Mark Yaconelli is co-founder and former director of the Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He has worked to develop a contemplative approach to youth ministry and can talk about adolescent spiritual development, youth ministry practices within mainline churches and teenagers’ responses to ancient disciplines such as silence and solitude, as […]

Richard Flory is a sociologist and executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He studies religious change, the spiritual practices of young adults and religion in Los Angeles. He is the author of Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism and  The Rise of […]

Fred Lynch, a youth evangelist, is the former youth minister at City on a Hill, a nondenominational congregation in Albuquerque, N.M., and founder of UrbNet, the Urban Youth Workers Network.

The Godfrey Mullen works on the Youth Liturgical Leadership Program offered by the Office of Vocational Development at the St. Meinrad School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Ind. The program works with high school and college students and sponsors “One Bread One Cup” conferences to bring Catholic teenagers to a deeper understanding of the liturgy.

Stephen Warner is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was co-director of The Youth & Religion Project, funded by the Lilly Endowment. The first phase of that project involved talking to college students of different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds about their experiences with their religions. A second phase involved […]

Roland D. Martinson is a professor of children, youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn. He has written books on parenting and youth ministry and has been involved with the Faith Factors project, a longitudinal study of the factors that lead young people who are Lutheran and Baptist to remain involved […]

Jeffrey Kaster is an adjunct professor of theology and directs the Youth in Theology and Ministry Program at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn. – a program that many of the teenagers who attend it call “God camp.” Students come each summer to learn more about theology and the Catholic faith. Kaster also has written […]

Rhys H. Williams is a professor and chair of the sociology department at Loyola University Chicago. He has done research on immigrant college students, including their attitudes toward religion and spirituality. He was also co-director of the Youth and Religion Project, funded by the Lilly Endowment, which did field work in the Chicago area to […]

Paul Hill, formerly a Lutheran parish pastor, was director of the Center for Youth Ministries at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa and is now executive director of Vibrant Faith Ministries in Minneapolis He has been a church camp director and helped plan national events for Lutheran youth, and specializes in ministry with teenage boys.