Applause and cheers engulfed a 16-year-old girl after her guitar solo of “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s Carmen. She looked out into the audience at a Shanghai coffee shop last December and saw her friends on the verge of tears as they knew how far she’d come to reach this point.
Three years ago, the teen took a leave of absence from her competitive Shanghai school as the then-13-year-old’s social anxiety kept her from even looking others in the eye. Yet through her involvement in a youth-led group of Christian teens, she made friends, served in the community, and began opening up. Now she was helping organize a concert benefiting young cancer patients and performed before 200 people.
Fragrant Youth, a Christian group initiated by homeschooled Christian students, reaches out to 12-to-18-year-olds—many of whom struggle with mental health issues or are addicted to their cellphones and video games. It has attracted as many as 200 teens over the past three years with its outdoor activities, charity work, book clubs, and entrepreneurship workshops.
“I want to provide a platform for Christian youth to live out their faith,” said 19-year-old Haoran, who founded Fragrant Youth in 2023. Due to concerns of government persecution of Christians youth groups, CT is using only Haoran’s first name. “When we walk alongside young people who don’t believe, we can help them see what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.”
As more young people in China face mental health challenges and drop out of school, Chinese Christians like Haoran are finding ways to reach out to young people and help them find meaning and purpose. Some combine counseling with group support, while others guide children to overcome their challenges through alternative learning communities. While proselytizing and organizing religious education to minors is illegal in China, they believe the next generation is desperate to hear about Jesus.
“When I help a teenager, I don’t just act as a confidante,” Haoran said. “I aim to lead them to faith, because ultimately, only God can truly help them.”
Chinese schools are known for their long hours, fierce competition, and heavy homework loads. This has led to a lack of sleep and increased anxiety and depression, according to experts. In an acknowledgement of these problems, the government has sought to ease academic pressure on students by banning after-school tutoring and excess homework. It has also assigned school counselors to every school.
Yet many young people still struggle. About half of the 95 million people with depression in China are students, according to the 2022 National Depression Blue Book. A 2019–2020 Chinese Academy of Sciences report indicates that one in five adolescents has symptoms of depression. Among those with mental health issues, half choose to leave school, according to a Chinese Academy of Science study.
Chinese Christians face additional pressures. Many attend unregistered house churches that face government persecution. Families trying to avoid atheistic public schools turn to homeschooling, which is illegal in China. Others send their kids to unregistered Christian schools, many of which the government has closed.
Haoran’s parents homeschooled her and her younger brother using a Christian project-based learning curriculum. They participated in a co-op comprising other Christian families.
Yet by the time she turned 12, most of the other co-op students had returned to public middle school. Wanting to connect with peers her age, Haoran started an informal youth group that became Fragrant Youth. As much as the youths enjoyed their time together, they wanted to do something more meaningful.
When Haoran learned about an interchurch ministry in Shanghai that provided families with affordable accommodations while their children received cancer treatment in the city, she decided to help. Haoran and her group brought board games, art supplies, musical instruments, and even pets to cheer up the young patients. Many of them were confined to their rooms and often passed time on social media or watching videos on their tablets.
From there, Fragrant Youth started book clubs—recently reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death—as well as entrepreneurship workshops and youth camps.
Haoran estimated that about a third of the attendees at Fragrant Youth’s events are not believers and described the group’s mission as twofold: to prepare the way for the gospel through its activities and to help Christian youths live out their faith. She sees her own role as evangelistic, as she sees her peers struggle with a sense of meaninglessness in their lives.
“Sharing the gospel to others is my life’s mission,” Haoran said. “My faith is the source of my sense of purpose.”
One teen learned about the group through a friend and wondered why members spent their time serving others rather than playing video games at home. He started attending events, and the more he got involved, the more he learned about their faith. A group member explained the gospel to the teen, who went on to take an Alpha course at a local church and get baptized.
But serving youth has its difficulties. Haoran has had to handle peers with their own ideas about what the group should do, and she wasn’t always sure how to wield authority and draw the line as a leader.
“I cannot accomplish it on my own strength,” she said, recalling her discouragement. “I can only rely on God and do his will.”
Elsewhere in Shanghai, Haiyan, 54, faces her own challenges serving the youth at her house church. As a Sunday school leader, Haiyan struggled to help six of her students who had ADHD. So she attended courses on special education and became an ADHD family trainer, educating families of children with special needs. (CT is using only Haiyan’s nickname due to security concerns.)
She founded the organization Path Light, which teams up with Christian counselors and psychiatrists to work with kids facing mental illness and support their families. When further treatment is needed, the group refers them to other medical professionals. Her work, as well as caring for her daughter with bipolar disorder, helped Haiyan better understand the needs of young people.
In 2019, Haiyan attended a character-based abstinence workshop created by Focus on the Family and decided to create a five-day overnight camp open to Christian and non-Christian youth. During the first camp, she recruited volunteers from among the attendees and was impressed by their passion and leadership.
“They took the initiative to care for others,” Haiyan told CT.
With Haiyan’s help, these volunteers created their own group, Youth of Light, to walk alongside teenagers struggling with mental health issues. YOL members gathered regularly to pray and plan activities for the teens, inviting former camp attendees to join them. Despite their heavy school workloads, many of them still traveled an hour and a half across Shanghai for book clubs, games, and sports.
Haiyan taught YOL members to embrace and support young people with ADHD, autism, and depression. “If you don’t know how to deal with them, remember that the greatest of these is love,” she advised, echoing 1 Corinthians 13.
One member of YOL has severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Bullying at school nearly prompted him to drop out. At camp, he was impressed seeing his peers lead activities and wanted to do the same. His parents and church encouraged him to join YOL, where he became a core member. Even when he exhibited behaviors like constant hand-washing, no one teased or questioned him. Over time, his OCD symptoms became less pronounced and he is now preparing to attend seminary.
Yet companionship and treatment don’t always help youth overcome their struggles. Haiyan said some of the young people she works with relapse and return to the hospital for treatment. Some parents are depressed themselves, willing to pay for their children’s treatment but ignoring their own mental health needs. Other families accepted the community and counseling that the group offered but refused to seek medical treatment, even for children with self-harm tendencies.
The search for help has led some families to move far from home to find alternative solutions for their children. Wanli’s eldest son disliked his competitive junior high school and grew depressed in sixth grade, becoming addicted to video games. He stayed in his bedroom all day, avoiding his parents.
To break her son’s addiction and find a way to connect with him, Wanli moved from Shanghai with her three children to Qujing, a small city in Yunnan province, in April 2025. Her husband stayed in Shanghai to continue working. Alternative education groups, which eschew traditional subject-based learning in favor of experimental approaches, have grown in Yunnan. (CT is using Wanli’s first name for similar security concerns.)
There, Wanli’s son joined a small learning community established by a Christian family that gained a reputation for helping youths overcome internet addiction, depression, and school aversion. The community teaches English and math but otherwise does not focus on academics. Instead, young people live in a rustic cottage, gather for daily worship, prepare lunch, spend time outdoors, and help with the cottage’s renovations and maintenance.
Initially, many young people were reluctant to participate, but after a few weeks, they became more comfortable and engaged, Wanli said. Although the young people spent less time studying, their motivation to study increased. With more time for reflection, some of them became more willing to take responsibility for chores and care for the younger kids in the community.
Wanli herself, who converted to Christianity in college, also began to experience spiritual renewal after moving to Qujin. After getting married and starting a family, she had initially tried to homeschool her children. However, she found that in cities like Shanghai and Beijing, homeschooling was considered a form of elite education requiring endless discussions about curriculum choices, resources, and college planning. Later, when she sent her son to school and he struggled with addiction and anxiety, Christian groups and local churches offered little help. In the learning community, which includes some parents like herself, Wan Li was moved by the genuineness of the faith she saw among the group.
Now Wanli and the founder of the learning community lead a dozen teenagers, helping them restore their physical and mental well-being through working in nature and restricting access to cellphones and tablets. They meet visitors from across China who hope a change of environment will improve their children’s circumstances. However, it is still difficult for most parents to abandon the notion that academic achievement is everything, Wanli said.
“If parents don’t want to spend time with their children, try to understand them, or be consistent in disciplining them after they leave here, everything goes back to the way it was before,” Wanli said.
The approaches Haoran, Haiyan, and Wanli take to supporting young people have their own limitations and difficulties, but the common challenge stems from government intervention. Although they have removed explicitly gospel-related content from their programs, their activities still attract the government’s attention.
Officials have interrupted Haiyan’s youth camp several times. Authorities interrogated Haoran’s parents for hosting lectures on marriage and family, which the parents of Fragrant Youth members sometimes attend. Even so, teenagers looking to support their peers remain undeterred: Fragrant Youth continues to share the good news privately, and YOL members organize new camp sessions.
Haoran recently won a scholarship from a community foundation to support her mentoring program and plans to invest part of the funds into the group’s current activities supporting young cancer patients. She hopes to build community, mentor more young people, and replicate her ministry model elsewhere.
Wanli’s eldest son’s mental health improved enough at the end of 2025 to allow him to resume his studies in Jiangxi, where he lives with his uncle and grandparents. Wanli decided to stay in Yunnan with her two younger children to help other young people but is uncertain about her next steps.
As for Haiyan, she is preparing for the next youth camp. “We will not give up, because grace is sufficient,” she said. “We believe that God made everyone valuable.”
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