Three Things That Almost Guarantee Teens Stay Catholic

This post comes from Fr. Matthew P. Schneider at ProjectYM.com. See it in its original form here.

We all want to live our life by guarantees. What if I told you that if you’re able to get teens to have three simple factors, there’s an 80% chance the weekly mass attendees as adults? In Christian Smith’s Young Catholic America, he actually pointed out what these three factors are. 80% may not seem high but for comparison, the following combos don’t even produce 50%:

• High parental importance of faith, high teen importance of Faith, and teen frequently reads Scripture
• High teen importance of faith, teen attends Sunday School, and teen has many adults he can talk to about the faith
• High parental importance of faith, high teen importance of religious faith, attends Sunday School, and teen has many religious experiences

In this blog post I want to examine these three factors, then talk about how youth ministry, or better said the church’s ministry to teens, can achieve these three factors.

Christian Smith is a leading sociologist on the sociology of religion: he did a study of over 2000 young adults in their teen years on the religiosity and then followed up with them while they were in their 20s. As far as I know, there aren’t many comparable studies. When he followed up with the Catholics, the results are so amazing he compiled them into a separate book. One interesting thing is that if Catholics go to mass their 20s statistically speaking they will probably go to mass until they die but if they don’t go to mass their 20s the chances that they come back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s is actually rather slim. At the end of the book, he talks about how different combination of factors can come together to ensure that Catholic teens are active Catholics (for him, this basically means attending mass weekly, although I would hope that a truly active Catholic would do more). There are only seven possible path that lead to more than 50% of the teens remaining active Catholics as adults – and some of these require 4 or 5 factors to come together. Of the seven paths one stands out for two reasons: it produces an 80% success rate at having active Catholic adults and all three of the factors are things that we can create the environment where there almost definitely going to happen.

Click here to continue reading.