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At one of our church’s weekly staff meetings the youth minister said he had a problem and needed his colleagues’ advice. In the course of teaching the confirmation class, he had asked the young people to write their own statement of faith. The problem, he said, was that one of the students didn’t believe much of anything, though he was happily involved in the confirmation process. The question our colleague posed for us was elegantly simple: “Can you be confirmed in this church if you don’t believe in God?”

Youth culture in the U.S. is being reinvented every three years, according to Robert J. McCarty. Keeping up with youth culture is like mapping territory that is constantly changing, he says.

The current cohort of American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 is lonely, spiritually hungry and intensely aware of the threat of violence. That’s the profile that emerges from a recent Gallup Youth Survey.

Are mainline churches capturing the imaginations of young people and leading them toward long-term commitments to the church? Or do they serve as revolving doors—leading one way into secularism and the other way into "hotter" forms of religiosity found in evangelicalism or non-Christian faiths? What defines a successful youth ministry?