Jesus Youth History - Eddy's Pages (BJEP***)

 Jesus Youth Leadership Structures Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 6 The long journey of forming leadership teams in the movement began in 1978. The job of the first coordinating team was to gather youth in the Renewal, and we were just 3 people, Fr. Justin Pinheiro. Miss Alicekutty. And myself — listed, in those days, simply as "Convener." The task before that small committee was equally simple in its description, if not in its execution: identify young leaders across Kerala and bring them together. That year, we organized several gatherings and training programs, and in December, we held a youth conference that brought together about 800 people. Looking back now, I am struck both by how much we managed to do with so little and by how completely unaware we were that we were laying the foundations for something that would eventually require a formal statute and receive recognition from the Holy See. That is not false modesty. It is simply the truth about how m...

 Jesus Youth Fellowships Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 5 I remember an evening gathering in the mid-1980s—I cannot recall the exact year, but I can picture the room. We used to call that Kanji (gruel) clusters. Perhaps fifteen or twenty of us gathered in someone's home in Ernakulam. A young couple who had just come into the renewal experience. Two or three college students, still finding their bearings in the movement. An older man, a professional, who had been part of the community for several years and whose steadiness you could feel in the room. A priest who sat on the floor like everyone else and laughed easily. A sister from a nearby convent, given permission to come. The youngest person there was probably seventeen; the oldest must have been close to sixty. We prayed. We shared what God was doing in our lives. Someone had a difficulty that week and said so, and the room simply gathered around them. By the time we parted that night, something had happened tha...

 Jesus Youth Spirituality and Membership Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 4 One of the stranger experiences in drafting the Jesus Youth statute was the moment when we had to formally and precisely write down who belongs to the movement. Jesus Youth had always been the kind of community where belonging felt self-evident. You were there. You prayed together, laughed together, went on retreat together, stayed up too late together talking about the things of God. Whether you were eighteen or forty, whether you were lay or ordained, whether you had been around for years or had just arrived — the community held you. No one had ever handed you a membership card. And now we were being asked to write down who, precisely, qualifies as a member, and on what terms, and under what conditions a person might cease to be one. It was humbling work. But it was also clarifying. Because when you have to commit something to a written page in language the Church and civil law can understa...

 Why Is Jesus Youth a Private Association? Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 3 A few years into drafting the Jesus Youth statute, I sat in a room with a priest who was an expert in Canon Law, going through the document section by section. At one point, we arrived at the question of how to classify the movement. Public association or private association? He looked up and asked, in his careful way, a deceptively simple question: "Did the Church found this movement, or did the faithful?" The answer came easily. The faithful. A group of people in Kerala, awakened by the Spirit, began meeting together and drawing others in. No bishop had summoned Jesus Youth into existence. No curial office had designed its charism and sent it out into the world. It grew from below — from people saying yes to the Spirit's invitation and then finding others who had said the same yes. "Then," he said, setting down his pen, "it is a private association. And that class...

 Jesus Youth Guidelines and Statutes: How They Were Formed Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 2 (By Edward Edezhath, article in Kairos Magazine in 2016) In January 1998, I was sitting in a National Service Team gathering and I put forward a proposal that had been forming in my mind for some time. Fr. Fio Mascarenhas was the NST Chairman; I was Vice-Chairman. The proposal was simple in statement, considerable in implication: that Jesus Youth should be formally recognized as a national movement under the NST's structure. I remember the response. It was not skeptical or cautious. It was enthusiastic — the kind of encouragement that tells you the room had been waiting for someone to say the thing. The responsibility for drafting a guidelines document was entrusted to me. On July 3 of that same year, the National Service Team met in Bombay and formally adopted it. In that same year, the first national leadership body — JYNT — was formed, with Manoj Sunny as its Coordinator....

  Does Jesus Youth Have the Church's Recognition? The Pathways of Formal Recognition for the Movement Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 1 (Dr. Edward Edezhath - the article published in Kairos in 2016) I have been asked this question in more settings than I can count. Sometimes it comes from a parish priest before a program can be announced from his pulpit. Sometimes from a bishop's secretary, politely but firmly, before a scheduled meeting. Sometimes, more pointedly, from a fellow Catholic who has heard about Jesus Youth through secondhand sources and wants to know whether it is safe. "Does Jesus Youth have the Church's recognition?" The question is understandable. We live in a time when all manner of groups emerge in both civil society and the Christian sphere — some of them with genuine spiritual fruit, others causing serious harm to individuals and families before anyone recognizes what is happening. A Church that exercises careful discernment be...