The "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus" video has gone viral with many of your high school youth and young adults. Mark Hart (Life Teen’s Bible Geek) gives an effective pastoral strategy to help those you serve to unpack the profound message of in this video from the mistakes it also makes about religion.

A response to the viral youtube video: "Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus." The teachings on God's grace in this video are actually pretty awesome, but his arguments against religion (Catholicism in particular) are seriously theologically flawed. Don't let the emotional sensationalism of this video sweep you away from religion. Christ himself said he came not to abolish religion, but to fulfill it. And he established the Catholic religion, from which came the Bible this man clings to so dearly.

Youth and Young Adults of the Des Moines region have the opportunity to gather, sing and pray at the Wednesday, January 18 concert, Canticle of Life. It will also be an opportunity to joyfully send our area pilgrims to the March for Life.

Take a look at a few keys to youth ministry. There are many more but this is a good start.

I remember as a kid watching the show Married With Children and my favorite part was the opening song. Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage, this I tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other. As I was driving the other day, thinking about Adolescent Catechesis and Youth Ministry, the song kept popping into my head. At first I was perplexed but after thinking about it for awhile it started to make perfect sense. Youth Ministry and Adolescent Catechesis go together like a horse and carriage. More on that in a minute. First lets look at where Youth Ministry stands at this point.

Sheep is a great word. It can be singular or plural. We believe that our job is to tend the sheep, but really if we want to do youth ministry well, we need to tend to the sheep. Confused? Let me make it simple. You need to take care of your own spirituality. If you are broken in your faith, it will be hard to listen and pray for others who are the same. You may try to pray and listen, but it will leave you with a sense of hollowness. Many times youth ministers get burned out, but it isn’t because the relational ministry has suffered, it is because they are spiritually weary. If you want to be a youth minister you need to have your relationship with Christ moving in the right direction.

A potpourri of stuff: 6 different kinds of kids in ministry, Parental Guidance Suggested, New Orleans Adult Conference

This is a must read about Adolescent Catechesis

This week the focus of the newsbrief will be on Sacred Scripture. This focus was taken from the Core Curriculum from the Framework set forth by the Bishops.

The past several News Briefs have covered the Components of Comprehensive Youth Ministry, as set forth in the USCCB document “Renewing the Vision.” This is the last News Brief in the series, and it will cover the component of “Evangelization.”

The ministry of prayer and worship with adolescents has several distinct dimensions that provide direction to comprehensive ministry efforts.

This week’s News Brief is on “Leadership” “The ministry of Leadership Development calls forth, affirms, and empowers the diverse gifts, talents, and abilities of adults and young people in our faith communities for comprehensive ministry with adolescents.” –Renewing the Vision, p.40.

This week our focus will be on Social Justice and Service:

This week’s youth ministry News Brief is on Community Life.