By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
Five Youth Mission Team members from the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community arrived in Perth last week to minister to over 40 Catholic schools in the 25th year of the Team’s national tours.
Perth’s Monica Cruise, 18, joins Jessica Simon, 18 and James Asimus, 17 (from Sydney), James Hay, 19 (Canberra) and Tom Miller, 18 (Melbourne) for a year of missionary work living relationship-free lives of simplicity and obedience.
Similar teams will tour Catholic and public schools in Wollongong, Sydney and Melbourne.
As they tour Catholic schools from Perth to Bunbury to Kalgoorlie, the Perth-based team will be led by senior Disciples of Jesus member Martin Firth.
The teams will run reflection days for entire year groups of between 70-110 students in the high schools, plus four weekend retreats and will assist with 24-7, the Disciples of Jesus’ youth ministry for teens, every Friday night at their Osborne Park base.
The reflection days involve a series of talks, games, activities and dramas where the team members hear the students’ beliefs before informing them of their own beliefs.
While YMT members’ ages traditionally range between 17 (high school graduates) and 25, the age of youth volunteering for the mission is dropping.
The five touring Perth are the youngest group touring Australia this year. This helps the ministry, team member James Hay said, as they can relate to the high school students better.
He told The Record that their lives of chastity, simplicity and obedience – modelled on the vows taken by consecrated Religious – also help YMT members deal with the challenges of ministering to Catholic schools which contain many students deeply affected by secularism.
“There are elements of resistance in schools, as the culture we live in doesn’t exactly lean towards Catholicism,” Mr Hay said.
“Having a manager and working in a team ensures you’re protected. Just like the ordained people’s focus is on God, we are able to root ourselves more deeply in God, so we are used for God’s work and not our own.” The lifestyles also ensure that the call to mission does not just cover one part of their life, but encompasses all of it.
This year’s five missionaries are unique in that the two members who are women had parents who are second-generation YMT members. Miss Cruise’s mother Michele was on the first team 25 years ago and Miss Simon’s father Kelvin was the team leader.
Glendalough parish priest Fr Doug Harris was also in that team at the time as a teenager.
The YMT was started by Colin Sutton, who felt inspired to establish missions in schools.
Member of the Disciples of Jesus, a national organisation with a strong focus on building Catholic communities based on serious commitments to their faith, began living in households – men and women separately – while ministering to schools.
Volunteers gather each year in Wollongong for an orientation and selection process before being sent out to the dioceses with others their own age.