It's time I started talking

I've been debating whether I should start doing this or not...

Inspired a bit by this post over at the Totally Catholic Youth Ministers Lounge, I think an update is in order.

For those of you that don't know, I'm no longer in a full time youth minsiter position. At the end of February I was terminated from the position I had accepted not 6 months before. I haven't talked about it too much in public to this point for a few reasons. One, as might be expected, there was some healing that I needed first. And second, I wasn't sure if talking about the parish and individuals in question was fair to them or if I was setting myself up for some sort of trouble.

But after reading some stories around the internet, and getting into discussion with people about what youth ministry really means, I think it's time to tell my story. It's not a pretty story to say the least - I don't think I was naive about working in a parish, but even I was hopeful that things couldn't be that ugly. And when people with National LIFE TEEN tell you things like "oh yeah...we know about that place" and "you've picked about the most difficult situation possible for your first position"...well, you can imagine some of the problems.

I'm going to try and keep some names anonymous...not that means too much, as a combination of reading through some of my older posts and running some Google searches will fill in all the blanks. And I don't want it to be all down...I'm going to try and look at some of the good things and how they can be improved and carried over.

So yeah...look to this space in the upcoming few days as I'll try and update much more frequently. And please call me out on stuff...if there's something I'm missing, that if my mindset is off, I'd like to know.