How and Why to Focus on Vocations in Your Youth Program 

As you consider teaching on vocations in your youth program, you will want to think through three questions: Should we focus on our teaching vocations? Does this distract from the main gospel message? How do we integrate vocations into our programs?

Why Vocations?

For Catholics, there are three main vocations: marriage, religious life, and single life. However, our primary vocation is to love God and neighbor. Jesus tells us that these works are the most important call on our lives. Does focusing on marriage’s specific vocations, religious life, and the single life distract from this? Honestly, there is a risk of derailing our main message. Imagine a “purity culture” teaching that focused more on avoiding premarital sexual activity than having a vibrant relationship with God. Imagine an intense message from a minister on religious life’s primacy that leads youth to think they are not “holy” enough if they don’t become a priest or nun. Keeping these risks in our minds is important to balance our message. 

However, even with the risks, it is imperative to make vocations a larger part of our teaching. The question of where God is leading you is among the most important that our youth will ever ask, and we can prepare them to wrestle with this question. Our society teaches that you need both romantic love and a lucrative career to be fulfilled – we need to explicitly teach on the beauty of a religious vocation for youth to consider a vocation as something that God could ask of them. 

Many priests, and even young men who discerned out of seminary, will tell you that the discernment process drew them closer to God. Discernment takes purposeful, intentional self-examination and prayer. It calls us to look for God in our lives and listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit. Teaching students to discern their vocation equips them to discern many other small calls in their lives – the call to move, choose a specific romantic partner, choose friends, join a church, start a ministry, found a nonprofit, etc. If we do not teach our children and youth to discern the call of God, they will struggle to discern God’s voice in the many hundreds of ways that a follower of God needs to. 

How to Focus on Vocations: 

Young children need to be exposed. 

From birth until the preteen years, what most children need is exposure to religious life. Most children have examples of marriage vocation in their lives, if not in their parents, then in grandparents, extended family, or most television shows and stories. During these early years, it is important to tell stories of saints who were priests and nuns to increase religious life awareness. 

For young children, priests and nuns should seem like superheroes who are admired but attainable, in the same way, they see teachers, firefighters, or doctors. Children should have a relationship with as many religious people as possible – would your parish priest be willing to read a story to the children? Could you have a religious order visit? This is admittedly harder during the pandemic, but as regulations lift, think about how you can get your children to see religious life as a normal, possible choice for their future. 

Youth need to be taught to listen.

Your middle schoolers and high schoolers are just waiting to be called to their vocation. They are no longer daydreaming about what they want to be when they “grow up”; college is around the corner, and the choices are looming. During this time, it is imperative to teach them to discern. Teach them contemplative prayer practices like the Examen to equip them to hear God’s calling in their life. 

Youth have many voices telling them what road to choose – help them create space to hear what God is saying to them. God wants them to choose a career that honors their baptism. Can you ask adults to share their story of being called to their career – whether it is teaching, accounting, healing, or religious life? 

Make sure to honor and celebrate any seminarians in your community who are exploring the call to the priesthood. Middle and High schoolers are intensely passionate when they find what they love – as they grow in love with God, this passion will give them the openness to consider a call to religious life. 

Graduates need to be supported.

If you have students considering a religious vocation, do not let them drop off your map after high school graduation. Follow up with them regularly, pray for them, ask them how you can support them in their calling. Whether they take religious vows or they discern out of that vocation, they will benefit from your support and guidance as they decide. They will be a powerful witness to your current youth if they are willing to come back and share their experiences. 

Brooke is a cradle Catholic who has done a bit of everything in Youth Ministry – summer camps, high school campus ministry, parish ministry, youth conferences, etc. Currently, she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and works at a Classical Catholic school teaching second and third grade. She loves her job because she gets to go to Mass every day and teach about Medieval Saints. You can find her at https://brookeannbuth.wixsite.com/writer.