Father Lappe recently announced after Masses the wonderful news that Star of the Sea has purchased the Canopy World property, a large lot West of the Parish Office on 6th Street across the alley. As part of our mission to expand our Youth Ministry programs, the 2000-sq-ft building on the property will be renovated and converted into our Blessed John Paul II Youth Center. We hope to eventually also use the space for additional church parking, which we are in great need of.

You can read more details about the purchase of the lot on the Kitsap Sun website, as well as an interview with our Director of Youth, Josh Johnson, in the Catholic Northwest Progress discussing the future for the youth programs at Star of the Sea below:
 

BY KEVIN BIRNBAUM

When Josh Johnson arrived from Virginia this summer to serve as the director of youth and young adult evangelization at Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish, he immediately set about surveying all the groups he'd be serving, including teens and their parents, to "see what the needs were," he recently told The Progress.

He discovered that the community had "an incredible number of very strong families with some very well-catechized teens that are very strong in their faith," he said.

"And then we have the teens that aren't so strong in their faith, and they need [to be] evangelized," he added. "We have a lot of those — they may not even come to Mass every week, and if they do, maybe they're just coming because their parents make them. And then we've got kids who are in between.

"So we've got a lot of different teens at a lot of different places. So we knew that a one-size-fits-all youth group night is only going to reach a limited amount of people."

‘Master plan'
The parish soon developed a "master plan for youth ministry."

As the parish implements the plan in the coming year, the "traditional youth group experience" — based on the Life Teen and Edge programs — will migrate from Wednesday nights to Sunday mornings, taking the time slot currently filled by religious education classes.

The new weeknight offering will be gender-specific FRATERNUS and Sororitas groups for those in middle school and the early high school years. The youth will be further divided into small groups of six to 10 with an adult leader for more intimate discussions and service projects.

"We have found that to be a much better environment for catechesis and prayer and discipleship," said Johnson, noting that teens tend to open up more and take spiritual discussions more seriously when the other gender isn't around.

Another part of the master plan includes renovating a 2,000-square-foot building the parish has purchased and turning it into the Blessed John Paul II Youth Center. A grand opening is tentatively planned for the feast of Corpus Christi next June.

"Father [Derek] Lappe, our pastor, has put a high priority on youth ministry," Johnson noted.

Forming evangelists
The idea behind all of this is to make disciples.

"The first priority is to take the kids that really want to be Catholic … and disciple them," Johnson said. "And this is primarily to teach them how to be followers of Jesus Christ."

As in the New Testament, the hope is for the teens to become not just disciples but also apostles, sent forth with a mission.

"We want them to be taking what they receive and sharing it with their peers, both in the parish and in their everyday lives — in their schools, in their sports leagues, extracurricular activities. We want them to be evangelists."

Getting in the mindset of sharing the faith and inviting friends to church events doesn't usually come easily for Catholics, said Johnson, who was raised an evangelical Protestant and served briefly as a Methodist minister before converting to Catholicism in 2007.

He wants to help young Catholics "have the tools to talk about their faith, and the courage to do so." "Every Catholic is called to be an evangelical Catholic," he said.