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When he died on October 30 at age 61, Mike Yaconelli had helped improve Christian youth groups for nearly 30 years. As cofounder of Youth Specialties, founder of The Wittenburg Door magazine (now The Door), and author of the books Dangerous Wonder and Messy Spirituality, Yaconelli inspired thousands of church leaders, seminarians and their professors, and people with a sense of humor about their faith. More than 25,000 people accessed CT's online coverage of Yaconelli in the week after his death. In this essay, Ben Patterson reflects on the gifts left behind by his friend.

Virtually none of the students at the college where I serve as campus pastor know who Mike Yaconelli was, though some may remember my voice growing thick the day in chapel I announced Mike's death and tried to explain why they should care. I told them that if they had been in any kind of youth ministry anywhere in North America, Mike probably had touched their lives. Such is the influence of an outfit called Youth Specialties. The enterprise that began with Mike and his friend Wayne Rice silk-screening the first Idea Book in a garage in San Diego, and that grew into conventions and resource seminars and a crazy little magazine called The Wittenburg Door, has affected a few generations of evangelical youth workers, pastors, and even college professors. All of this happened through God's sovereign and inexplicable grace, and no small amount of chutzpah.

Mike embodied chutzpah. He expected to be listened to, to affect people, and if his expectations weren't met, he found a way to meet them: sometimes through outrageous humor, sometimes through the passion of his convictions. Nothing fired Mike up more than justice for the underdog, the overlooked and the undervalued, especially if that person was a youth worker. You wanted Mike on your side if you were being mistreated. He once devoted an entire Door to answering criticisms aimed at his friend Tony Campolo.

His outrageous humor is legendary, and everyone who knew him has stories to tell. My repertoire includes the time someone unwisely asked him to give thanks for the food set before us in a restaurant. Mike stood atop the chair he was sitting on, raised his arms into the air and began to pray loudly and sonorously. Our faces got red, our ears hot, but we laughed our heads off, and I'm still talking about it.

I loved and hated being with him in public. He mainly loved it. He looked for ways he could create disequilibrium in a room, or in a crowded elevator. Once he spoke to me in confidential tones just loud enough for those around us to think they were eavesdropping on a private conversation. He said, "Ben, when are you going to go back to your wife and family? She's heartbroken and the kids are crying and hungry." The people around me were glowering, and there was nothing I could say to him or them that wouldn't make me seem even more guilty. I wanted to throttle him, but his impish grin saved his life, and I'm still talking about it. And I'm still thinking he was totally out of line.

My involvement with Mike was mainly through The Wittenburg Door. More chutzpah, there. What did we think we were doing, comparing our publication to the place where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses and touched off a movement that changed history? On some level, maybe what we were doing wasn't much more than what Mike did in that restaurant or elevator, but for more lofty purposes, most of the time. But we misspelled Wittenberg, for heaven's sake!

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January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1