Young Life

Young Life is a group of caring adults who go where kids are, win the right to be heard and share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with them.

 

The vision began in the early 1930s when an elderly woman, Clara Frasher, recruited a group of her friends to pray for the teenagers attending Gainesville High School in Texas. Six years later, during the spring of 1939, a young seminarian, Jim Rayburn, started a chapter of the Miracle Book Club in Gainesville, Texas, a small town 75 miles to the north of Dallas. As he was developing the program in Gainesville, Rayburn also worked with a local pastor, Clyde Kenne.

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Over 90 years later, the Young Life mission is still committed to incarnational witness: embodying and expressing the love of Christ through relationships with all kinds of kids:​ WyldLife​ is our outreach to middle school kids, Young Life for those in their high school years, and Young Life College is our program for college and university students. In addition to the ministries mentioned above, Young Life reaches military teens through a program called Club Beyond, the Small Towns/Rural initiative brings Young Life to communities of fewer than 25,000 people, and Amicus is Young Life’s student exchange and hosting program for international kids.