From NYTimes:

As Pentecostalism advances across the world, winning converts faster than any other Christian denomination and siphoning believers from more established faiths, it is also suffering its own slow leak: young people who are falling away from the faith.

Mainline Christian churches have grappled with the problem for years. And recently, evangelical leaders in the United States sounded an alarm over “an epidemic of young people leaving.”

But the loss is doubly distressing for Pentecostals, evangelical Christians who can be especially zealous in seeking new members and rejecting the secular culture they feel is luring adolescents away from religion. Against that backdrop, Ark of Salvation is an unusual success. Unlike most of the other Pentecostal churches they visit, this 60-member congregation has attracted a devoted core of teenagers — more than a dozen — who sing and pray at every service. This is no accident.

When the first of them showed up two years ago at the austere storefront on Amsterdam Avenue, dragged along by friends or family, they had little inclination toward religion or music. But Pastor Danilo Florian saw in them the seeds of his church band. More important, he saw in this motley bunch of knockabout youngsters the future of his fledgling church.

He gave them instruments. He paid for music lessons. And he lavished gifts that few of them had ever known, growing up in fractured families and on dangerous streets: Attention. Praise. Expectations.

Today, they are thriving. The bassist, Frankie Lora, looks as if he may defy his mother’s fears that he will end up like his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder. The pianist, Juan Carlos Matias, once lonely and aimless, is studying to become an engineer. And the singer, Jessica Marte, who was cutting class and fighting at age 12, now dreams of opening a clothing store for Christian girls.

They have also embraced a strict — and sometimes strait-laced — moral code, which they are urged to spread to friends and strangers.

But they are still teenagers, living in a city filled with temptations for quick pleasure and easy money that the founders of Pentecostalism a century ago never imagined. At school, they have classmates who live only for the latest music, gadgets or fashions, or friends who sell drugs. At home, some have parents who ridicule their faith.

And being teenagers, they have their own doubts and questions about their newfound religion’s many rules and rituals. Frankie still recalls his disbelief when he saw people shouting, crying and twitching at his first service. “I was looking at them like they were retarded,” he said. “I never saw jumping like that in the street.”

Reaching these young people took a lot of work. Keeping them in church as they enter the wider world may prove even harder. READ IT ALL