was to lead young people and their families to Jesus and then let Jesus transform their hearts.  We stopped being event coordinators and started being signs that pointed to Jesus.

We took a look at Jesus’ model of ministry and what He told us in the Gospels.  According to Jesus, their are five components to doing ministry.  He lays out these components out in the Great Commandment (Matthew 22: 36-40) and the Great Commission (Matthew 28: 16-20).  In the Great Commandment, Jesus identifies two of the components: 1) Worship – “love the Lord your God…” and 2) Ministry – “…love your neighbor….” And in the Great Commission He identifies 3 components: 1) Evangelism – “Go and make disciples…,” 2) Fellowship – “…baptize them…,” and 3) Discipleship – “…teach them….” These components give us a flow to how we should approach ministry, and each component and each compopnent directly corresponds to a category that a young person falls in.

1. Community Teens = Evangelism
2. Crowd Teens = Worship
3. Congregation Teens = Fellowship
4. Committed Teens = Discipleship
5. Core Teens = Ministry

In developing our Purpose Statement, we took each component and gave it a word:

1. Worship = Glorify
2. Ministry = Spread
3. Evangelism = Reflect
4. Fellowship = Plug
5. Discipleship = Root

After identifyoing a way to approach ministry with purpose and how to follow Jesus’ guidelines set forth in the Gospels, we began to be purpose oritented with our programming.  The programs we designed for community teens become more “reaching out” types of programs.  The programs for crowd teens are purposefully designed to have elements of catechesis and evangelism to them. Congregation students have programs that help them begin to associate how to make God a priority in their everyday lives.  And once a young person gets to the point where he/she is ready to make a personal committment to actively deepening his/her relationship with God (committed teens), we offer various tools (prayer jounrals, scripture studies, etc.) to aid them in deepening their spirituality.  Finally, once a young person has shown that he/she is willing to strive in deepening his/her faith and shows a desire to bring that faith to others (core teens), we have a peer ministry team to give them that opportunity to mentor their peers.

Our Programs are broken down as follows:

Evangelism Programs: (Target= Community)

1. Tailgate Parties
2. After the Pole Concert
3. Attending Lunches at Schools
4. Attending Sporting events and Award Ceremonies
5. Summer Kick-Off Social
6. Back-to-School Bash

Worship Programs: (Target= Crowd)

1. LIFE Nights
2. ROC Luncheons
3. Confirmation Retreats
4. Service Projects
5. Parent Nights

Fellowship Programs: (Target= Congregation)

1. Monthly Worship Night (Engage)
2. Fall Retreat & Spring Retreat
3. RISE Work Retreat
4. Steubenville Conferences

Discipleship Programs: (Target= Committed)

1. Scripture Study
2. Theology of the Body for Teens
3. Generation Change (Dave Ramsey)
4. Discipleship Tools (Prayer Journals, Mass Prep Cards, Devotions, Liturgy of the Hours)

Ministry Programs: (Target=Core)

1. Peer Ministry

As  leaders, we not only tell our teens how to get to Heaven and how much their God loves them, but we journey with them – teaching them and learning from them. Our job in four years is not to make them saints, but to help lay a foundation and to show them where home is, so that hopefully one day they will become saints.