Kyle Hoffsmith came of age in what might be one of the world’s most effective youth groups—by the time he and his two brothers hit college, they all wanted to be pastors or missionaries, even though neither of their parents was in full-time vocational ministry.
But none of them wanted to be a youth pastor.
“When I was in college, I heard Tim Keller recommend going to a small church and pastoring people for a long time, which is what he did,” Hoffsmith said. “He said to preach a ton of sermons, do it all, and then see what God tells you to do—either to stay there or leave. So I was hoping to go that route.”
That’s a pretty good reason. Another is that being a youth pastor is more difficult than it used to be. Gen Z is notoriously sad, socially anxious, and overscheduled. The youth ministry of the 1990s—heavy on games, pizza, and lock-ins—often doesn’t draw like it did back then. Relying on those activities now seems a little silly.
That’s especially true in the Reformed movement, which values serious biblical engagement, and where some have argued that youth ministry is best left to parents.
Unsurprisingly, these changes have led to a shortage of youth pastors. Of the 230 open positions posted on TGC’s job board, 46 involve working with middle or high schoolers—more than any other category except associate pastor.
“I get a text at least once a week from a church looking for a youth pastor,” said TGC’s vice president for operations, Zach Cochran, who spent most of the last 26 years working with youth and youth pastors. “They just keep coming.”
“There’s way more demand for youth pastors than folks who want to do it,” agreed Sam Bierig, dean of Spurgeon College at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “I get a lot of calls and text messages from churches looking for one. But students aren’t beating down my door asking for a youth ministry position.”
Most of them are more like Hoffsmith, who specified he wasn’t interested in youth ministry when he asked people to pray with him about job opportunities.
“Of course, God opened up the door for me to be a youth intern at a church,” he said. “That turned into a full-time youth pastor job.”
Hoffsmith’s been working with youth, under one title or another, for 13 years now. Over time, a lot of his friends stepped from youth pastor to senior pastor, executive pastor, or church planter. During COVID-19, he wanted to quit too.
“And then I made a conscious decision,” he said. “I decided to give everything to this job, as if I was a senior pastor.”
These days, Hoffsmith spends a serious amount of time studying the Bible and preparing his midweek lessons. He’s built good relationships with parents. More kids are coming to his midweek gatherings and to his growing number of Bible studies. And when he asked the high schoolers a few years ago if they wanted to read through J. I. Packer’s Concise Theology, 42 signed up.
“It’s been the best six years of my life,” he said. “We’re seeing some pretty cool fruit.”
Back in Time
“Modern youth ministry began as an evangelistic tool, not a discipleship tool,” Cochran said.
He pointed to Jim Rayburn’s Young Life (YL) and Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ (YFC). Both began in the 1940s, and although the means were different (small groups in homes and massive rallies in stadiums), the goal of saving souls was the same. Both groups were wildly popular, attracting thousands and rapidly expanding across the globe.
The youth ministry of the 1990s—heavy on games, pizza, and lock-ins—often doesn’t draw like it did back then.
By the ’70s, churches were recognizing this success and beginning to hire their own youth ministers—sometimes former YFC or YL leaders—to replicate those strategies and help them share the gospel with young people. After a while, they began incorporating some of the engaging, event-based strategies of the seeker-sensitive movement.
The timing was perfect.
“From 1990 to 2010, you could snap your fingers and get 100 students together,” Cochran said. These prescreen teens—who often went to the same school, could drive, and had spending money from summer jobs—were eager to get out of the house and be together. Youth sports hadn’t grown to swallow all evenings and weekends. And parents in a mostly Christian America were thrilled their kids were hanging out with Christian friends.
“Youth ministry was the cool and fun version of church,” said Adam Griffin, who was a youth pastor, public high school teacher, and YL leader before becoming a senior pastor at Eastside Community Church in Dallas. “Churches sold it like that—‘Youth group is the highlight of your week!’ ‘Camp is the best week of your life!’”
By extension, being a youth pastor looked like the best job in the world. You got paid to do all the fun stuff—eat junk food, play hilarious games, and hang out with the cool kids.
But there was a problem: “We were not preparing kids to swim upstream in a culture that was going to hate them for following Jesus,” Griffin said. Over the past 25 years, as Christianity became less fun and cool, 40 million Americans dechurched and secularized. Many church kids walked out with them.
Discipleship
Alarmed, Reformed leaders pushed back against many seeker-sensitive strategies. They placed campus ministries under the authority of local churches, emphasized the responsibility of parents to disciple their children, and leaned into expositional preaching. They encouraged youth pastors to stay in their positions for the long haul and began producing resources to help.
And in many ways, youth ministry improved.
“Most of the folks I know who have strong student ministries are Word-centric and gospel-centered,” Bierig said.
One is Hayden Holmes, pastor of families and students at Sojourn Church J-Town in Louisville, Kentucky.
“I was raised in a classic Southern Baptist Oklahoma church, where they taught the Bible and believed the gospel,” he said. “It was heavy on big, high-energy events to get a bunch of people in the door and share the gospel with them. The thrust of discipleship was, ‘Invite your friends to church and tell other people about Jesus.’ I loved those things, but there wasn’t as much on formative discipleship or walking through books of the Bible.”
He ran into Reformed theology during an internship at Henderson Hills Baptist Church.
“The first conference I was sent to was a Simeon Trust workshop,” he said. “It just blew my mind. I left thinking, Why would I not walk through books of the Bible and teach what it says?”
He still does that, teaching through books of the Bible each fall and doctrine or theology (say, the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles Creed) in the spring. He’s not drawing crowds of hundreds. But around 60 to 70 kids show up to hear him on any given Wednesday evening.
“They’re responding to it—they want it,” he said. “We just got back from camp, and Dr. Hershael York, who was one of my professors at Southern, was our camp pastor for the week. He’s in his mid-60s, and I was a little nervous—how were our kids going to respond to him?”
All week long, York gave sermons that “could’ve been preached on a Sunday morning somewhere,” Holmes said. “He’s just getting up there, teaching the Bible in his own skin, being normal him.”
At the end of the week, the teens filled out evaluations.
“They were 100 percent like, ‘Dr. York is amazing. We love him,’” Holmes said.
But none of this means his job, or any other youth pastor’s, is easier than it used to be.
Smaller and Harder: The Students
“I used to host a podcast where I had more than 100 conversations about teaching the Bible to students,” said Hoffsmith, who now hosts a different podcast (and has written a book) on youth ministry. “And the best line, out of those hours of conversations, was when a real-life youth pastor said, ‘The reason it’s hard to teach middle school students the Bible is because it’s hard to teach middle school students the Bible.’”
This has always been true. But over the last 25 years, it’s gotten noticeably harder.
“That’s because the context of a teenager is harder today,” Hoffsmith said.
He doesn’t mean harder like having to go to war or camp alone in the woods with only a hatchet. Gen Z is easily the wealthiest, most educated, physically safest, and most technologically advanced generation in history.
Ironically, this prosperity has made daily life more challenging for them. They wrestle with porn addictions, overdependence on AI, and hypersensitivity to mental health issues.
Another problem is that “kids don’t know how to talk to each other,” Hoffsmith said. “They can talk and text while playing video games, but not in real life.”
They even date that way, he said. It’s harder for him to spot the couples because they’re not talking to each other in person.
Socially anxious students are a critical problem for youth groups; these gatherings draw together kids who don’t go to school together. Especially since the pandemic, many parents have chosen private schools, co-ops, or homeschooling.
Socially anxious students are a critical problem for youth groups.
“Now everybody shows up to youth ministry as strangers, unless they grew up together in that church,” Cochran said. “The biggest key to youth ministry right now is relational vibrancy among the kids. You have to foster it.”
The best way to do this is in-house, raising kids who’ve seen each other every week since they were in the church nursery.
But Hoffsmith is working on another way.
“There’s red tape to get into the schools,” Hoffsmith said. “So I find coffee shops near high schools and do Bible studies there either before or after school.”
These are modest Bible studies—by the time the kids get their coffee and gather, there’s time for about six minutes of exposition on a Psalm and prayer for their school. But the fruit has been encouraging enough for him to keep pressing in. Sometimes it’s a friend casually joining the group or an adult who overhears the discussion and offers encouragement. Sometimes it’s the great conversations they have in the three-minute church van ride as he drives them over to school for the day.
“We’ve seen God answer prayers,” Hoffsmith said. “One kid we prayed for got saved at youth group.”
This year, he held two Bible studies near public schools, one near a technical school, and one in a high school through Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He’s got students leading another at the Christian school and is planning to start another for homeschoolers.
At this point, more kids come to the Bible studies than to the midweek meeting. So next year, he’s planning to put the studies all on the same day, hoping to catapult those kids into the weekly evening gathering.
“Already, if they’re willing to come to the school Bible study, they’re slightly more likely to come to the midweek group,” he said.
Smaller and Harder: The Parents
“Parenting has shifted,” Griffin said. “It’s not just what this generation is experiencing, and it’s not just technology. We get these generational pendulum swings from cultural ideas that our parents had.”
Unlike earlier generations, today’s parents are more likely to bring their children to counseling, to be in a blended family, and to value a close emotional relationship with their kids.
“Most parents would admit that they idolize their kids, or at least components of their kids’ lives,” Hoffsmith said.
“The dark side has been undisciplined children or undiscipled children, because parents have been too afraid to tell them hard things or to let them face something difficult,” Griffin said. “The good thing is there’s a safer relationship between parents and kids to talk about hard things.”
Another good thing has been parental willingness to talk with youth pastors about their kids.
“Parents are always like, ‘What are we doing wrong?’” Holmes said. “I’m like, ‘You’re like the sixth parent I’ve talked to today about this. Your kids hit puberty, their hormones go crazy, you guys are fighting. You’re also very normal.’”
A few years ago, Hoffsmith decided to capitalize on this.
“We started these parent connect meetings,” he said. “They’re like parent-teacher conferences, but with the youth ministry staff.”
Hoffsmith starts those meetings by asking the parents how he can pray for their child.
“Jesus said, ‘Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,’” he said. “Based on the prayer request, I can gauge the parent and child and know where to go with the conversation.”
Like a doctor’s office, Hoffsmith and his staff keep notes so they can remember and check in at the next meeting. They try to check in annually, but if something crops up, it’s easy to ask for a meeting midyear.
“I could tell you dozens of stories of how these parent connect meetings have bled into real ministry with the kids,” he said. “If I meet with a parent in the fall, and they say, ‘Hey, I think my kid is struggling,’ then I can keep an eye on it. Then, if it turns out a child is lying or struggling with her sexuality, I already have it on my radar. I already have a relationship with the parents. They trust me, and now we can do triage together.”
Like the smaller Bible studies, one-on-one meetings take time—a lot more time than one big gathering of adults each fall to explain the curriculum or where you’re going on a mission trip.
But they were so helpful with the high school parents that Hoffsmith asked his middle-school staff to start doing them, then rolled them out for all levels of kids’ ministry.
“Parents need help,” he said. “Parents are the ones who are ultimately responsible for their children. They need to know what a youth pastor sees in their kid, and a youth pastor needs to know what the parent sees.”
Sometimes these meetings are hard. But they’re always rich.
“If I ever feel like, Why am I even doing this job? then I’ll just schedule a couple of these parent connect meetings,” Hoffsmith said. “It gives me the opportunity to talk with parents about things they wouldn’t normally talk about. I feel like we’re reaching whole families, and that fuels me up to get back at it. It’s taken years to build this, but it’s the best.”
Church Connection
Hoffsmith’s first goal in youth ministry is to teach students the Bible. His second is to connect them to the church. He encourages kids to go to services with their parents, sing with older saints, and find ways to serve.
He’s finding that the more he asks of them, the better.
“I think boredom with the church is a big thing,” he said. “If we give kids cookie-cutter answers, we should expect them to walk away. But if we raise the bar, I’ve seen the opposite happen.”
In 2020, over Zoom, Hoffsmith started reading theological books with his youth group kids.
“I invited kids who would actually read a book,” he said. That was the seed of a different kind of culture, and it kept growing. Each year, more kids signed up. After COVID-19, he began meeting with them in person. Then he began connecting them with older people in the church.
Hoffsmith’s first goal in youth ministry is to teach students the Bible. His second is to connect them to the church.
“Every week they read on their own, then they meet with an adult at church between Sunday school and church,” he said. “The meetings are purposely only 12 to 20 minutes long—this is not an hour-long discussion at Panera. It’s enough time to discuss the reading and get the kids some time with adults who are not their parents.”
Two years ago, he used Packer’s Concise Theology. Last year the groups worked through Hope for All the Earth: Understanding the Story of the Old Testament by Southern Seminary professor Mitchell Chase. This coming year, he’s assigning The End in Mind by Ian Carmichael and Marty Sweeney.
This isn’t the right ministry for every teen—or for every adult. But for those who sign up, this practice does double duty, building theological literacy and intergenerational connections.
“I had to lay the groundwork for this for years,” Hoffsmith said. “But it has turned into dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of kids.”
Youth Pastors These Days
The reputation of youth pastors can still suffer from the goldfish-swallowing, underground-church-playing, all-night-lock-ins ’90s. When a family member learned Holmes was doing youth ministry, he asked, “Does that mean you take kids to the batting cages?”
But it’s also expanded, naturally, into family ministry. Over the past eight years, Hoffsmith has been promoted from pastor of high school ministry to pastor of all student ministry to pastor of family ministry. On the TGC job board, nearly a quarter of the youth ministry work is housed inside larger family, NextGen, or discipleship job descriptions.
This shift allows for more responsibility, better pay, and a longer tenure.
“I really started seeing fruit at the five-year mark,” Hoffsmith said. “If God would call me to something else, I’ll be obedient. But at this point, I’m so infiltrated into the church life and into the teenagers’ lives and into the parents’ lives that now I can go further faster.”
His ministry effectiveness is an argument for longevity, though he’ll tell you he’s not dogmatic about it.
“I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with looking at youth ministry as a stepping stone, because you can learn a lot by working with youth,” he said.
Holmes agrees.
“Done well, youth ministry is the best possible training ground,” he said. “In so many situations, adults revert back to their middle school selves. They might have some extra veneers on the front, but when you strip it down and watch people respond emotionally, it’s like, Oh, I dealt with the same issue at camp last year with two seventh graders.”
Here the advantage goes to the middle schoolers, who are more malleable than their parents.
“I want to hit the cement while it’s wet,” Hoffsmith said. “My goal is that my students will learn to follow Jesus now, and learn habits that will serve them for the next seven decades. I’m actually aiming for them to teach their grandkids to follow Jesus.”
Advice for Churches
When churches call Bierig, looking for a youth pastor, he warns them it’s a difficult position to fill. He suggests reframing it as an associate pastor responsibility. He tells them to look for someone from their own congregation they can raise up.
If all that fails, he advises them to keep their program going with parent volunteers if they have to.
“An object in motion stays in motion,” he said.
In general, youth ministry today is healthier than it was in the halcyon days of the 1990s, he said. “Neither the pastor nor the kid are confused about why they’re there. If the students take their face out of the phone long enough to say, ‘My life is terrible,’ you can help them with that. You have answers for that.”
That’s why Bierig is bullish on student ministry.
“I’m incredibly buoyant about this,” he said. “The Lord is still moving his kingdom. I’m very excited about where the future of student ministry is going.”
