“DO YOU WANT to go on a walk?” 

I was 16, on a youth group trip near Los Angeles. The specifics of why our Lincoln, Neb., youth group went to a Christian camp halfway across the country have blurred over the intervening years. But I remember when a girl about my age asked if we could go on a walk. I didn’t know her well, but she clearly had something she needed to get off her chest and must have figured my ears were as good as anyone’s.

We walked a trail on the outskirts of the camp, cheap buildings sprinkled across the desert, pockmarked with firepits, a basketball court, and a swimming pool with a handwritten “T-shirts must be worn at all times” sign duct-taped near the entrance. As we walked, she unloaded her raw feelings about youth group: In brief, where exactly did all these hypocrites get off?

We were already old enough to have seen plenty of youth ministers fall prey to scandal. And as for the youth group kids, were we really any better off than our non-youth group peers? Didn’t we have the same social hierarchies, and all the bullies, outcasts, and smutty gossip that comes along with them? The girl was having a crisis of faith, but it wasn’t about whether she believed Christianity was true; she doubted if anyone else really believed it. Gesturing dramatically to the entirety of our ramshackle camp she cried, “What’s the point of any of this?”

That question stuck with me through the rest of my time in the youth group world, which continued after I graduated through volunteer positions, internships and, eventually, something like an actual job. Throughout all that time, I had the sneaking suspicion that my Walk Friend had the whole thing dead to rights. Sure, I saw ugly stories in the youth group trenches, but the true source of tension was larger, more systemic. What was the point of any of this?

Something had to be done

“IF YOU TRACE youth group history, most of these groups are about social control,” says Liz Moore, the assistant director for the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. “They’re deeply connected to how you live in your body. And I would say that that as a strategy did not pay off for young people in the long run.”

The history of church youth groups like mine—white, evangelical, relatively affluent—starts with a heady stew of Freudian psychology and Darwinian biology. Before the 1900s, little consideration was given to an intermediary period between childhood and adulthood. But in 1904, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall published Adolescence, which posited that the upheaval of our teen years was a manifestation of human evolution from primate to person.

Youth group wasn’t all fun and games.

Many churches in the U.S. watched the development of this social category with great interest. Decades earlier, the Industrial Revolution had sent kids streaming into the pre-child labor law cities, looking for work. Christian organizations like the YMCA took it upon themselves to see to these kids’ academic and moral education. Now, here was a whole new category of person needing similar guidance. And given teenagers’ budding reputation for turmoil, angst, and transgression, they needed it fast. Something had to be done.

One answer came in the form of youth-oriented Christian ministries like Youth for Christ and Young Life, which got their start as evangelism outfits but served as a proof of concept for churches sensing opportunity among the adolescent demographic. While most churches were still sitting their congregations down in pews and then talking at them, youth ministries were getting innovative: casual settings, Bible quizzes and, above all, relationships. The Youth for Christ model worked—a 1945 rally in Chicago netted more than 70,000 attendees—and churches wanted in on it, pulling pages from those playbooks for their own copycat programs. Several decades later, it wasn’t unusual for a church to employ a youth pastor—perhaps a former Young Life or Youth for Christ staffer—to organize events with food, music, and games to draw in local teenagers.

“We used an attractional model in the ’80s and ’90s: ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Moore says. But the problem with setting attraction as the goal is that it’s always just out of reach. You can always be more attractive. “So, let’s add the fog machines and put a bowling alley in the basement,” Moore says.

What Moore calls the “attractional model” started to mutate into spectacle or, more cynically, a Sunday morning entertainment arms race. Which youth group could have the coolest band? The craziest games? The most exotic summer camp? It was never about who was forming the healthiest relationships with teenagers. At worst, it became about which youth pastor could shove the most marshmallows in his mouth.

The ostensible motive here—to evangelize and disciple teenagers—was benign enough, but there were other reasons churches wanted to invest in youth ministry: more teenagers meant more tithing families. Plus, it was an investment in the future. If adolescence was a time of rebellion, it stood to reason that a church that helped teens navigate that era could rely on their loyalty on the other side. It was a sound calculation. The truth ended up being more complicated.

Sure, I saw ugly stories in the youth group trenches, but the true source of tension was larger, more systemic. What was the point of any of this?

Not all fun and games

I NOW KNOW that my teenage years were Peak Youth Group Era, a time when churches and ministries—at least, the ones that could afford it—were dumping enormous amounts of time and resources into a self-sustaining youth group universe.

Tom Bergler, professor of Christian thought and practice at Huntington University, is firm in his convictions that youth ministry is good. But after analyzing youth ministry across African American, evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic traditions for his book The Juvenilization of American Christianity, he is critical of the way many youth groups prioritized entertainment—the fog machines and bowling alleys—over spiritual formation. “We can’t just entertain kids and expect that to be a lasting faith,” he told me.

But as Caroline Ely points out, youth group wasn’t all fun and games. Though she no longer goes to church, as co-host of the podcast Good Christian Fun she reflects on her past involvement with evangelical-ish culture, including youth group, with a mix of affection, critique, and humor.

She appreciates the “good intentions” and “beauty” of “giving kids spaces that were spiritually informed, but fun,” she says. “The downside is there were things that were way too serious, way too heavy; creating like this martyrdom idea within young people that they may have to literally die for their faith.”

Ely is referring to a movement that sprung up after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Co., which ultimately left a teacher and 13 students dead, including 17-year-old Cassie Bernall. In the confused aftermath of the shootings, a story spread that the teenage gunmen had asked Bernall if she believed in God—and pulled the trigger when she said yes.

Later investigations would find that this did not happen, but the story proved irresistible. She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall spent five weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, leveling the question at a generation of Christian teenagers: What will you do when gunmen ask you if you believe in God? More pressing questions about how two teenage boys got four guns—or whether we could prevent the future killings of teenagers—were left unasked.

More pressing questions about how two teenage boys got four guns were left unasked.

And possible martyrdom was far from the only weighty issue youth groups were impressing upon devoted teenagers. For many, purity culture—which Ely sums up as “a Byzantine set of rules for dating and sex at a time when you really are hungry for how to do it correctly”—cast the longest youth group shadow. In the common telling, following these rules would invariably result in a happy, sexually robust marriage, while breaking them invariably led to shame, guilt, unwanted pregnancy, and life-ruining disease. Having these rules imprinted during formative years can take a toll. Ely says she looks back on her purity culture-immersed youth as wasted time: “There was so much time I spent really shaming and investigating myself for things that in hindsight were totally normal and could have been normalized.”

Emily Maynard, a therapist in California who focuses on religious trauma, says Ely’s experience is a common one. The purity culture program reduced human experiences of sexuality to one extremely specific blueprint.

“Anytime we ignore the breadth of human diversity, I think we’re missing out on a different idea of God as creating more diversity and wonder and learning and difference in the world,” said Maynard. “Everyone is supposed to believe exactly what a white middle-class teenager in Middle America believed in 1988? I don’t know. Humans are a little more complex and interesting than that.”

Deficit-based thinking

THIS IS, PERHAPS, a microcosm of youth group’s more systemic problems: narrow agendas for the social and spiritual development of teenagers that fail to account for the vast array of human experience.

Angellica Sweat, who works with Moore at the Institute for Youth Ministry as program coordinator, notes that these “heavily programmatic” models of youth group were “less flexible to adapt to the needs of young people” and the questions that they might have about God. “We were really adapting to the needs of adults and what adults wanted young people to know,” she says.

Thus, adult anxieties were projected onto teenagers. And these ideas—that teens should face school shootings like first-century martyrs or treat their bodies like fragile sticks of dynamite—were reinforced with threats of shame and alienation.

As it turns out, the white evangelical youth group world had no monopoly on treating teenagers as problems to be managed. Almeda Wright, a practical theologian at Yale Divinity School who studies African American adolescent spirituality, observes in the Journal of Youth and Theology that deficit-based thinking about youth—the assumption that teenagers are broken, wayward, or spiritually incomplete, and need adults to fix them—has pervaded youth ministries across different traditions. But the specific anxieties adults paste onto young people vary considerably by race and class.

Adult anxieties were projected onto teenagers.

Wright points to educator and cultural theorist Henry Giroux, who notes that white and suburban teenagers like me were often seen as innocents who needed protecting, while teenagers from minority and urban communities were often seen as dangerous “thugs.” And as Wright observes, youth internalize these adult anxieties: “I just hope that they realize that life’s not all about gangs and drugs and being ghetto and stuff like that,” one young woman told Wright in describing her peers. Wright notes that this young woman “does not focus on a lack of programs, resources, or opportunities for youth in her community,” but instead parrots popular narratives about “keeping youth out of destructive communities (gangs) and off drugs.” My white evangelical youth leaders never thought to address the easy gun access after Columbine; if this young woman went to youth group, I suspect her leaders weren’t addressing structural issues their teenagers were actually facing either.

The solution, according to Wright, is to stop assuming youth are broken and instead “push for a theology that embraces the already-right now qualities of adolescents and sees them as full partners with God and in the community of faith-youth relationship.”

Research from the Fuller Youth Institute shows the promise of this approach when applied to youth ministry. In a study of 12 ethnically diverse churches—African American, Latino, Asian American, and multiethnic—youth weren’t primarily a demographic to be retained or a problem to be solved; they were, in many cases, the bridge-builders holding multigenerational, multilingual congregations together. Many of these churches affirmed young people’s spiritual gifts, entrusting them with leadership roles—and in one case, keys to the building. The churches that seemed to get it right, across every tradition studied, were the ones that managed to resist deficit-based thinking and instead sat with young people in their actual lives, asked what they were dealing with, and said, in one form or another: You don’t have to do it alone.

Listen…

IF WE ABANDON the entertainment-heavy “attraction” model of youth group and stop treating youth as problems, what’s left? Moore advocates a return to relationship-forward ministry, one that sidelines programs in favor of solidarity with the teenagers themselves. She envisions ministries where leaders tell teens: “I want to sit beside you in how uncomfortable and grief-ridden the world is and say that I am with you and the Lord is with you. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do, but I know we’re supposed to do it together.”

For all the resources lavished on youth groups like mine in the ’90s and ’00s, the lack of this approach was a missed opportunity. But churches may be on the verge of another chance.

A 2025 Barna study found that for the first time in decades, church attendance was growing instead of shrinking—a trend largely driven by millennials and Gen Z. Moreover, the young people who are returning to church are looking for relational connection, not just programs. Many churches will need to rethink their approach if they want to make the most of this unexpected uptick.

Moore relates the story of a youth pastor she met in Raleigh, N.C., whose heart was broken by the gun violence teenagers face in schools. He knew the kids in the youth group were living in fear of a school shooting but didn’t know what he could do to help. So, according to Moore, he did the only thing he could do: listen to them.

“It turns out what they needed to know was that the adults in the congregation were also grieving this and were also afraid every day that kids went to school,” Moore says. That listening campaign led to real civic action, including a mass letter-writing campaign.

“Any caring adult—youth pastor, volunteer, lead pastor—can sit with young people in the mess and say: ‘I am with you in it, and I believe that a better world is possible. Let’s try,’” says Moore.

Another chance

YEARS AFTER MY youth group involvement had ended, I made a return visit to the old church, along with a friend who also used to go there. It wasn’t particularly easy for either of us—old churches come with a lot of baggage, even in the best of circumstances. We got to the Sunday morning service late and tried to sneak in the back, but my friend stopped cold as soon as the door opened and we were hit by a wave of worship music and lights.“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do this.”

So we just walked around. It was a megachurch, so there was plenty of walking available. The memories that hit us were not, by any stretch, all bad. There was the kitchen where we’d prepared Thanksgiving meals for homeless people. There was the closet where a girl kissed me mid-prayer for “Africa.” There was the old sanctuary where I’d “accepted Jesus into my heart” for the fifth or sixth time.

I remembered my Walk Friend from California, the one who read the whole thing for filth. I still don’t think she was wrong. But I think I have an answer for her now that I didn’t then. “What’s the point of all this?” You are.