Doug Franklin

My name is Doug Franklin and I serve youth workers through a ministry called LeaderTreks (www.leadertreks.com). I love youth ministry and the people who serve in it. I work with an incredible team creating tools and resources enabling youth workers to develop students into leaders. I want to influence youth workers to challenge students and prepare them for leadership in the kingdom of God.

I am married to a wonderfully creative woman named Angie Jones. We live in West Chicago IL, but we love to serve those in the world that don’t have enough.

I am passionate about leadership development in the church. I was a youth pastor for 12 years and during that time I had many different focuses in my ministry: evangelism, discipleship, missions, teaching, community and service. All good, but what made all of these focuses better was when students were leading them.

I’m focused on innovation; when I started LeaderTreks in 1994, all I wanted to do was create exceptional resources and experiences for students to grow into leaders. Not just for the sake of leadership, but because I wanted students to see early on God had something incredible for them, and I didn’t want them to wake up years later regretting all the years they had missed out on impacting His kingdom. I wanted to put students in leadership roles and let them lead. And I mean truly lead, even if it meant students would go through failure or the event they were leading would fail.

So here’s the end goal: I would love to see youth ministry move towards preparing students to lead the church by allowing them to be the church now. Youth ministry is not the ministry of the church to students. Youth ministry needs to be the ministry of students to their world.