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

 The Movement's Juridical, Material, and Resource-Related Arrangements Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 6 In May 2016, the Holy See formally recognized Jesus Youth as an international Catholic movement. Along with that recognition came the approval of the statutes that will serve as the movement's operational guidelines. The approved text, in English, is arranged as a preamble followed by 79 paragraphs under 13 headings. Over the past several articles, we have been working through the principal sections of this document. This final installment takes up the last four headings — Titles 10 through 13 — which deal with the practical and administrative arrangements that spiritual movements sometimes tend to overlook, and that the statutes take care to set out clearly. I want to begin with a personal observation before getting into the content. When you spend decades helping build something by the Spirit's leading — something that grew from a few people in a room i...

 Jesus Youth Leadership Structures Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 6 The long journey of forming leadership teams in the movement started way back 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 ...

 Jesus Youth Fellowships Getting to Know the Jesus Youth Statutes — Part 5 I remember an evening gathering from the mid-1980s — I cannot recall the exact year, but I can picture the room. We used to call that Kanji (gruel) clusters. There were 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 who had been 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,...

 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 bef...

 How the Six Pillars of Jesus Youth Lifestyle Took Shape (By Dr. Edward Edezhath - the article published in Kairos Magazine in 2016) I must have been in my mid-twenties the first time I saw the diagram. Someone drew it on a blackboard during one of the early Life in the Spirit Seminars — a simple wheel with the Chi-Rho symbol at its hub and four spokes radiating outward. At the center: Christ. Along the outer rim: Daily Christian Life. And the four spokes connecting them: prayer, study, fellowship, and service. It was one of those images that fix themselves in your mind immediately, and I remember thinking: yes, this is what it looks like. This is what holds together. That diagram had roots in Acts 2:42 — the early community in Jerusalem devoted to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. The Life in the Spirit Seminar's sixth week would take those ingredients and ask: what does a consistent, daily Christian life actually look like? What a...

 The Finance Management in the Jesus Youth Movement (By Dr. Edward Edezhath, Article published in Kairos Magazine in 2015) Somewhere in the late seventies or early eighties — I cannot pin down the exact year — I heard a story that stayed with me. In one of the prayer fellowships in a rural part of Kerala, a young man had been selected to travel to Ernakulam for a state-level leadership gathering. The trip was several hours each way. He had no money for the bus. When the others in his fellowship found out, a quiet conversation happened without his knowledge, and a small group of them went out that evening to tap rubber and till fields — working a few hours for hire — so that they could press the money into his hands, pray over him, and send him off joyfully. I have told that story many times over the years. It captures something about the financial character of Jesus Youth better than any policy document ever could. People who don't know the movement well often ask the same pointed ...

 The Journey of Social Commitment in Jesus Youth (By Dr. Edward Edezhath - article published in Kairos Magazine in 2015) Sometime in 1982, during one of our monthly weekends together, the First Line group stumbled into a conversation that refused to end. I don't remember exactly who started it — someone raised the question of what it meant for Jesus Youth to be leaven in society, and then the room simply took off. These were the kinds of conversations that made the First Line what it was: a circle of leaders from across Kerala who gathered on the third weekend of each month, sat together without formal classes or prepared syllabi, and talked. Shared. Prayed. Argued, sometimes. Then went back home to act in their living situations. What made it remarkable was precisely the absence of control. No one was managing the conclusions. In most groups, a certain direction of thought is set in advance, and participants are quietly guided toward it. The First Line had none of that, and the fr...

The Foundations of Jesus Youth Presence in College Campuses (By Dr. Edward Edezhath, based on the article in Kairos Magazine in 2015) "Are you simply going to hand the colleges over to revolutionary movements?" I can still hear Sr. Hedwig's voice when I recall that meeting at St. Teresa's College, Ernakulam, in 1983. She had convened us — the youth leaders of that era — and she was not in the mood for polite conversation. She had a particular directness that I always found simultaneously uncomfortable and clarifying. You are confining your youth work to the parish, she told us, because it is easier there. The field of higher education may not be a comfortable setting for Christian work — but that is precisely where this youth movement needs to be active. She was right, of course. She usually was. Sr. Hedwig had recently taken charge of the Xavier Board — the organization of Catholic institutions in higher education in India — and she brought to that role the same rest...

 The Pathways of Personal Formation in Jesus Youth I must have heard Fr. Marcelino tell this parable a dozen times, and each time it landed differently. He would describe two kinds of trees. The first was a Christmas tree — bright, decorated, loaded with gift packages. The packages arrived overnight, beautifully wrapped, instantly attractive. The second was a fruit tree — no packages, no ribbons, but the slow, patient work of roots reaching deep and branches drawing sun, until in time it bore fruit that would last. Both trees, he would say, had something real to offer. But only one had life in it. He was talking about gifts and fruits — about the difference between the Spirit's gifts poured out in a moment of faith and the fruits that grow only in a person who abides. "Those who abide in me," Jesus said, "bear fruit that will last" (Jn 15:5). Fr. Marcelino understood something that took me longer to understand: that a person who receives gifts and is marvelously...

 A Self-Awareness for the Movement? The importance of asking ‘What is Jesus Youth?’ I remember the Friday evening we arrived at POC — the Pastoral Orientation Center at Palarivattom, Ernakulam — with that particular feeling I associate with being invited somewhere for the first time. Alicekutty, Manoj Sunny, and I had come representing Jesus Youth. The year was 1993. The then-Director of POC and Deputy Secretary of the Kerala Bishops' Conference was a priest who would go on to become Bishop Joseph Kariyil, Bishop of Kochi. The catechetical center of the Bishops' Conference had come up with a fresh idea: to design a unified faith formation program for young people across Kerala, and to do that, they had called together all the known Catholic youth movements in the state. Large groups, small groups, established groups, newer groups — all were invited. And among them, Jesus Youth. The significance of this was not lost on us. Although Jesus Youth had grown considerably by that poin...