The Project’s first partnership.

Eighty-one per cent of Australian churches have nobody in a youth ministry role at all. Three per cent have somebody in one full-time. The gap between those two numbers is not made of unwilling churches — it is made of roles that nobody can build a life around.

Figures: Stanton & Pepper, Journal of Empirical Theology (2025); 2016 NCLS church base.

Plentylife Anglican Church sits on Melbourne’s northern edge, in Mernda. Like most churches that want a full-time youth minister, it could not fund one outright. In July 2026 it took the role on regardless, as the first church to enter a partnership with Youth Ministry Futures. Katie Holloway is its youth minister.

How the partnership works

A partnership costs about $30,000 a year. YMF carries more of that cost in the early years and the church takes on more as it goes, until by the midpoint the church funds the role in full. In the closing years a small surplus flows back, and it seeds the next partnership. The model is built to replicate rather than to run on fresh fundraising alone.

What is different about the first one

Until July 2026 The Project was a proposal: a way of describing how a church might grow into a role it could not yet afford. It is now a job somebody holds, in a church, on a street, with young people in it. That is the difference between a model and a ministry.

It is also only months old. There is nothing yet to report about what this partnership will produce, and YMF would rather say so than borrow a result it has not earned. What can be said is that a role exists in Mernda that did not exist before, and that it was designed from the outset to be one a person could stay in.

Where a gift goes

A gift to Youth Ministry Futures does not fund Katie’s role, and it does not fund Plentylife. Gifts go into a pool that trains youth ministers and those studying to become one, sustains those already in the field, and places them in churches through partnerships like this one. The pooling is deliberate. It is what lets the next partnership begin before the last has finished paying for itself.

The shortage of youth ministers in Australia was built over decades, out of budgets and assumptions and the ordinary pressures on small churches. It can be rebuilt, and God is the one who keeps a generation. The Project is how YMF puts its shoulder to that work: one church, one youth minister, and then the next.