FEATURE ARTICLE
BELONGING, BELIEVING AND BECOMING BY SUZAN VAN ZYL Aquinas College began our “Belong, Believe, Become” journey in 2019 when we were invited to attend the Oceania Equipping School as the New Zealand representatives. The vision of the Equipping School is to inspire and equip Catholic schools to become centres of evangelisation with new ardour, expressions, connections, and experiences to develop a sense of belonging, believing and becoming. The school is operated by Catholic Schools Youth Ministry International (CSYMI), in Canberra. Mrs Monique Harris (the then Leader of Learning - RE), Laura Smith (then deputy head girl - Special Character) and I attended. The Great Commissioning in Matthew 28:19 calls us to “Go and make disciples of all nations”. This resonates with our college as we seek to accompany our students on their journey of faith and to develop an intentional discipleship pathway providing spiritual nourishment and empowering students to be witnesses and to share their testimony with others, while also strengthening our connections to our parish communities. Pope Francis has spoken about now as a time of a new Pentecost for our youth, as many have been “sacramentalised but not evangelised” (Fr. Ken Barker). We are being called to reach out to our youth and to invite them back through reigniting in them the fire of the Holy Spirit. We must call on the Holy Spirit to move and speak in new ways to our youth and the Equipping School was a living example of this. It operates under the premise of three youth ministry goals: to foster the total personal and spiritual growth of each young person; to draw young people into responsible participation in the life and mission of the Catholic faith community; and to empower young people to live as disciples of Jesus Christ in today’s
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world. (These goals are laid out in the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference’s document Anointed and Sent.) These three goals are also outlined in the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference’s Tu Kahikatea – Standing Tall (2006) and 2014’s The Catholic Education of SchoolAge Children also reiterates that facilitating an encounter with Christ is essential to the function of a Catholic school. Another fruit of our visit to Canberra was securing a mission team to visit our college and diocese in November 2019. We saw great potential in a youth ministry pathway and wanted to pursue our involvement to build capacity and establish a sustainable model for peer-to-peer ministry. The team ran our Year 10 retreats and students opted into a newly constructed Year 11 Discipleship Class for 2020. This class was very successful with opportunities to reflect on their living relationship with Christ while still completing an academic NCEA course. These students refined their testimonies to present on retreats, learned how to run small groups and practised drama to share ideas on our Year Seven Retreats.
CAPRICE BASILE SHARES HER TESTIMONY
