This article originally appeared in print journal July/August 2002.

Specialization is one of the main characteristics of both our age and some of our best-known churches. Many big congregations have specialized ministries for men, women, divorcees, abuse victims, various brands of addicts, and other population segments.

Some megachurches go even further, offering their members a menu of hundreds of specialized small groups, each with their own unique emphases and styles. And of course, there are few churches around that don’t have some kind of youth ministry. After all, youth ministry was one of the earliest forms of specialized ministry that emerged during the past two centuries…though this wasn’t always the case.

The Invention of “Youth”
Before youth ministry existed, someone had to invent something called “youth,” which wasn’t as easy as you might think. Sure there have always been young people. But “youth” is a much more recent innovation. For millennia, children and teens were treated as junior members of clan and community rather than being considered a separate group or subculture.

That began to change last century when trends like urbanization and industrialization, along with the growth of public education, gave birth to a distinct group with its own unique identity and subculture. This pace of change has speeded up in recent decades as mass marketers and purveyors of pop culture have targeted America’s 32 million teens, a group that spends $100 billion a year.

In the 19th century, Christian leaders realized that young people were falling through the cracks of their churches and began developing targeted ministries designed to bring them back in. One of the earliest efforts was England’s Young Men’s Christian Association, which provided urban youth with a positive alternative to the sins of the city. Founded in London in 1844, the YMCA had a Boston branch by 1851. One of the group’s biggest supporters was evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who also helped found the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions in 1886.

British-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was founded in 1919 and began working in Canada in 1928 and the U.S. in 1939. Today, IVCF works with more than 30,000 students on more than 600 U. S. campuses. Its Urbana Student Missions conventions, launched in 1946 and usually held every three years in Urbana, Ill., attract nearly 20,000 young people and have inspired many to pursue careers in evangelism and missions.

A Growing Ground Swell
America’s first major home-grown youth ministry was Young Life, founded in 1941 by Dallas Theological Seminary student Jim Rayburn, whose success at working with high school students led him to proclaim, “It is a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel.”

Today, Young Life’s weekly meetings in nearly 500 U.S. communities remain lively and energetic (one observer called them “controlled chaos”) and reach 80,000 high school students and 17,000 middle schoolers.

But the most influential of America’s youth ministries has been Youth for Christ International, an organization which emerged from a grassroots movement of evangelistic youth rallies held in England, Canada, and American cities during the 1930s and 1940s. In New York, the rallies were called “Word of Life.” Kansas City’s gatherings were called “Singspiration.” The name Youth for Christ was allegedly first used in Indianapolis.

Major rallies organized by various independent groups drew huge crowds to venues like Madison Square Garden and Chicago’s Soldier’s Field. Their successes, along with favorable media coverage, led to a growing demand for similar rallies around the country. In 1945, rally organizers met and formed Youth for Christ, which established an office in Chicago to coordinate the rallies and hired its first employee, a then little-known evangelist by the name of Billy Graham.

Through the 1950s, YFC organized Saturday evening city rallies and created Bible clubs, which came to be called Campus Life. Soon, there were 3,600 clubs on high school campuses throughout the country.

Though it has had a huge impact on youth ministry, YFC’s greatest impact  may be its pivotal role in training the leaders who would go on to launch and lead dozens of influential organizations such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and World Vision. As Christianity Today once put it, “It is virtually impossible to scratch the surface of any…evangelical parachurch ministry today without finding staff…personnel whose roots are embedded in the YFC movement.”

Man with a mission
Bill Bright left the business world in 1947 to study at the then-new Fuller Theological Seminary, but he grew impatient with academia and set out to fulfill the ambitious mission he believed God had given him: to reach every single human being on planet Earth with the Gospel message.

In 1951, Bright founded Campus Crusade for Christ on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. By October 1999, as CCC dedicated its new Orlando, Florida campus, the $368 million international ministry had more than 20,000 full-time staff members and more than 650,000 trained volunteers operating 68 ministries and projects in 181 countries.

The organization, which calls itself “the world’s largest evangelical organization,” long ago expanded beyond its original focus on youth and now has developed specialized ministries for athletes, politicians, business leaders, health care professionals, and the entertainment industry. Crusade also fostered projects like the JESUS film, which has been translated into 650 languages, and speaker Josh McDowell’s ministry of apologetics.

New challenges, new movements
Today, youth culture continues to evolve at a rapid rate, and youth ministers are doing everything they can to keep up. Newer organizations like Youth Specialties, which was founded by YFC alumni, hosts conferences and publishes products designed to increase the professionalism and effectiveness of youth ministry. The National Network of Youth Ministries organizes events for leaders as well as kids. Its most popular event is the annual See You at the Pole high school campus rallies, which began in Texas in 1990 and have spread around the country, involving millions of young people. And Louie Giglio’s Passion conferences and recordings seek to tap into a growing youth worship movement.

How will youth ministry change during the 21st century? In the summer 1994 edition of Youthworker, a panel of experts tried to answer that question.

George Barna said youth leaders would have to deal with encroaching technology. Tony Campolo discussed issues raised by growing racial and ethnic diversity. And popular speaker Dawson McAllister’s comments would take on a new relevance as a wave of school shootings broke out: “Because students are hurting so badly and their problems are so deep, youth workers in the 21st century will spend less time entertaining and more time healing the wounds of their students.”

And as America becomes ever more diverse and pluralistic, Christian groups operating on secular campuses are under growing pressure to conform to schools’ non-discrimination policies. An InterVarsity group at Tufts University learned this lesson in 2000 when it was placed on probation until it re-drafted its charter.

No matter how it continues to evolve, youth ministry has already had a profound impact on millions of young people. Even more, its philosophy of targeting ministry to a specific, narrowly defined niche has served as a model for many of the other specialized ministries that are so common in many of today’s churches. n