SHYG Life Teen

SHYG (St Helen's Youth Group) Life Teen is a community for high school students (grades 9-12) in our local area looking to grow in their Catholic faith. St Helen's Youth Group strives to serve our teens and teach them as they look to grow in their relationship with Jesus and find their place at home in the Church. We do this by emphasizing the importance of prayer, the Sacraments (especially the Eucharist!), and community. The SHYGs participate in our parish community through the fiestas, soup dinners during Lent, through events put on by other groups like the Thomas More Newman Center, and in our worshiping community every Sunday, to name a few things. But our biggest goal is to help the youth build a community for themselves in the Catholic Church where they can grow together in their faith and take that into their adult lives. 

Our group usually makes two big retreats during the year: a ski retreat in the winter, and we attend a Steubenville Conference in the summer, with plenty of other fun activities in between. A video for the Steubenville conference below. 

We started using the Life Teen model of youth ministry in our parish in February 2019 and love the resources that are available to us. It is Eucharistic-centric and incorporates sound doctrine while helping us meet the teens where they are; engage and teach them the faith in a way that touches their hearts. 

We strive to teach the youth about who we are and who we are created to be, following the example of the Catechism: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek Him, to know Him, and to love Him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life." CCC 1 

We must know the faith and our rich history to know who we are. But it is most important to know why God created us, and once we seek him, know him, and love him, we truly become who he created us to be. When we realize this, we are freed to live life to the full, and we thirst to know him! Our goal is for everyone who comes through SHYG Life Teen to learn this and long to live it out. We hope you can join us!