What are the key issues and trends for youth workers in church settings? To find out we asked:

Scott Stevens, Director of Student Ministries LifeWay Christian Resources. A publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, Lifeway was founded in the late 1800s. Lifeway provides resources to approximately 5,600 full-time youth ministers in 45,000-plus churches.

Dave Curtiss, USA/Canada Coordinator for the Church of the Nazarene Youth ministries. Founded in 1912, Nazarene Youth Ministries serves 900 full-time youth pastors, more than 7,500 volunteer youth workers and more than 170,000 young people.

Marti Berger, Director of Christian Formation for the Evangelical Covenant Church, which serves more than 25,000 junior and senior high students.

Steve Puils, Director of Outreach Ministries for the Assemblies of God. Founded in 1914, the Assembly has more than 3,000 full-time youth workers and 6,000 volunteers serving 370,000 youth.

Here’s what our four experts told us.

YouthWorker Journal: What do you see as the key opportunities and challenges for youth ministry today?

Marti Berger: One of the key opportunities we have right now is capitalizing on where students are on the whole issue of justice ministry and humanitarian concerns. They really want to impact their world and live a life of significance. They are looking to the schools, and often to the church, for some of those ways of finding answers. They are seeing that our world is not functioning in the way they would hope it would function, and because of that, I see youth not being discouraged but rather encouraged about how they can make a difference.

Dave Curtiss: The deconstruction of the family and society is an enormous challenge, [as are] the increasing sophistication of teenagers in the area of media and music, and the devolution of religious views. This last one especially means that there are more opportunities to share you viewpoint than ever before. For instance, if people are seeking and searching Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam, that probably means they are also searching Christianity.

Students also are rejecting the monochromatic look of many churches. In other words, all white people go to this church or all black people go to that church, all Asian people go this church and Hispanic are at that one. They desire a more broad ethnic connection.

Scott Stevens: It continues to be a struggle for churches to involve students into the full life of the church. You have kids who have pretty extensive responsibilities with things they do at school, whether it is teams, clubs or other leadership things they do. Then when it gets to the church, it’s kind of like, “You’re really not quite ready to do something significant here.” So we keep all the youth of the church locked up in the teen room or down in the basement."