Most youth ministry books tell you what a thriving youth group should look like.
This one shares what actually worked from forty-seven years of doing it.
Alan J. Kobs has spent nearly five decades working in Christian education and youth ministry in local churches, across denominational clusters, through Group Publishing workshops, and in seminary. What he learned cannot be found in a textbook. Much of it, as he will tell you plainly, is not taught in seminary at all.
Growing a Youth Group is the book he wished he had at the beginning.
It is a field-tested collection of approaches, experiences, and practical ideas drawn from a lifetime of youth ministry from recruiting and training adult volunteers to building a youth leadership team that actually leads, from planning balanced programming to creating the kind of relationships with teenagers that leave a lasting mark on their lives and faith.
Every church is different. Every youth group brings its own personality, energy, and temperament. What Alan offers here is not a formula, it is a lifetime of honest reflection on what tended to work, what did not, and why. Readers will find themselves drawing from these pages in ways that fit their own unique ministry context.
At the heart of this book is a conviction that has shaped everything Alan has done: young people can own their own program. They can lead, make decisions, serve, pray, fundraise, and reach out, when the adults around them believe in them and build the right environment for it to happen.
And across nearly five decades, the young people Alan worked with have grown into adults who still carry what they experienced in those youth group years. Something worked. Alan believes and has always believed that the Holy Spirit was at work in every one of those encounters.
This is not a book about filling seats on a Sunday evening. It is a book about building a ministry that shapes young people into the Christians and human beings, God is calling them to be.
Written for pastors, volunteer youth leaders, Christian educators, and anyone with a heart for teenagers and a willingness to do the work.
