Schools are where young people hang out. If you want to positively influence young people it makes sense to access them in schools, where they are conveniently gathered together for the purpose of learning and preparing for the rest of their life.

Currently we are experiencing unprecedented access to young people in the schools of the world. Youth for Christ in Britain is in the final stages of developing a Christian Religious Education curriculum that will be available to 20,000+ schools. When the web-based program is released it is expected that at least 6,000 school communities will begin using this resource, impacting hundreds of thousands of young people each week. In Brazil, because of the success of a Christian outreach program that Youth for Christ has been running in High Schools, we now have access to all public schools in the nation. In Hong Kong, Youth for Christ conducts Christian outreach programs in public High Schools every week reaching thousands of teenagers. In the USA our Campus Life Clubs and student-led programs reach into 1,026 school communities and weekly connect with tens of thousands of teenagers. And in Hungary a law has recently been introduced that requires that ethics and religion be taught in every elementary school in the nation. Our Youth for Christ Board Chair in Hungary has just been asked to help develop the Christian Religious programs for all the schools.

The value of these school programs is often captured in the comments of the students that attend. In the final Youth for Christ program (prior to summer break) in a school in Hungary one of the quietest kids in the group came to the Youth for Christ staff and said, “Thank you for loving us and caring for us. It means much to us.” In another group a new member—who wasn’t coming during the year but wanted to see what the program was all about—stated, “How stupid was I to miss all of it during this past year! It is so fantastic and I enjoyed every little moment with the guys here. It is so cool.”