Why the Confirmation kids keep leaving your parish
A parish secretary runs into the pastor’s office and says, “Father, there’s a bat in the church. We can’t get rid of it.”
The pastor says, “Give me a second.” He grabs his bag off the table and leaves. He comes back a few minutes later and says, “Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of it.”
The parish secretary says, “Oh no, did you kill him?”
And he says, “No, I gave him Confirmation. He’ll never come back.”
A priest told me that joke a few years ago. Teens get confirmed, leave, and never come back. It’s such a common problem, it’s a joke, and it reveals something crucial about how the Church sees the problem. The priest is the hero, and the bat (the teen) is the problem.
But we need to reframe this view. Consider that it may not be the case that every single teenager is so disengaged and disinterested in Catholicism. The common denominator is us.
WE are failing to catechize our children and help them see the mission of the Church they are being brought into.
If we acknowledge we are the problem, then we can start to fix it.
Pope Leo, in an address to confirmation kids around Pentecost, talked about this problem.
He reinforced the importance of remaining in our parishes, since that’s where Catholic life is lived. It’s lived in community, it’s lived in parishes.
Leo recognizes that the source of the problem is perhaps something young people are intuiting. He said, “You are part of the mission of the church.” Perhaps he’s the first person to say that to them — because by and large, the church communicates the opposite: that the mission of the church does not belong to these young people.
Young people are smart. They intuit that we don’t believe the Church's mission is for them, and they respond accordingly.
In my book, Save Your Parish, I talk about a problem I call “New Clericalism.
Clericalism is the idea that the mission of the church belongs only to priests and not to lay people. New clericalism is an expansion of that idea to include priests and “official” lay people like youth ministers, DREs, and parish secretaries.
The mission of the church belongs only to them.
Infected by this mindset, New Clericalists parishes become like sacramental dispensaries where people come, do some paperwork or retreats, and receive the sacraments.
Once that process is over, they leave. Why wouldn’t they? Their part is done.
Families bring their children in for a service as they bring them to school or to travel baseball. We put them through a class or a program, and once they are done with it, they are done. It never occurs to them that the mission of the Church belongs to them, too, because it is either not explicitly said or it is not apparent how. If evangelization is merely running CCD, how are they supposed to do the mission?
The real Catholics are the ones who “get involved” as staff or official volunteers. Most have no desire to do this, so they leave entirely. They can tell they are not needed.
Pope Leo is calling these young people to take on a new, non-clericalist mindset when it comes to the Church. He’s asking them to take on an apostolic mindset.
But for them to do that, our parishes have to become apostolic parishes.
We have a collective responsibility to treat our parishes like they are a place for lay people and clergy alike to come together, empower each other, and live out the mission of the Holy Spirit — the mission of the Church — in the real world outside the walls. Leo is saying the Holy Spirit wants us to walk together and do Christ’s work together.
The Holy Spirit descends on us in Confirmation to make us co-laborers with Christ, to work alongside Him in the world and do His mission with Him.
The kids are leaving because they don’t know that. Even if we say it, we don’t do it. We don’t give them a concrete picture of what evangelization as a normal teenager looks like.
As a youth minister, I tried my best to instill this sense of mission in my teens.
One girl, whom I’ll call Rebecca, took it to heart.
She was a small, mousy, introverted girl more interested in writing and drawing than in street corner preaching or volunteering at Church.
One week during Confirmation prep, I told them Confirmation meant being empowered to evangelize. I taught the teens to practice listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
She took my words to heart, and over the course of my time at that parish, she brought ten friends to church, including two non-Catholics, one of whom converted.
We often talk about how “9 leave for every 1 that joins.” But 1 on-fire disciple can bring in 10 and make up that difference.
If we give teenagers the tools to become apostles, some won’t, but many will. Those who take on the mission will cause unprecedented growth in our Church.
Form a teenage parish cricket team. Find a Saturday competition. They play on Saturdays and worship together on Sundays.
Speaking from overseas, the first impression that comes into my mind is that this is a global issue. Basically it has to do with catechetical and pastoral gaps related to the families.