Sharing the Faith at Youth Rally

It wasn’t your typical religious rally: Christian music that sounded more like R.E.M. Light-hearted warnings of eternal acne for betraying a confidence. And fajitas for a Lenten dinner.

More than 700 youths, most from Orange County, gathered Saturday to share their spiritual journeys at an all-day retreat at Santiago de Compostela Church in Lake Forest.

The huge sanctuary was filled with a sea of denim and baseball caps, wooden crosses and cargo pants. Boys with spiked hair and earrings sat near girls with ponytails and ribbons.

The event was organized by Life Teen--a Catholic group founded in Arizona by adults who remember how hard it was to be religious teenagers in a secular world.

“In today’s world, young people are told, ‘You’re a mess,’ ” said the program’s executive director and emcee, Phil Baniewicz. “But Life Teen and the Catholic Church are saying that you are good and you are holy.”

Baniewicz--who said he gave up a potential career as a baseball player to work in youth ministry--played the crowd Oprah-style.

At one point he asked the youths, aged 14 to 18, for a different kind of confession: their most embarrassing moment. The kids roared when one teenager told of running naked through her neighborhood in the middle of the night with a rubber glove on her head--a consequence of playing Truth or Dare.

The teens also played beat-the-clock games in which they had to relay all they could about Jesus to another in the audience in under a minute.

“That’s just not enough time!” complained Laura Hall, 16, of Villa Park. She’d been cut off midway through her version of the Immaculate Conception.

But there were plenty of serious moments too.

The teens listened in silence when Baniewicz talked about death, sin and the meaning of baptism.

“Sin kind of messed everything up,” Baniewicz said. “That’s why baptism is there.”

About 54 Catholic parishes participated. Most teens came from Orange County, although some traveled from as far away as Stockton.

Life Teen was formed in 1985 after a youth told a priest that he had never felt loved in the Catholic Church.

“We wanted to make sure that never happened again,” Baniewicz said.

After catching on at a parish in Chandler, Ariz., the organization has mushroomed to serve 500 parishes and about 50,000 teenagers throughout the U.S., New Zealand and Australia.

Saturday gave the teens a chance to show their strength in numbers locally.

“I think that everyone talks about the bad things that teenagers do,” said 15-year-old Melissa Lane of Lake Forest. “They don’t recognize that not everyone’s like that.”

She said there’s no other place she would have been Saturday. “It’s not like my mom made me come,” she said.

For 17-year-old Mike, the day brought comfort in being around kids like himself.

A student at Valencia High School in Placentia, he said he’d had a “roller coaster” of a time the last few years. He said that his parents were having problems and that he’d started doing drugs, drinking, cutting school and hanging out with the wrong crowd. But that’s all changed now, he said, thanks to his church and girlfriend.

“It took me screwing up to bring me to God,” he said. “I know there are some here today that are having hard times. But I know that they can change too, with God.”