What to pray for young people, and for those who stay.

Much of what a teenager carries is invisible to the adults nearby. Pray for those who belong nowhere in particular, that they would be welcomed somewhere and know it; for those who have left the church, or left the faith, that Jesus would draw them back; for the ones sitting exams, that they would know their worth is not what the results say it is; for young people carrying poor mental health, bullying or poverty, that the right people would be near them; and for Christian teenagers holding their faith in front of friends who do not share it.

A youth group is a small and fragile thing: a few volunteers, a room, and a night of the week competing with everything else in a teenager’s calendar. Pray for groups where a young person is known rather than counted; for safety, physical and emotional and spiritual, and for leaders with the wisdom to build it; for clarity about Jesus in every talk, every study, and every conversation on the way out the door; and for churches with no young people at all, that they would keep praying for them and keep making room.

Faith is mostly caught from people a young person already trusts. Pray for parents and carers, sustained through the ordinary difficulty of raising adolescents; for grandparents praying for children and grandchildren who do not yet know the Lord; for adults in churches to be worth imitating, and to make room for what young people bring; for teachers, chaplains and counsellors, given wisdom for conversations that matter more than they appear to; and for volunteer leaders, who fit this around work and family and are rarely told that it mattered.

More than 80 per cent of youth ministry roles in Australian churches are part-time (Stanton & Pepper, Journal of Empirical Theology, 2025). People leave this work, not usually because they stopped caring, but because it could never become a living. Pray for youth ministers to lead with integrity, and to be held in their own faith while they carry other people’s; for those training now, in Pipeline and at Bible college and in churches that took a chance on them; for part-time workers holding ministry alongside another job; for those serving where resources are thin and encouragement is rare; for the tired and the burnt out, that they would be given rest rather than simply replaced; and that God would raise up people who will stay in this work for a long time, and churches able to keep them.