Catholics can learn a thing or two from our evangelical sisters and brothers.

On a Thursday night last September, Scott Sroda found himself at Primetime, a weekly program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. Sroda, a freshman and a Catholic from Janesville, Wisconsin, tagged along with a sophomore friend from home who was also Catholic but who had been in a Crusade Bible study the year before.

"I really liked it," says Sroda, 18. He met other new students, enjoyed the speaker, and was introduced to praise and worship music, which he liked immediately.

The following Sunday the two friends went to the 6 p.m. Mass at St. Paul's University Catholic Center, where Sroda got a second dose of praise and worship songs. At the end of Mass the music leader announced that anyone who wanted to join the choir should talk with him. Sroda's friend, a guitar player, dragged Sroda up with him to find out about joining. "I never would have done that on my own," says Sroda, but because he used to sing in his parish's children's choir with his younger brother and sister, he knew that being in the choir would keep him going to Mass.

A few days later, two upperclassmen from Campus Crusade stopped by Sroda's dorm room to say hi and invite him to pizza and Bible study. He appreciated how they looked him in the eye and actually seemed interested in how he was doing. "They're very genuine-and it's nice to have friends that first week," says Sroda. When his hometown friend heard who the Bible study leader would be-his own leader from the year before, a good guy-he encouraged Sroda to go.

It turned out three other guys in Sroda's Bible study-out of six total-were also Catholic. "It surprised me," says Sroda, but he knew part of their reason for being there was probably the same as his own. That first week of college, when extracurricular possibilities seem endless, what really made a difference was the personal touch. "Their initial coming to my room and befriending me was a critical point when I could have gone either way. And that's something Catholics could learn a lot from."

Catholic wasteland

Sroda's story is not unique. Jason Simon, executive director of the Evangelical Catholic, a Catholic organization that works to develop sustainable spiritual renewal to campus ministries, parishes, and dioceses nationwide, estimates that of the 500 or so college students who attend Primetime each week at the Madison campus, as many as half-or more-were raised Catholic. "Some of these students don't feel like they've ever encountered Christ in the Catholic Church," says Simon.

While it's likely that every parent, pastor, and youth- and young-adult minister of both Christian traditions have concerns about keeping teenagers and young adults in the fold, it seems that evangelical Protestants, on average, do a better job of it than Catholics. A glance into evangelical churches and organizations provides countless examples of 15-to-35-year-olds doing everything from leading music teams and Bible studies to publishing books and planting churches.

"Some of the most vibrant movement [in the evangelical world] is happening among young people," says Shane Claiborne, a 34-year-old Christian author and activist whom CNN dubbed one of "the next evangelicals."

By comparison, the Catholic landscape looks a bit bleak. "Being a Catholic teenager does not portend solid engagement in religious practices in the emerging adult years," writes Christian Smith in Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford). The book, released in September 2009, presents a new set of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) that was collected from 18- to 23-year-olds who had previously been surveyed by NSYR as 13- to 18-year-olds.

Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, points out that nearly 20 percent more young adult evangelical Protestants report strong affiliations with a religious tradition than do their Catholic counterparts, and young adults who leave the Catholic Church tend not to join other churches, as erstwhile young adult evangelicals do.

Young adult Catholics in the study also reported less frequency than the evangelicals in the following categories: prayer, observing a weekly day of rest, participating in a religious music group or choir, sharing their own religious faith with someone not of faith, and attending religious education classes.

The "E" word

So what can Catholics who care about youth and young adults do? Three strategies that have proven successful for evangelicals-although by no means their sole domain-may be the best place for Catholics to start, or to revisit: building relationships, creating a culture of conversion and discipleship, and teaching young people how to tell their faith stories.

First, though, it's no secret that the word evangelical can be a turnoff for some Catholics. Simon recalls how a Catholic campus ministry staff member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill admitted she was initially hesitant about working with the Evangelical Catholic because, she said, "I'm afraid you're trying to get people to be so bold in their faith that they turn into the Pit Preacher"-a fire-and-brimstone extremist who preached for decades in a UNC courtyard where students gather.

"Too often the word evangelical implies close-minded, in-your-face fundamentalism and coercion," says Simon. "It just means that we're about the Good News. It should really be a unifying word."

A distinctively Catholic understanding of the word, Simon suggests, can be found in Pope Benedict's 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love): "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction."

One other crucial point expressed by every source for this story: The primary factor in helping young people develop a vibrant faith life is for parents to do the same.

Long-term relationships

For Brian Katauskas, a high school youth minister at Northland, A Church Distributed, a nondenominational congregation of 12,000 that worships at sites throughout Central Florida and online, relationship is the key element of his ministry. "You can't have influence without relationship," he says.

Katauskas, 31, grew up in Northland and was especially influenced by his youth minister, Vernon Rainwater. Katauskas interned in Northland's youth ministry program for two and a half years during high school and college and worked closely with Rainwater.

"The things I remember Vernon teaching me were themes in his life, not just talks he gave . . . he taught me what it means to be a man after God's heart, how I should treat girls, how there are two types of people: One who walks into a room and says, ‘Here I am,' and the other, who walks in and says, ‘There you are.'"