"The Church in the life of young people and young people in the life of the Church." This was the full title of a LACE weekend that promised to be very important, and was to be facilitated by Bishop MacMahon. Unfortunately, he was taken ill, and so the fifty odd members of LACE were left to their own resources for the weekend, which proved to be an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, since it was an excellent and stimulating weekend.

One of the most readily acknowledged facts was that the Church has not always done well by young people, and in this we could learn from our sisters and brothers in the other Christian traditions. The Church has always thought education important, (in the nineteenth century it was recommended as more important to have a school than a parish church!) and has devoted a huge proportion of her resources to these schools. The question is to what extent in these days this is the only or even the main source of the life of young people in the Church. Traditionally there has been a three-way bond between young people and the Church -the home, the parish and the school. We were forced to acknowledge that the home has altered beyond recognition and often does not engage young people in the Church, and the parish is often limited in the amount of engagement and invitation it offers young people, leaving the school as the only remaining link, nevertheless one which some young people take as being largely irrelevant to their lives, which are centred elsewhere, in media and youth culture. So while the ministry of the Church through schools is extremely important, it also needs to be supplemented by a ministry that reaches young people where they are.

Was going to Mass an important determinant of their relationship with God? It is a visible but unreliable element. We have all known church-goers who do not grow in their faith and non- church-goers who do, so in many ways it may have even an inverse relationship. As one of the contributors vividly put it, ìFall out with the Catholic Church but don't fall out with Godî. A number of young people, including some present at the weekend, made the point that we were trying to discuss this without much contribution from young people themselves, and what they had to say was that they often did not feel particularly welcome at Mass in a parish. They found themselves between the elderly, the children and the young families, with no particular role, and so found it hard to get to know people in a parish. The ministries open to young people are limited, and their involvement in making the liturgy alive with dance or drama (as at St Cassian' s) depends very much on the parish priest. So Mass-going is not really a measure of their closeness to God.

However this has implications for the church community .We are aware of the lack of vocations to the priesthood, and the effect this will have on parish life, but perhaps we are only just becoming aware of the huge opportunity that this offers to the laity. Perhaps too there will be a renewed consideration of the role of women in the Church. As one person put it, young women are treated as equal in every sphere of life now, except the Catholic Church. They feel dismissed and misunderstood by the attitude of the Church, which seems to say one thing - the infinite worth and dignity of each human being, and then do another - where women's roles are so limited in scope. So no wonder the young have difficulty seeing their place in the church community.

Having said these negative things, there are very many things young people can get involved in within the Church, and it is probably better to work from the concrete to the abstract rather than vice versa. Often we expect them to behave as Christians, to believe as Christians, and then we .will accept them as Christians. Perhaps we should rather welcome them into our community , ~ wherever they are on their search, and once they feel a sense of belonging, perhaps belief will -make sense, and from belief stems all action. We have so much we could do to help them feel, welcome, as the church of today and not just the Church of tomorrow, and it is an inherent part of our Christian life to attempt to pass on the treasure we have found so that they can rejoice in it too. We can support retreat programmes, and youth days, we can involve ourselves in developing liturgy that is meaningful to young people from time to time, we can go on pilgrimage. We can celebrate together, and consider what our vision is for our society, our world and our church.

It is easy to denigrate young people as having no spirituality, and some people do. We need rather to understand how their spirituality is expressing itself. A telling survey asked children what were the most important things about school. The first was friends, the second food, and the third was fun - none of these are normally on a teacher's priorities for school. The other main ones were sport, values and learning by example. These seem to reveal the inherent spirituality of the educational project, and how we sometimes miss it by working at cross-purposes. Young people are making a spiritual community , as is evident when you see the way young people support one another, but they are often doing it against the impetus in school. If we could learn a way to tap into this community and express it as a spiritual search, there would be more harmony between the priorities of young people and their teachers.

Given what young people look for in school, what they value, it is clear that none of these things are normally found in church. They generally do not meet their friends, though it makes a great difference if they do, and if they have things that they can do in the parish that are with people of their own age. They do not experience the Mass as feeding them. They find it too much the same, and don't see the attenuated signs of a feast as representing a real feast to them. They do not feel Mass is fun. And yet all these things could be. The young people have an understanding of the importance of sharing food, often where this sign has been abandoned at home. How can we make the liturgy more of a feast? They have a deep hunger for spiritual food, they value meditation - how can we make the Mass more a meditation that feeds that hunger? Young people love to have fun, they can't help it. African Masses and several other styles can be full of life and enthusiasm, but British celebrations can be a bit dreary.

The task is huge, but perennial: to read the signs of the times and to interpret the enduring truths in terms that will attract and be relevant to people in their lives now. It is simply not good enough to let the young people go, confident that they will return with their first baby, or later in life. The Church is now, and young people are now. If we get it wrong, we lose a whole generation. We need to find a way to develop the ministry of the young, and in the process we will all be energised and renewed.

We felt challenged as a group to work further towards this vision of how the Church should act with regard to young people, and I personally share a vision one of the discussion groups wanted to send to the bishops of this country. We simply dreamed of a church where every parish employed youth-worker and every school employed a chaplain. Then we would be well on the way to developing and growing in the ministry of the young.

I will finish with the words of some young people who wrote this for us when they heard about the weekend: "Include the young more - ask them to present things, creative ways to interpret words of Bible/Gospel ( drama or songs etc ). Have less rigid services, services dedicated to the young, generally more lively, music, clapping, etc: youth days, events dedicated to young people (with religious themes). Less talk, more fun! Encouragement to think for themselves on subjects, more inventive ways to help young find faith, approachable priests/deacons etc whom they can talk to about anything".