Youth

Thousands of viewers and listeners tuned in to a webcast Tuesday evening to hear Christian apologists tackle the pervasive problem of youths leaving the church.

Guests on the American Family Association broadcast, “Church Dropout: Overcoming the Youth Exodus,” agreed that young people were quitting the faith because of intellectual skepticism.

"One of the major reasons is intellectually they don't know why Christianity is true," said apologist Frank Turek, founder of Crossexamined.org, "because we haven't told them why it's true." more >>

Youth Specialties' possibly biggest fan, Tic Long, is back at the helm of the ministry and he hasn't left his humor behind.

Just months after being let go from the national ministry and trying to figure out his post-YS future, Long was called back to serve as executive director of Youth Specialties beginning this year.

"I thought my time with YS had ended but obviously God had other ideas," Long wrote in his blog. "I blogged it was going to be painful to no longer be able to say 'Hi I’m Tic from YS'. I can’t believe I get to say that again. I Love YS." more >>

More than 100 Coptic Christian teens have been arrested by security forces in Egypt in what the Christian community considers as pressure from the government to play down the recent fatal church shooting that made international headlines.

Since late last week, Egyptian State Security members have knocked on the doors of Coptic Christian families mostly around dawn and arrested Christian youths, according to Assyrian International News Agency. To date, according to local sources, the number of Coptic youths rounded up without warrants has surpassed 100 people and is growing.

A Nag Hammadi teacher, Anwar Samuel, told the news agency Free Copts that State Security came to his home at 4 a.m. in search of his nephew Mohareb, who was in Kuwait at the time. more >>

A group of students from a Seattle-area church joined XXXChurch to spread Jesus' love at the annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas this past weekend.

For the nearly two dozen people from EastLake Community Church, it was a mission trip.

While the term mission trip typically conjures up the image of vaccination shots, a foreign village, and a completely different culture from that of the missionaries, Jake Larson – an associate of XXXChurch – says there's tons of need in Sin City and other U.S. cities. more >>

Evangelism is often looked at as the red headed step child (apologies to any reading this right now) of the youth ministry world. We deal with it because we are legally required to in the by-laws of the Bible but, down deep in our hearts, we are more passionate about discipleship than evangelism.

But this is where our thinking is wrong. Evangelism and discipleship are like Nitrogen and Gylcerin, they must be blended for maximum effect. Teens who are growing in Christ will share their faith and teens who are sharing their faith in the power of the Spirit will grow in Christ.

I am convinced that if teenagers fall in love with sharing their faith they will fizzle out, but if they fall in love with Jesus they’ll always evangelize. Because of this, our first and foremost goal is to get teenagers fully surrendered to Christ. If they offer their lives as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1), I believe they will passionately share their faith out of the overflow of their love for God! more >>