A very good friend of mine and I are trying to get our Young Adults more involved in our parish. Our diocese recently had a Theology on Tap session hosted by my parish and another in our city. It was absolutely amazing and it’s empowered my friend and I to do more to reach out to our parish community. Eight members of our church attended and we’d like to continue and hopefully grow from there. Any suggestions on what to do to engage more people? We are the future of our church and I hope to set an example for the generations that follow us.
God bless your efforts
events are a good way to go
i’ll tell you some of the things we have going on im our city, maybe it’ll help give you some ideas
unfortunately, my parish does not have too many young adults, mainly because I live in an area where people go mostly for retirement, public transit is a long commute so the younger people tend to move out of there
anyways, I’m part of a university movement called CcO (catholic Christian outreach) and this is mainly where the young adults gather since we are pretty scattered throughout the city
we have a monthly adoration event called summit, which is bible reading, testimony, and an hour or so of adoration followed by benediction, adoration is accompanied by singing (quiet piano/guitar songs or anything really), confession is also available, after there’s some time to get together and hang out. it takes place at a different parish every month. I understand that the logistics of this could be difficult but you could do something similar at your parish
we also run faith studies, which is basically like a bible study, maybe you could start one of those?
prolife group, young adults are eager to look at being a bigger part of something outside of themselves
we also have something called cornerstone, where we invite a speaker to come and talk about a current catholic issue
retreats, we organize an annual retreat, this however may also be logistically difficult
besides all the more formal faith-based stuff, we also have fun events such as girls night, boys hangout, games nights, coffee houses, sports events, bbqs, pancake breakfasts, movie nights, rosary making sessions, etC…
it depends why the difficulty in getting people to come out? are there just not that many of you? or are people just not interested? maybe it’s just because nothing has been organized? or they just don’t seem that int to their faith.
it might work to put on a more social event, people are generally a bit more receptive to those and then you can work your way in to the deeper stuff
anyways, that’s all I’ve got for now. I hope you can fine something useful
