Starting a New Pastoral Year
Beginning a new year in ministry can be full of emotions–stress, the excitement of new things to come, uncertainty, and hope. How can you start off the ministry year well and invite God into it? Here are my top 6 tips for laying the foundation for a fruitful year ahead:
Personal prayer. Everything–everything–flows from our personal relationship with God. What will your personal prayer routine be this year? How do you desire to grow deeper in relationship with the Lord? Do you spend time with God just for the sake of being with Him? Plan it out, take the time to cultivate intimacy with Him, and keep going if it gets challenging. While the Masses and Holy Hours we do with our teens are great, we all need our personal prayer time outside of those spaces. Pray, pray, pray. Go on a retreat just for you. Get a good spiritual director. Carve out your sabbath day and keep it restful. I know it sounds radical, but “waste” time in prayer (hint: it’s not wasting time at all!). Take St. Mother Teresa, for example: The Missionaries of Charity once told her that they needed to cut down their Holy Hour in the morning to half an hour, so they’d be able to serve the high volume of people in need in the streets. St. Mother Teresa told them no, instead they would now pray for two hours in the mornings. If they were serving more people, they needed to pray all the more! The same goes for us. Honor your personal relationship with God, no matter how busy it gets.
Dream with God for your ministry. Take the time to invite the Holy Spirit into your planning for the year. What’s on God’s heart for your ministry? Ideas and new dreams may come with your prayer, things that maybe weren’t on your radar before! When you gather with your leaders, pray together and see where the Lord is leading you. Dream with God with the trust that He is abundant, and expect miracles!
Look at the fruits. Look at what can be pruned. With your leaders, take a look at what the good fruit of the last year was. Where were your teens encountering Christ? Where were hearts transformed? Where was community built among the teens? Build on that foundation of what God is already doing and what is bearing fruit in the teens’ lives. From there, look at what maybe is getting stale or what could be pruned from your ministry this year. Remember, the Lord prunes so that new fruit can grow!
Ask key questions. What is your vision in youth ministry? What are your top 3 goals for the year? How will you strategically implement those goals? Make sure everyone is on the same page, and communicate these goals to your pastor and the parish.
Pour into your leaders. Plan fun things for your leaders this year. Take them axe throwing, out to a nice dinner, do an escape room together–have fun outside the church walls! Most importantly, feed your leaders spiritually. Connect them with good prayer resources. Help them find good confessors or spiritual directors. Pray together beyond just praying together before a Youth Night. Find a retreat you all can go on together, do a Marian Consecration together, go to a worship night, etc.
Keep track of miracles, and celebrate the victories! Let’s be real, the year goes quickly. When God does something great in your ministry, keep track! This goes for a teen finally coming to youth ministry after being invited for a long time, teens taking on new leadership, healings taking place, those great retreat moments, etc. A good practice is to write all that God is doing in a journal. This helps so you can look back and marvel at what the Lord has done and be encouraged in the challenging moments. If God did it once, He wants to do it again! Praise God for it, and celebrate with your team!
We wish you all the best for the year ahead! May the Lord bless you abundantly and radically transform the hearts of your teens! We are praying for you and are cheering you on.
Lauren Gentry is a campus minister at Cardinal Spellman HS in The Bronx. Besides ministering there, Lauren is currently pursuing her Master’s in Catechetics and Evangelization from Franciscan University. She has a B.A. in Theatre from Butler University in Indiana, where she created theatre with refugees and immigrants to help them process trauma. For more information on Lauren, please visit her website at: www.laurengentry.com
