Many early Seventh-day Adventist leaders were teenagers just like the kids in your youth group.  Students. Committed young Christians with a consuming vision. Eager to serve. Ready to go wherever God led them. Willing to devote their lives to a well-defined mission.

Ellen Harmon was 16 when she was first drawn to the Advent message. Within weeks of her 17th birthday in 1844, God began to use her to give encouragement to a discouraged group of believers who needed to hear that God still cared. (See; Ellen White.)


John Loughbrough was a 16 in 1848 when he started preaching. It was before the time when ministers received regular salaries, so John worked during the week at whatever job he could find and then preached his heart out on the weekends.


Annie and Uriah Smith, sister and brother, became Adventist Christians while they were teenagers. Annie turned out to be a noted poet and hymn writer. Uriah started editing church publications in 1853. He was 21 years old.


John Andrews was already part of the picture when he was 15. He began a career as a minister when he was 21. And he passed along his youthful enthusiasm to his children. When he left the U.S. in 1874 to become the Church’s first missionary, he was a single parent (his wife had died two years earlier) with two teenagers, Mary, 13, and Charles, 17.


Luther Warren was only 14 in 1879 when he and a 17 year old friend, Harry Fenner, decided the church needed an organization to encourage and support the youth. They called their new group a “young people’s society.” Within ten years the church structure was beginning to follow their lead. In 1889 the Ohio Conference became the first to form a conference-wide youth organization. It was known as Christian Volunteers. And in 1907 the General Conference Youth Department was formally organized.


Remember, God doesn’t ask us how old we are, whether we’re male or female, how well we’ve done in school, or what life’s been like at home. He just tells us how much He loves us and how eager He is for us to join His team in telling the good news of the gospel of His grace to others.


—Adapted from Walking On the Edge (Lincoln, NE: AdventSource, 1996), 20, 21.


“From: ABZ’s of Adventist Youth Ministry”
© 2000 John Hancock Center for Youth and Family Ministry
Permission to copy for use in the local congregation or group