We've set out at our parish to communicate and implement a parish vision and strategy from womb to tomb. Our mission: To build a Church of missionary disciples in Grapevine, Texas. Our strategy: to use a clear path of discipleship to walk people through the stages of Encounter, Grow, and Serve. (This is a simple articulation of the catechumenal model, or the evangelization process). 

I created a worksheet to help our ministry leaders plan and evaluate around a clear path of discipleship.

I've been taking high schoolers to Steubenville conferences for the last 6 years I've been in ministry. It's an amazing experience and really a huge surge of evangelistic momentum for any group of high school students. The problem a lot of us youth ministers have is following up intentionally on this event and using the momentum to bring youth into a deeper understanding of what it means to follow Jesus as His disciple.

So my co-captain Tim and I came up with a plan to hack this evangelistic momentum. The intention is two-fold: to capitalize on teens committing/recommitting to a decision to follow Jesus and make changes in their life, and to continue to foster the Christian community created in our Steubenville conference small groups.

Our plan is to use commitment cards and a Discipleship 101 series as followup. Below is an explanation of our strategy as well as the files we're using. Feel free to download and use the resources we created! If you try something like this, let me know your thoughts.

“So…what is the Gospel message?” As the Director of Youth Evangelization and Catechesis at our parish we’ve been focusing on the basic Gospel message, or the kerygma, in all of our volunteer training. There are lots of ways to articulate the Gospel message in its entirety and plenty of places to learn it.

What I wanted to share is the best way to summarize and teach the basic Gospel message that I’ve come up with so far. I’ve used this structure to train catechists, evangelists, core members, parents, youth ministers, etc. Its not my own and has morphed slightly over the years.