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When pioneering Christian educator Henrietta Mears rewrote the youth ministry curriculum at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California in the 1950s, she couldn’t have predicted how the field would explode during the next 50 years. Today the Christian youth movement is packed with camps, conventions, short-term missions trips, small groups, peer to peer evangelism ministries, after-school prayer sessions, and more. Organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth Specialties, Young Life, and others have emerged as guides and innovators in leading and discipling young people. Scholarship of youth and religion has also increased dramatically: the groundbreaking 2001 National Study of Youth and Religion was one of the first to track how youth perceive and act on spiritual ideas as they grow up. In many cases, young people themselves have started their own ministries, taking up social justice causes and spurring their peers on to good works.
Short-term missions are complicated and often done poorly. But with wisdom and transparency, a medical missionary explains, they can be hugely helpful.
As an early-career educator, I was growing discouraged in the classroom. Then a small Christian college showed me a new way to teach.
Half a century ago, established churches looked askance at young men newly interested in Jesus. Let us welcome and exhort them today.
News
Rescue teams continue their search after the Guadalupe River overtook cabins at Camp Mystic, a nondenominational camp in the Hill Country.
Young people who feel anxious and conflicted about marriage and family need a positive example, not a lecture.
Wire Story
Backed by Christian groups, the bipartisan Take It Down Act aims to protect against online exploitation.
Ageism persists in majority-Asian churches. But Scripture exhorts us to transform how we speak and act toward young pastors and leaders.
Review
A symposium on Christian Smith’s book Why Religion Went Obsolete.
Review
One is relatively simple to map out. The other is much harder to capture.
Review
How Christian Smith’s concept of a “Millennial Zeitgeist” helps explain their recent retreat from faith.