“Lord, nothing except You.” – St. Thomas Aquinas
Welcome!
We are glad you are here and we hope to hear from you and see you at one of our upcoming gatherings. My name is Christian and I work here at St. Helena’s in a variety of roles, one of them is working with our young adult community. I am a husband, father, and young adult myself. I know what its like to live in a world that is hostile to the teachings and truth of the Catholic Church. I know how vitally important it is to find a community of peers who will support and challenge me to grow in my discipleship with Jesus.
If you are a young adult, I encourage you to reach out to me at cthompson@sainthelenachurch.org. I would love to meet up for a purpose-drive cup of coffee and hear about your story and how I can best serve you in your discipleship journey. Below, you will find some information about our young adult community, including who we, when and where we meet, and the goals and purpose of our community.
So often, young adults discover their Catholic faith in college but move home and have no community or connection to foster their faith. Other times, young adults discover their faith in their later twenties/thirties, but are often left without friends or a support community who understands and agrees with them. It is very important for young adults to find and develop relationships that help them to grow in their faith and fall more deeply in love with Jesus and His Church.
Friendships rooted in Christ are the strongest friendships. In the Gospels, Jesus says to build our foundations on rock and not on sand. A friendship built on the rock of Christ will stand the tests of life. We invite you to build your relationship with God, yourself, and others on the rock of our Catholic faith!
Young Adult Ministry Calendar – 2025
We get it! Many people and things are competing for your time and attention. Some of them are good, like family and work, and some are not good, like social media. We invite you to look over our upcoming calendar and
Winter Gathering – “Romans: The Gospel of Salvation” – Seven Wednesday evenings (January 8 – February 19) – Please click HERE to learn more and let us know if you are coming to our bible study of the book of Romans!
Lent Gathering – “Metanoia: Journey with Christ into Conversion – PART ONE” – Five Wednesday evenings (March 12 – April 9) – Please click HERE to learn more and let us know if you are coming! This is a AMAZING series that will challenge you no matter where you are in your relationship with Jesus. Please consider joining us for this transformative series – you will not be disappointed!
Summer Gathering – “Metanoia: Journey with Christ into Conversion – PART TWO” – Six evenings with dates TBD – We will finish the AMAZING series that we began during Lent.
Fall Gathering – “Mystery of God” – Six evenings with dates TBD – Atheism is on the rise. The so-called New Atheism has attracted millions of young people. How should Christians respond? How can we turn the tide of secularism and draw people back to God? Reaching into our rich theological tradition, and using the insights of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope Benedict XVI, we’ll uncover a clear yet sophisticated understanding of what we mean by “God”. Who is God? And why does he matter? Join us for this series and you’ll not only learn the answers yourself, but you’ll discover how to share them with others – especially those who no longer believe.
Advent Gathering – Lectio Divina for Advent readings – Four evening with dates TBD – Advent is the time when we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus but so often we lose sight of this season because we get caught up in festive busyness and we find ourselves no more prepared and transformed on Christmas Day than we were at the start of Advent. We invite you to take some time to reflect and listen to what God is telling us through Scripture in order to prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus. We will meet each week of Advent to watch a short video reflection and to pray over and discuss the upcoming Sunday readings. You are sure to gain some peace and hope from our time together!
Our goal is simple…
To work with all young adults in their late teens, twenties, and thirties through community, evangelization and catechesis, prayer and spirituality, leadership development, and engagement in the social mission of the Gospel.
Challenges
- Young adults have been captivated by the consumerism and materialism of the society in which they grew up and have became apathetic and cynical.
- Young adulthood is sometimes a world of boredom, disillusionment, and indifference to the Church.
- Young adults need a non-threatening place where they can freely express their questions, doubts, and even disagreements with the Church and where the teachings of the Church can be clearly articulated and related to their experience.
- Young adults make some of the most important decisions in their lives about their Christian vocation, their career, and their choice of spouse.
Most of the members of our Saint Helena’s Young Adult Group have a similar thread in their metanoia, or “ongoing conversion”, stories: We have eaten the fruit from the tree of the world, the flesh, and the Evil One: a fruit that looks good and delicious; however, when bitten into, is a spoiled and rotten fruit.
When we left high school, and with it many of our homely comforts and worldviews, we entered a world that can be compared to Frodo Baggins leaving the Shire and coming face-to-face with the evils of Mordor. Many of us attended universities where we were blindsided by anti-Catholic, anti-life, and anti-family principles. Largely unprepared and certainly ill-suited by the modern Catholic educational and catechetical institutions, we were knocked out in the first round without ever being able to throw a punch. The bumpers were removed from our metaphorical bowling lanes, and we rolled gutter balls.
Like Edgar Allan Poe’s the Masque of the Red Death, the world consumed many of us while we were comfortably tucked away in our respective universities naïvely enjoying the party lifestyle and all its dressings. As a result, most of our contemporaries and friends left the Catholic faith in their late teens and early twenties. Most will probably never return.
Attributed only to God’s grace and the Mystery of Predilection, some of us have begun to seek healing from our experiences and find solace in beauty, unity, truth, and goodness. Of course, the nature of the Catholic Church is these transcendentals. What starts out often as a lonely and humbling search for the Catholic faith by one young adult turns into a Emmaus-style walk where many young adults meet each other along the way and realize we have similar backgrounds and can journey together. This is the reason the Saint Helena Young Adult Group exists.
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