Hi friends...
My name is Jah and I live in the Philippines. Our youth group is Catholic with the name Young Christian Society... YCSian, for short. We are made up of mostly pre-teens between 10 and 14 years old. There are some high schoolers and college students and they are the group's officers. I am 17 and I'm an assistant junior animator for our group. Our senior animator is abroad, a cook on a marine ship so our junior animator (me!) and the rest of Timothy (the cluster name for the officers) are in charge of the group.
Our group meets on Sundays from 2 PM to 6 PM and sometimes our officers have emergency meetings at different times. At 3 PM we play our favorite song: Yippie Alelulia and it encourages other kids to attend our catechism. It's like a sign to them. I will let you hear it... it is good.
I have a favorite scripture passage. It is Proverbs 22:6 which reads, "Train up a child in the way he should go, so that when he is old, he should not depart from it. YCSian has many activities. Every April we do a Passion of Christ play for the kids. We also do a comedy show we call Makcornick. In English Makorni means "cheesy". At Christmas time we go caroling and perform a Christmas Contata.
We do have a favorite activity. It is an all time favorite - summer camp. I know everyone of us will agree on this "bcos we have lots of activities". There is a pre-camp during the season. Right now (in April) it is summer here so we are excited about summer camp.
We don't have a lot of songs in our meetings becos we are Catholic but we did attend some charismatic ministry meeting in our place and find it interesting and fun becos they have instruments playing.
We do have some difficulty. We are not an ordinary group like some parishes have. YCS was founded by six young people with the help of two Bosconian (sp?) priests back in2001. We were not formally recognized by the parish but were allowed to use some facilities.
The next year we became recognized and since we were mostly kids the priest gave us a children's mass from 4 to 4:00PM. Then the parish priest changed. We did get close to the next priest so much that we visited him when he was assigned to another parish. When the third priest came things became different.
This priest questioned our group... he said we already had a Parish Youth Ministry... so we're like, we are there but not actually, like a shadow of the PYM. The new priest said we are snatching their roles. We told him we are not - we have our task, which was given to us.
In the end we agreed to move out of the parish so we would create commotions. Starting this new year we are an independent group, more like a community group. We still do things at the church and attend mass together. We are also trying to register our group as an NGO. It is hard becos we don't have other adults besides us - we are in charge of all of us. I hope you can give us advice and share some topics that we can use. Now you know how dramatic our group is... well that is all.
God bless, Jah
If you would like to respond to Jah and she has expressed interest in hearing from other youth, please write to TimFerguson@christianyouthgroup.org. Jah will be notified. We look forward to hearing from you.