Dr. Chanon Ross says they’ll stay if we just tell them why they should. Dr. Ross, who’s a youth ministry expert at Princeton Seminary, says most churches do a poor job articulating why the church matters to young people and, as a result, we see very few college age – 20′somethings in church. In this [...]

This may be the greatest thing churches can do for young people today: help them solve the dilemma of busyness. Youth for Christ VP and chief ministry office Dave Rahn says young people jump from one thing to another so quickly that a churche’s most effective ministry may be to help them find a place [...]

Ordained Methodist, PhD candidate, and USA Messy Church coordinator Andrew Holmes ponders the role of ‘fun’ when it comes to Christian worship – and at the end of the day he’s in favor of it. Holmes, who cites numerous Scripture texts suggesting the playfulness of God, is also writing his doctoral dissertation (St. John’s, Durham [...]

We don’t grow in isolation. This is the conviction of John Brown University Youth Ministry professor Jason Lanker, who believes deeply in mentoring, specifically ‘natural mentoring.’ This is the kind of self-selecting match-ups that include shared emotional bonds hand in hand with shared activities. In this interview, Jason tells us why adults and children need [...]

Celebrating juvenile things as if they were adult things. It’s a problem that plagues contemporary society, says professor Tom Bergler, whose new book, ‘The Juvenilization of American Christianity‘ chronicles our modern propensity to extend adolescence as long as possible – which is having detrimental affects on the Church. In this interview Dr. Bergler tells us [...]

Deacon Earl Randall has one part of the Great Commission down pat: Go! Earl, a youth leader at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in New Orleans, LA, is joined by his wife as they reach out to the impoverished community around them. In this interview, Earl tells us how his ministry has started taking on [...]

How do you get families who don’t come to church, to come to church? Introduce them to Messy Church! After a listening campaign involving young families around Lucy Moore’s church, volunteers crafted a new way to do church that’s be welcoming, accessible, and inclusive of families who don’t regularly attend church services. The basic structure, [...]

Rock bands and pizza parties only go so far – what’s getting traction for one youth leader is the formation of a safe community where teens can leave the competitiveness and cliqueiness of their worlds behind. Jean-Daniel Cathell-Williams, a Cooperative Baptist youth minister and student at Yale Divinity School, says our church communities need to [...]

The dust is beginning to settle from the failed experiment behind youth/adult worship segregation in many U.S. churches – and what’s left? Old fashioned approaches like mentoring, that youth minister Jaimie White is happy to recover. White, and her youngsters at Mt. Olympus Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, are finding that mentoring is [...]

“Certainly not MY sermon!” – Yep, Princeton Seminary PhD candidate Stephen Cady says he was just as shocked to discover this – and other things – about the spirituality of young people. When Stephen embarked on his research – to discover where high school aged young adults find God in worship – he never expected [...]

Creating safe space for the ‘religiously-disconnected-but-still-interested’ young adult is a passion for David Zahl, whose media initiative, Mockingbird, is finding a steadily growing audience. Mockingbird (found at mbird.com) seeks to connect Christianity with everyday life. It’s a publishing venture that majors in blog posts, short books, and live conferences. In this interview David tells us [...]

It’s a lament often heard in churches: where are all the kids? And Princeton Seminary‘s Kenda Creasy Dean says we often not need look further than parents. An abundance of research points to the direct link between religiously active adults and religiously active children – so the best place to start – is with parents. In [...]