The First Text Message: 5 Ways To Engage Youth With Scripture

I had fifty eyes glaring back at me with exhaustion and boredom. It was my first foray into a Catholic middle school classroom as a guest teacher for religion. I was twenty-one years old, relatively “hip” by preadolescent standards, and one week on the job as a new parish youth minister. After a whopping thirty minutes of preparation for a Bible study on peer pressure, there I stood, Bible in one hand and coffee in the other. I was woefully unprepared but didn’t know it.