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How OYM Serves the Parishes

The Office for Youth Ministry focuses its service on parish leaders in Youth Ministry. In pursuing this mission, OYM directs its efforts to assisting pastors, parish staffs, parish pastoral councils, parish finance councils, Youth Ministers, Religious Educators, parents, and peer ministers to develop comprehensive programs of ministry for the young of the parish.

OYM fulfills this mission through the services of training/formation, consultation, coordination, advocacy, resourcing, and networking.

Within each of these service modes the Office for Youth Ministry offers a number of programs which are designed to assist parish Youth Ministry leaders to develop comprehensive Youth Ministry for the young in their parishes. These programs are described in the following pages.

It is important for Youth Ministry leaders to note that the aim of these programs is to assist parishes to develop their own ministerial outreach to the young in their community. The program offerings proposed by the Office for Youth Ministry always involve both youth and adult leaders from the parishes. The structure of OYM's programming always engages the participants (youth and adult) in celebrating one's faith and training for the implementation of similar events in the local parishes. In all of these programs OYM seeks to make the parish a dynamic center where the young can deepen their faith in Jesus and participate more fully in the life and traditions of the Catholic Church.

The choice of programs offered by OYM is not a matter of chance. Rather, the mix of OYM programs represents a deliberate attempt to model for the parishes of the Archdiocese a comprehensive approach to the Church's ministry to and with the young. Relying on the US Bishops' Document Renewing the Vision ( 1997), OYM offers a variety of programs which cover all of the nine components of comprehensive Youth Ministry. Thus, parish leaders will find in OYM offerings, the basic training and experiences in the components of Outreach, Evangelization, Catechesis, Worship, Community Development, Service and Justice, Pastoral Care, Advocacy, and Leadership Development. Through these programs, OYM hopes to offer parishes definite "portals of entry" through which the parish Youth Ministry Community can journey on the way to developing a comprehensive approach to its ministry to and with the young.

Through this indirect ministry, the Office for Youth Ministry hopes to empower parish leaders to hand on more effectively the totality of Catholic identity to its young.