Alas, the catechetical year with my 6th graders ended with more of a whimper than a bang last evening! Suffice it to say that their eagerness to be done with Monday night religious education sessions outweighed any anguish they were feeling about not seeing Mr. Paprocki any more! 🙂 Part of the problem stemmed from the usual shenanigans that one encounters when supervising a large group of pre-adolescents attending Mass on a Monday evening after […]
Here are some excellent and proven evangelization & catechesis strategies. At the end, I”ll tell you where they are from and you will probably be surprised. Appeal to young people since youth is a time of idealism. Make demands on people and you will get a heroic response. Convince people that change is necessary and that they can contribute toward changing the world. Attract people not only by words but by action. Make sure your […]
I came across this very nice post – The Calling of a Catechist – by Lorrie Lane Dyer in which she reflects on her call to serve as a catechist. This might be helpful for recruiting new catechists (along with a number of other resources I’ve compiled in my Becoming a Catechist feature that can always be found on my home page, right column, scroll down near the bottom).
This coming Monday (April 29) is my last evening with the 6th graders. Following the closing Mass in church, I should have about 20 minutes left with them and I plan to use that time to send the kids off with something concrete about how to live out their faith as a Catholic. First, I’m going to show them some images of Chinese artist Liu Bolin who is known for his “Invisible Man” images in which […]
I have long been an advocate of assessment in catechesis. At the same time, I have always made it clear that assessment in catechesis is to be used as a tool to address needs (both individual and corporate) and to address deficiencies in the catechetical program. I don’t advocate using assessments to assign report card grades to kids in religious education and certainly not to determine if they are to “pass or fail” or to […]
Tonight is the last session that I will be teaching for my 6th graders this year (next week is our closing Mass). I’ll reflect soon on what this experience has been like for me (in brief, it’s been wonderful!) but for now I’d just like to offer a glimpse of what I’ll be doing tonight. Preliminaries (15 mins) Gather, attendance, misc. – young people write prayer intentions Opening prayer ritual/procession Engage (10 mins) I plan […]
Over the past couple of years, in an apparent effort to ensure orthodoxy of content, some Catholic dioceses in the United States have invested countless man hours and who knows how much money implementing lengthy and tedious processes to mandate a limited number of catechetical textbook series in their dioceses. This, despite the fact that dozens of textbook series have gone through rigorous scrutiny and have already been determined to be in conformity with the […]
I know this is last minute, but I just became aware of this Webinar being offered tonight by a friend of mine, Ansel Augustine, on “Multi-Cultural Ministry and the New Evangelization.” Ansel, a greatly talented pastoral minister in the Archdiocese of New Orleans and an excellent speaker, will present and lead a conversation on the implications of the New Evangelization for multicultural ministry and vice versa—how can Catholic multicultural ministry shape and strengthen the New Evangelization? For […]
So last evening, I conducted a Jeopardy-like review with my 6th graders and then followed it up with a final assessment. Here’s a summary: As part of our opening prayer, we included prayers for all those affected by the bombings in Boston. It is lamentable that, in the course of several months, we catechists have had to talk to our young people about the Newtown tragedy and now this. Let’s pray for an end to […]
In ministerial circles, it is not uncommon to hear the phrase “Faith is caught, not taught.”The point of the phrase is that faith is something that involves more than just transmitting information. With that in mind, it might be helpful to know just what makes a message go “viral” – what makes a message “contagious.” Seeking answers, I recently read a very good book: Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger (Simon & Schuster) […]
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