Growing Young: 6 Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church by Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Brad Griffin is a book that focuses on how to attract more young people (ages 15 to 29) to the church. The book is 330 pages long and has the vibe of a short textbook. Growing Young discusses unlocking keychain leadership, empathizing with today’s young people, taking Jesus’ message seriously, fueling a warm community, prioritizing young people (and families) everywhere, and being “the best neighbors.”

A good point that the authors make is that young people don’t necessarily want young, hip leaders. The authors also wisely discuss how stereotyping young people can be very harmful. For example, they remind leaders to not quickly judge a 24-year-old who is not employed, or a 26-year-old who is not married; twentysomethings today often have different life stages than their counterparts did twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. Growing Young also briefly touches upon how an important group of young people – young singles out of college – are sometimes missed over in ministry. Churches often have groups geared toward highschoolers, college students, and young married couples, but the postgrad singles may find that they don’t really fit into a Sunday school class or a life group.

Who would be interested in Growing Young? The book would be best for pastors or young adult pastors who are looking for ways to improve how they run their ministries.

You can find Growing Young here.