Tex Sample is Professor Emeritus of Church and Society Saint Paul School of Theology. He lives in Kansas City, Mo. and is the author of Powerful Persuasion: Multimedia Witness in Christian Worship (Abingdon Press, June 2005).

Steve Matthews was youth minister at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Va for more than 15 years. St. Paul’s has been one of the partner congregations in the Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Rodger Nishioka is an associate professor of Christian education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. He is the former coordinator of youth and young adult ministries for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Nishioka can talk about why many young people are absent from the pews and about what young people want church to be like.

Neil Howe is a historian and economist who writes about generational issues. He is co-author, with William Strauss, of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Vintage, 2000).  Howe and Strauss say Millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s, are optimistic, positive and engaged – they want to make a difference.

Frederick Edie, a United Methodist minister, is assistant professor of the practice of Christian education at Duke Divinity School. He also directed the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, which invites high school students to live for two weeks in an intentional Christian community at Duke.

Chris Boyatzis is a developmental psychologist who teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. He has studied religious and spiritual development in families, including how teenagers talk to their parents about religion. He’s also worked in an area he calls “God in the Bod,” looking at how young people’s spirituality affects their body image and […]

Jon Pahl is an associate professor of church history at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. He has written about young people and violence and is the author of Youth Ministry in Modern America: 1930 to the Present (Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), which examines youth ministry in four traditions: Lutheran, evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic and African-American.

Rabbi Eve Rudin is Director of the Congregational School at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. Previously, she was Director of the Department of Camp Excellence and Advancement for the Foundation for Jewish Camp, as well as the Director of the URJ Kutz Campus for Reform Jewish Teen Life and the North American Federation […]

Christian Smith is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. He was co-principal investigator for the Youth and Religion Project. He is the author, with Melinda Lundquist Denton, of a book summarizing major findings from that study called Soul Searching: The Religious and […]