Nearly 100 parish pastoral council members from across the Archdiocese of Sydney have spent recent weeks wrestling with a question that kept surfacing in every room: what are we doing for our young people?
The three workshops, held at Kingsgrove, Leichhardt and Mount Pritchard so that parishes from the inner city to the far west could reach one, were run by the Parish Renewal Team within the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation.
Parish Renewal Officer Sr Anastasia Reeves OP said the sessions were deliberately built around planning of a particular kind.
“We’re trying to look at the pastoral life of the parish. What in the parish is helping lead people closer to Christ? Whether they’re those in the pews or we are inviting those who aren’t in the pews to join us in that beautiful lifelong experience.”
That meant setting aside the logistics that councils already handle well: the catering, the budget, the booking sheet, and starting instead with prayer and with the question of who a particular parish is actually trying to serve.
Why do we do this? Is it to draw the parish closer together, or to invite back people who haven’t been for years? When councils worked through who the people were and what they needed, one answer arose again and again.
“For many of them it was either those who are not in the pews or our young people, and sometimes there’s a lot of overlap between those groups,” she said.
Several parishes reported a shift in how they intend to approach it. Rather than designing youth programs from the top down, they resolved to ask young people directly what would help.
“Not just assuming we know what young people want, but asking them what is the real need,” Sr Anastasia explained.
“I think that resonated with other parishes, because so many parishes are asking the same question.”
Encouragingly, a number of councils have already made room at the table. Since the archbishop’s guidelines for parish pastoral councils were promulgated, several parishes have used their changeover to bring young members on.
“They’re getting the voice of young people in there, rather than just those who are perhaps, in days gone by, the ones available, who are now the older crowd,” Sr Anastasia said.
Councils were candid about the obstacles – finding new volunteers rather than the same willing few, budgets, spaces, and the tensions that come with differing opinions. But Sr Anastasia said the mood was anything but resigned.
“People are wanting to be future-focused,” she said.
“We want our parishes to be growing and more vibrant. And we know that means we have to be looking at younger generations, because we all get older. Even those young people will get old one day.”
The workshops have finished for 2026 and will return in 2027.
