Can you call or e-mail the people you want to talk to, meet them sometime/somewhere else (after church) or call the youth group leader and see if they can move youth group to a slightly later (1/2 hour) time this week so you could get to some of it? You could volunteer to call most of the members to tell them and see if it would be okay with them?

Most schoolwork is BS because it's "practice". Just going through the motions primes you to being able to go through the correct motions quicker and easier. You know how you got arithmetic questions wrong even after you learned to do them but the more of them you did the more accurate you got doing them? Reading, researching, and writing stuff is like that. The only way to get better at writing is to write so they make you write; what you say isn't all that important, can be "formula" stuff as long as you get the practice. Throw in a new word every now and then and look up a word in your reading and your vocabulary grows :-)