The following blog was contributed by Dan Masterton, Assistant Vocations Minister, The Clerics of St. Viator, in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
In spring 2018, my principal emailed our school staff with a plug from NCEA. Its national convention was coming to Chicago in 2019, and they were inviting submissions for presentations.
I’ll admit I hadn’t done much campus ministry professional development besides grad school for my master’s degree. And the bit I had done with other campus ministers was more about building relationships and making connections. I hadn’t seen much in my several years that was well geared toward developing stronger ministry on high school campuses.
We had a strong culture of professional development at that school, and my principal consistently encouraged us to take part in things on and off campus. I decided to open the application and saw the huge list of specialties under which presentations could fall — and campus ministry was one of them!
In my role as campus minister, I had designed and implemented a program through which students could imagine, design, lead, and direct a brand new retreat from scratch. I decided to adapt my system into a presentation and submit it to NCEA. As I learned more about how many people attend the conference from so many different roles in Catholic education, I was glad I threw my hat in the ring. Sure enough, I was accepted to present.
On that April afternoon at NCEA 2019, I had the very enjoyable opportunity to talk to a modest sized but deeply engaged group of people. Even more enjoyably, the attendees followed my input with excellent questions, and a few remained after the session ended to talk even more!
One of these fateful conversation partners was Cari White, Director of Campus Ministry from St. Edward High School near Cleveland, Ohio. Cari shared a bit about her school and its ministry, invited me to join a national network of campus ministers and theology teachers, and even mentioned that she had initial conversations with NCEA about writing a campus ministry book. It was a project she had been thinking about for some time, as there is a serious lack of resources for high school campus ministry. We immediately talked like old friends who were catching up, and we agreed that we would keep in touch.
One year later, our co-authored book, Cultivating Faith: A Guide to Building Catholic High School Campus Ministry, has been published by NCEA and is now available at their online store! We are excited to share our work with all of you, and we hope it can provide some meaningful food for thought for you and your schools.
First of all, we never set out to write a prescriptive handbook. From almost twenty years’ campus ministry experience between us, we know every high school is different. Local contexts and varying circumstances mean every school needs to adapt in its own way. As such, we set out to describe some basic frameworks and fairly universal principles as a starting point for readers’ consideration.
From there, we focused on what we feel are the three integral areas of campus ministry: retreats, liturgy and prayer, and service and justice. Each area gets a chapter that lays out a good foundation and some ways to build out to broader offerings or build up to multi-layered approaches.
To get a little past nitty-gritty and into some philosophical considerations, we then included some topics for wider, broader thought. We talk extensively about building a rich, vibrant ministry environment with sustainable vitality; we write about establishing and maintaining a safe, supportive environment both for young people and adults; we give some resources and background on integrating technology into ministry.
Finally, as a conclusion, we offer some spiritual reflection, including some of our favorite self-care and wellness practices. Campus ministers are significantly vulnerable to overworking and burning out, so we wanted to share some ideas for taking care of ourselves.
Together, these areas constitute a roadmap of sorts. We think it can be instructive to schools that are starting campus ministry from scratch. We think it can inform schools who are trying to restart campus ministry or dedicate new, different attention to it. We also think it can be a measuring stick in imaginative, strategic discussions that evaluate the past, present, and future of already stable, strong campus ministry. No matter the situation, we hope most of all that people can use it constructively and reach out to us if we can pitch in as conversation partners to the great work being done at Catholic high schools.
