By Reagan Scott
for the Register
This summer, Sara Racicot, the youth ministry coordinator at St. Joseph Parish in Lincoln, came up with a new way for high school students to stay cool while also growing in their faith.
Desiring to create a fun and casual event for the summer that would be different from the parish’s youth ministry activities during the school year, Racicot came up with the 2023 Fire n’ Ice (cream) Tour.
Racicot said that as an ice cream lover, she enjoys any chance to incorporate ice cream into her life, but she also wanted to help students practice being unashamed witnesses for their faith in public places.
“There is a safety we can feel when we are at our own parish, in our homes, et cetera, that gives us a unique freedom to practice our faith,” Racicot said. “Part of maturing in the faith and learning how to evangelize is to let go of our fear of bringing that faith out into public, and to practice feeling free to say Jesus’ name, pray in front of others, talk about faith topics and hang out with priests. I desire that freedom for our high schoolers.”
For each Fire ’n Ice event, students from St. Joseph parish, as well as students from other parishes in Lincoln, met at a different ice cream shop in Lincoln. There, they had the opportunity to socialize and enjoy their ice cream, which they ranked based on flavor, texture and the atmosphere of that event’s location.
Then Racicot and Father Louden Redinger, the assistant pastor at St. Joseph Parish, or another adult would give experience talks about a topic for that night.
“We [would] share our experience with the topic, rather than teach about the topic,” Racicot said. “So, for example, on the night we talked about suffering, we didn’t necessarily share what the Church teaches about suffering. Instead, we shared how we have journeyed to understand that teaching, embrace and unite our own suffering and how we have learned to suffer well.”
After each talk, the students had the opportunity to submit questions anonymously for discussion through the Ziplet app, which they also used to rank their ice cream experience.
The topics for the tour included summertime faith, doubt, suffering, prayer, confession and “difficult topics.” Father Redinger said they polled the students so that they could speak on topics that were relevant to them.
The topic of prayer was one that Father Redinger said led to lots of questions from the students like, “How do I pray?” “How do I know God is responding to my prayers?” “Why isn’t God responding to my prayer?” He said they were good questions, and ones he still works through, even as a priest.
“The response from students was overwhelmingly positive,” Father Redinger said. “The events created an environment of vulnerability and trust, and they had a freedom in this environment where they could ask these questions. They need that safe place to be known, seen and loved and have a place to wrestle with those tough questions.”
The locations visited were Dairy Queen, 402 Creamery, Holmes Lake (where the students played sand volleyball and enjoyed ice cream from Colby Ridge), Zesto, Cold Stone Creamery and Ivanna Cone.
Father Redinger said he thought meeting in these secular locations helped achieve Racicot’s goal of getting the students to practice living their faith out in the world.
After getting ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery at SouthPointe Pavilions, the group made its way to a courtyard in the middle of the mall, where the students had an encounter with another group of similarly aged teens spending time at the mall.
Despite some negative comments from the other teens, Father Redinger said the St. Joseph students were respectful of the fact that, in this group they had encountered, there was a curiosity to know God. The students even had the opportunity to talk with the teens afterward, leading to a positive interaction.
“I thought it was a cool witness in the middle of SouthPointe, bringing the Lord there,” he said.
The tour was well attended, with 15 to 40 students participating each week. At the end of the summer, an ice cream winner was announced with 402 Creamery having received the most votes. However, it could be argued that the students themselves were the real winners, having the desire to grow in their faith over the summer months and learning to live it in public, unashamed.
