Mission Statement:

Life Teen is an international Catholic movement that serves the Church by providing resources and faith experiences that help lead teens closer to Christ. This is accomplished through a vibrant Eucharistic spirituality and by creating opportunities for teens to grow in their faith.  At Saint Mary’s Church our Sunday Life Nights follow the Life Teen Mass because we believe everything that we do as a parish and as catholic individuals flows from the grace we receive in the sacrament of the Eucharist.  A lived faith gains its vitality from taking part in the sacraments of the Catholic Church (especially Eucharist and Confession) and by working daily at a personal spirituality rooted in prayer and the study of Holy Scripture.

Life Nights are the catechetical element of a teen’s faith formation which begins in the home with the family.  Everything we do at Saint Mary’s Life Teen is meant to support your family in its faith journey and daily struggle to live as people of God in a growingly detached, frenzied and disenchanted culture.

Life Nights follow a two-year curriculum which meets the standards for high school faith formation as laid out by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  We cover a wide variety of topics all focused on living out our Catholic Faith by spiritual formation and character education. 

In 2009-10 we will be covering the topics of Catholic Morality and Social Justice by focusing on God’s Law as laid out in the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes.  We wish to show how, though we stand convicted by the law, we are justified in Jesus Christ.  It is not what we do that makes us good or special, it is who we are.  We are God’s own creation called to live life gloriously and with joy.

"If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"   -Galatians 2 : 17-21