Scottish Catholic Observer

In an age where checking Facebook and Twitter seem to be of paramount importance to teenagers, AMANDA CONNELLY meets the Glasgow woman who’s showing young people that it’s possible to keep their Faith strong and alive against a backdrop of a million modern distractions

For young people today, as they pounce on the bleep of social media and text notifications on their smart phones, living in an ever-smaller world that becomes busier and busier, they can find it difficult to focus and take the time to nurture their spiritual wellbeing.

In a world consumed by technology and the fear of missing out and fitting in, it seems too often the material and secular is king. And yet amid all the secular, the material, the fitting in, Catholic youngsters across the world are doing their part to give young people that spiritual focus in their lives.

Enter 22-year-old Mhairi Jackson, who served on a NET team in the United States from 2014-2015, and this year will help to spread the Gospel message to young people in Catholic schools across Scotland.

National Evangelisation Teams (NET) describe themselves as ‘encouraging young people to love Jesus and embrace the life of the Church.’ They started in 1981 in the US archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis and came to Scotland in 2015.

Having completed an ‘amazing’ but ‘intense’ year of learning, self-discovery and practicing youth ministry across the US, Mhairi and her American counterparts have landed in Scotland and are excited to begin igniting the Faith in the hearts of Scotland’s young Catholics.

“There’s such a need for something for young people,” Mhairi said about Scotland.

“Young people in Scotland, they just don’t even know about God. They say they’re atheist, but it’s almost like they just don’t know. If [only] there was somebody that was able to say to them, this is who God is, God loves you, God wants to be your friend, God wants to help you out when you’re sad and was just able to represent that.”

It is with this in mind that Miss Jackson and the rest of this year’s NET Scotland team will travel around schools and parishes across the country, opening up the Lord to young people.

The exuberance with which the young people lead the NET retreats is truly inspiring; their obvious love for God is infectious.

And yet, this all-encompassing zeal is compounded—and made relatable to the young people taking part—by the fact that each one of those serving on a NET team has their own personal testimony to share of how God changed their life, too.

“When I was growing up in Glasgow, I always quite enjoyed my Faith,” Ms Jackson said. “My family always had a really strong Faith and we would always go to Mass and everything like that. But even going to a Catholic school, I hit 13-14 and all my friends were going out drinking and all of them were going off and doing all these kind of crazy things.

“I sort of lived a bit of the double life, so trying to go out and party, and then coming back and going on retreats. When I left high school, I got to a point where I needed to choose one or the other; I couldn’t keep trying to fulfill both these things.

“I had amazing opportunities to go on different retreats, some in different countries, and my Faith really grew. I really started to have an actual relationship with God, rather than just going and sitting in a pew through Mass. I actually realised that God was present there and what that meant, and that changed my life.”

After Miss Jackson’s sister served on a NET team and she noticed the difference it made to her life on her return to Scotland, she decided to take a leap of Faith and apply for the programme.

She laughed: “I crazily just sort of signed up for it!”

Before long, she found herself across the pond in a room full of 150 other young people in 2014, ready to begin her NET Ministries retreat and training.

“They teach you so much in those first few weeks, and then they teach you how to do ministry, so how to take all that knowledge and that Faith and actually reach out to young people and give it to them,” she said.

With Miss Jackson’s group delivering 118 different retreats across six states, to around 5,000 young people, NET takes its youth ministry to a whole new level in its wide-reaching response to God’s call.

“It was incredible to see the way that young people just responded to it; they’d turn around say, ‘my life has changed,’” Miss Jackson said. “They felt like they could connect to God in a way that they never felt like they could before.”

During their year with NET, the young missionaries learn about their relationship with God, what it means to be a good Catholic, how to live out their Faith, and the teachings of the Church.

Engaging in daily Mass, private prayer, reflection, reading scripture and participating in the sacraments, as well as socialising with young people across the world, it’s both a spiritually and socially uplifting experience.

It was this depth of Faith that Miss Jackson developed through NET that helped her through the most difficult time of her life, when, after her return to Scotland, her mother sadly died from breast cancer.

The power NET has to help others has proven to have remarkable effects on the missionaries and the retreatants alike, which this year’s NET Scotland team can’t wait to share in high schools across the country.

“Just for this six week team we have 21 retreats and we’re going to be in eight different schools,” Miss Jackson said. “A full day of games, dramas, music, prayer time, reflection and group discussion—it reaches young people on their level, making a personal connection. Our main ministry will be going into schools, doing the retreats, doing the prayer times.

“But NET is also an amazing ministry because it does come in and it gives you that hook, that life-changing moment, but what young people really need is that kind of follow-up.”

She wants NET to point the young people to events going on in their diocese on a regular basis.

It is this transformative nature of NET Ministries that has changed the lives of each of the missionaries on the NET team, and something they hope will be passed on to retreatants, as they have seen countless times before.

“That,” Miss Jackson said, “is a total privilege for us.”