Introduction

The three ‘C’s’ of the Just Faith programme are:

Community

Compassion

Courage

Just Faith is a programme for young adults, adapted by the Scottish Just Faith partnersfor use in parishes as part of the Just Faith programme. Just Faith is comprised of three organisations: SCIAF, Justice & Peace Scotland, and Missio Scotland. For all of them their work and vision is inspired by the Gospel, in particular the call to be compassionate and merciful. Their desire is to share the social justice work of the Church and encourage Catholics to connect their faith with action for a better world.

This programme complements and supports the Caritas Award programme, introduced by the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland to recognise and promote the active faith commitment of young people in their final years of high school. In parishes it can be used as part of the Caritas Award programme: Links between the Just Faith programme and the Caritas Award are highlighted at the start of each session. Quotes fromDeus Caritas Est (the foundational document for the Caritas Award) are also included at the head of each section, further emphasising the link between the two programmes. The programme also includes quotes from Laudato Si, and ideas for reflection.

Just Faith’s aims are to:

  • Invite young Catholics (aged 16+) to think about our interconnectedness, our interdependence, and our call to know and to love others as we are known and loved by God.
  • Make connections that are life-giving and sustainable between a young person’s relationship with God and with others.
  • Build up a young person’s capacity for real engagement for justice in our world; an engagement rooted in their own personal faith journey that sees them reach out to others in love. (The focus in terms of the justice dimension of this campaign is centred on climate change and the “for the love of” campaign
  • Encourage the development of leadership qualities and skills in participants; skills which would be used in the local parish on justice and peace issues in particular, but also in terms of wider engagement around peer evangelisation
  • Provide young people with a positive and empowering experience of Church and community through their engagement with this programme.

“We are called to find Christ in [the poor], to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them and to embrace the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them.”Evangelii Gaudium, 198

This programme will fulfil these aims by:

  • Providing a safe, challenging space for young Catholics to explore together questions of justice, in particular, as they relate to ourworld and the impact of climate change.
  • Exploring with young people practical ways they can become actively engaged in their own parishes/youth groups/dioceses in the search for justice for those most marginalised and forgotten in our world.

  • Providing interesting material to facilitate young people's engagement with Catholic Social Teaching (CST).

The following qualities underpin the Just Faith programme in parishes. These qualities inform all of the sessions, the material, the engagement between those facilitating the sessions and those participating in them. These qualities – the three ‘Cs’ of the Just Faithprogramme - are:

  • Community: Young Catholics will, through this programme, build stronger friendships with one another as brothers and sisters on a journey of faith. They will also seek, in solidarity, to know and to love those experiencing poverty, marginalisation and injustice in our world. Finally they will build connections with their local parish or local pastoral reality. The primary purpose of the programme centres on ‘building community’ as something living and dynamic within the faith lives of the young participants on this programme.
  • Compassion: we recognise our own need for our God who is all tenderness and compassion. Young people involved in the programme will engage with one another with gentleness. They will especially engage with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised and the disadvantaged with great compassion. In doing so, they seek out and embrace with love all that we sometimes find most challenging and most different in our world.
  • Courage: the programme acknowledges the need to pray to the God of love who inspires us to love others as we have been loved. Courage is needed to recognise and embrace the ‘other’, and to see in him/her the very face of Christ, broken and shared for us in our world. Courage is also needed to act out of that new way of seeing others in our world.

Through these qualities the programme links with the three elements of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland Caritas Award. These are:

Faith Learning: To inspire young people to learn more about their faith and its teaching, with particular reference to the Church’s social teaching.

Faith Reflection: To help young people to understand the importance of prayer and reflection in their lives.

Faith Witness: To encourage young people to engage in practical action for justice in their parish, community and world as a response to learning, reflecting and deepening their understanding about their faith.

The programme should be seen as a faith development experience for the participants, rather than any kind of academic exercise. In terms of programme format, the sessions are rooted in the ‘See-Judge- Act’ model at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching.

Who is the programme for?

This programme is for those young people who have begun to ask questions about their faith, in particular around where they feel their faith is calling them in terms of engagement with the wider world. For this reason, although the programme is not exclusively for older teens and young adults, it would be envisaged that it is with this group that the programme might have most resonance. It is possibly this slightly older group that would also have the maturity and sense of purpose that would allow them to commit to the programme.

It is envisaged that this programme would be best suited to a smaller group of young adults (no larger than 10).

Local differences will obviously apply in terms of the makeup of the group. The programme is designed to be flexible enough to meet these variations.

Prayer within the programme

The programme recognises that all Christian action, if it is to be Gospel inspired, must be rooted in an ever deepening relationship with Christ. For this reason, this programme is seen as an opportunity to build on the young person’s experiences of prayer and perhaps to introduce them to new types of prayer. In particular, it seeks to deepen the young person’s experience of contemplative/meditative prayer and also to introduce young people to a ‘Lectio Divina’ style of engaging with scripture. There is also an attempt to introduce to the participants some principles and approaches of Ignatian spirituality; particularly those relating to the invitation to ‘see God in all things’.

Those who participate in the programme will be encouraged to journal for the course of theprogramme. It is suggested that this journaling take a slightly different form to traditional prayerjournaling.

The entire programme is rooted in two key biblical texts: Luke 10: 25 – 37; The Parable of the Good Samaritan and Micah 6:8 and all prayer is focused on the 3 C’s of the programme; Courage, Compassion and Community.

Links with Caritas award

While the Just Faith programme has been developed separately from the Caritas Award it should be seen as complementary, offering opportunities for those participating to further deepen their learning and awareness of our faith.

In particular:

-The prayer and reflection dimension throughout the Just Faith programme complements that encouraged in the Caritas Award, building on existing experience and offering new practice. In all cases encouraging an understanding that action needs to be rooted in prayer.

-Just Faith introduces Catholic Social Teaching to participants, in the context of the social justice work of Church agencies here in Scotland. This supports the Caritas Award’s Faith learning dimension which encourages young people to reflect on how knowledge of faith informs and influences our actions.

-The reflective action required in section 5 of Just Faith, along with the reflective journaling and recording, can be counted towards the Faith Witness component of the Caritas Award.

Direct links with the Caritas Award are drawn throughout the resource with notes at the start of each session highlighting how it complements an element of the Caritas award.

Programme format

JustFaith is completed over six sessions. In addition there is an optional Commissioning Ceremony that takes place in the parish. Session 5 involves the group takingpart in an action, in the Parish and/or wider community. The remaining sessions; 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 should take place at a suitable venue within the parish.

As the rationale above suggests, this is a parish based programme and would invite, at the end of the engagement, a follow on engagement within the parish. It might also be good to invite one of the Just Faith organisations to meet with the group to discuss how the group can engage with its work as it supports the social justice work of the Church, here in Scotland and worldwide.

The group might also develop a short video on the group’s work during the programme. (See final session for further details).

Sessions 1, 2, 3 and 4 centre on aspects of Catholic Social Teaching. Human dignity,solidarity, and community in particular, are explored through these sessions. Quotes are used from a number of recent documents, including Laudato Si with ideas for responding to the document.In addition, it should be noted thatevery effort is being made, through this programme, to engage with the technological and cultural reality of young people in their everyday lives; while also providing a voice that seeks to challenge aspects of that same reality.

Sessions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 should take about 90 minutes with some time for tea/coffee and biscuitsat the end. The optional Commissioning Ceremony can take place during Mass on a Sunday in the parish and should take no more than 10 minutes. Session 5 can be as long or as short as participants decide.

It might be noted that each session is designed to be interactive. While there are ‘input’ moments, these should be understood as opportunities to deepen understanding, invite new insights and share learnings.

In addition to each of the sessions, participants are asked to undertake a number of ‘Take the Action’ activities. These ‘Take the Action’ moments allow participants to work through material covered during the sessions. They are also intended to give participants real opportunities to engage with the material in their own particular ‘day to day’ realities in their own local communities. In addition, each participant would be expected to undertake some reflection on their own personal experiences. Details of this reflective piece are contained within the programme itself.

The overall approach suggested by this programme requires some preparation on the part of the leaders, e.g. for session 1 it will be necessary for the leader to have identified people the participants are going to interview for the next session; for session 2 leaders will insert prayer passages from session 1 into a PowerPoint used in Session 2 and so on. The amount of preparation should not be onerous and the energy spent on the programme is best spent during the sessions, and in building relationships within the group.

For the purposes of recording activity and sharing that activity in online spaces, it would be usefulto photograph various moments (with the group's permission) and at appropriate moments throughout the whole programme.

Additional supporting material is available on theJust Faith website facebook page This is alsoa space for you to input your own thoughts and reflections as the programme happens. It can alsobe a space for participants to engage with through their own updates.

It is important that all material recorded on the 'graffiti wall' is kept so that it can be returned to at the end of the programme and to act as a reminder of the ongoing engagement by the group in the programme.

In each of the sessions a distinction is made between the older adult/main facilitator and the peer facilitator. This distinction is for the purposes of detailing the programme’s structure and content. The language of main/ older adult facilitator and peer facilitator should be avoided when communicating with participants. Both facilitators are equal in this task and have vital roles to play depending on their own aptitudes, experiences and appetite. Suggestions of who should do what are made in the knowledge that these personal realities will differ. Both facilitators should decide who is doing what after discussion.

Session 1

“Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Deus Caritas Est,1

Session 1 is a gathering session to introduce participants to the programme and to one another. The key scripture text is the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the dimension of CST being introduced is Solidarity.

Before the prayer, this session should begin with introductions. People might just introduce themselves in terms of their name and why they decided to come along. Facilitators might also consider using some form of a warm-up exercise to help participants to relax at the start of the first session. (A variety of warm-up exercises that you might use are available online on the Just Faith website).

Links to Caritas Award (CA):

-Learning about our Faith – Catholic Social Teaching

-Reflecting on our Faith

-Parable of the Good Samaritan Lk 10: 25-37 (Gathering Point 2)

ROOM SET UP AND PREPARATION

Resources needed for this session:

•Fortheprayerspace:colouredclothandcandle

•Chairsarranged in a circlearound the prayer space

•Handouts 1, 2, 3 and 4

•Large sheets of paper (for Graffiti wall)

•Data projector and screen

•PowerPoints 1 and 2

•Post it notes and pens

Put the required number of chairs in a circle. If you wish, set up a very simple prayer space with a candle in the centre.

Have a small ‘graffiti wall’ set up. This can be as simple as some sheets of A1 paper stuck together and appropriately designed as a ‘wall’ or something more elaborate, depending on your skill and budget. It can be a permanent fixture or something you remove after each session. It is important that nothing is lost off the wall as it is designed to be a record of the programme from session 1 to the final session. For session 1, you should have some blank post-its available on the wall, with markers/pens on a table nearby.

Don't forget to do a warm-up session at the start of Session 1 and give participants a chance to introduce themselves in a more formal way as well.

OPENING PRAYER

Begin by lighting the candle. With quiet music playing in the background, invite participants to bring themselves into the space, and come to stillness. Decide which of the facilitators will lead the prayer.

The Opening Prayer is adapted from a Lectio Divina approach to praying scripture. Given time constraints, and that this passage forms the heart of the entire programme, the prayer should be relatively short. A suggested approach might be:

  1. Begin by handing out Handout 1: Scripture passage. Invite participants to put everything else out of their hands and to take a moment to ground themselves, quietening their minds and bodies.
  2. Tell the group that you will read the passage twice. Read the passage the first time, slowly and allow a moment of quiet.
  3. Now, tell the group that you will read the passage again. Ask the participants to take a moment just to select a word or a phrase that speaks to them from the passage. Invite them to allow that word to come to them rather than feeling they have to ‘pick something’.
  4. Take a few moments in silence. Ask the group to share what word or phrase they picked. Remind them that there is no need for commentary on this; just the word or phrase.
  5. Invite them to now write that word or phrase on one of the post-its on the wall. (Note: these should be collected by one of the facilitators and used as part of the prayer in Session 2.)

There does not need to be a big conversation at this point. It is sufficient to allow the prayer to end quietly by slowly bringing people back into a more interactive space. Alternatively, invite participants to speak aloud their own prayer for the programme.

  1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROGRAMME

WHAT?

Begin this first part of Session 1 with some time for participants to share what their hopes for the programme are. With quiet music playing in the background allow participants to record, on post-its, their hopes for the programme. Once they are finished invite them to stick their post-its on the graffiti wall, and to share with one another their thoughts and feelings on them.

  1. Go through Session 1: PowerPoint 1 with participants on the objectives of the programme.

Invite some discussion as necessary and of course, invite reaction at the end.

  1. Ground Rules (see below). Again use the graffiti wall to record 'ground rules’ in terms of how the group itself wants to operate together and how they see the online dimension of the piece. (Facilitators need to give this piece a little bit of thought and some suggestions are below).

NOTES ON GROUND RULES