In addition to confirmation, opportunities for cross-cultural engagement will provide students an opportunity to consider the “other.” In a culture where selfishness, affluence, and “success” abound, teens would benefit from building relationships with those who are vastly different than them. Hopefully, this would take the form of something more than a typical mission trip, but would instead be more of a cross-cultural relationship, whereby two culturally different communities would enter into a long-term relationship, seek to listen to and know one another, and act out of that relationship to bring about justice and reconciliation. Such a relationship will likely also offer teenagers an attempt to participate in the ex nihilo of another culture.
Though only preliminary, these two main actions would do well to shape a ministry that addresses many of the issues facing adolescents while theologically attending to the revelation of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, participating through the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ continuing ministry, and joining God the Father in his creative and salvific work in the ex nihilo of the human condition.
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