A healthy church with a balanced leadership development approach will have embraced young people into the nurturing and training process. However, within the long-standing patterns of established children’s and youth work, specific thought should be given to continuity in nurturing teenagers both in their personal walk with the Lord and in developing them in their spiritual gifts and ministry as service within the whole church, not just within the youth group.
Larger churches may well be able to run their own development programmes, but for most medium and smaller fellowships it will be necessary to collaborate with other local churches, as the value of relationships built through joint youth work is enormous. Camps, youth conferences, summer teams and youth weekends augment whatever weekly youth development programmes the local church can run.
The following articles and papers were written to address some of the above matters.
Some in-house youth development programmes