“Explain the resurrection to me in two minutes without using any Church language.” This is the challenge that Sandhurst priest Fr Rob Galea sets for his staff to ensure they can easily relate to the young people they serve. Source: America Magazine.
“There’s so much church language that we use that we don’t realise that we’re using. So, speak their language as well. And that takes practice, and that takes hanging out with the kids and understanding the way they speak, the way they reason.”
Fr Galea, born and raised in Malta, is a priest of the Sandhurst Diocese in Victoria. He has amassed a following of hundreds of thousands across social media platforms and is also a popular singer and songwriter who once auditioned for X-Factor Australia.
Today, Fr Galea leads Icon Ministry, a global media and outreach apostolate that significantly expanded its reach over the pandemic years.
“We’d have 60,000 people at every Sunday Mass online,” he said. “And from there, we started creating resources for schools; we started teaching teachers online while they were in lockdown. And things started to grow and grow.”
His latest ministry initiative is an ambitious first. “We’re on Roblox, on a video gaming platform,” he says. “We’re building a church where there are 70.1 million users every single day. And what we decided was we need to preach the Gospel there.”
On the America Magazine podcast “Preach”, Fr Galea delivers a homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent. He recalls playing with his sister as a child and turning over large rocks to find an infestation of insects hidden underneath.
Fr Galea says that Jesus is like the light that dispels the bugs in our life – our sinfulness – leading us to freedom. “Yes, it is painful to lift up the rock,” he says. “Yes, it is shocking to come into the light; but there is no greater freedom than living in the light of Christ.”
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Father Rob Galea’s preaching strategies for reaching disengaged youth (America Magazine)
