"After more than four years of waiting and longing to see a successor appointed to continue the youth work of the Alliance, I am glad and relieved to see Yueh-Wen Lu stepping into the position," says Anna Ljung Hansson.

Anna, now general secretary of Sweden's Mission Covenant Youth, was the Alliance's first full-time youth secretary. She served with us in the period surrounding the 23rd general council, and played a key role in organizing the stewards' programme for the Debrecen meeting and in preparing the Reformed youth forum that preceded Debrecen.

Youth work has always been something of an orphan in the Alliance. One has only to dip into A Century of Service, Marcel Pradervand's 1975 history of the Alliance, to find a respectable strand of thought which even holds that we should not do any youth work, but should leave all that to the World Council of Churches.

Debrecen disagreed: it listed the youth secretary among the "essential" staff positions in the Geneva office. But general councils have always been good at willing the end without willing the means, and for almost four years the Alliance has struggled to find the means to finance this position. The solution, in the end, was a compromise: to appoint a full-time executive secretary, but working most of the time from his or her home country, not from Geneva.

After a thorough search, Yueh-Wen Lu of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan was appointed and took up her post at the beginning of May.Yueh-Wen (also known as Andrea) is 27 years old and a graduate of Tamkang University, Tamshui, with a degree in English. Young she may be, but she has already an impressive track record of church and ecumenical involvement.

Currently she is completing a master's thesis, in which she takes a sociological look at the role of the minister's wife - and yes, in the majority of cases in Taiwan (as elsewhere), the minister's spouse is a wife and not a husband. How, she wants to understand, do the church and the minister's wife construct each other's identity?

Yueh-Wen's immediate tasks as youth secretary mirror those undertaken by Anna Ljung in relation to Debrecen: to prepare the stewards' programme and the Reformed youth pre-conference for the 24th general council in Accra. She is already hard at work rejuvenating - if we may so speak - the youth network initiated by Anna and hopes that member churches will respond eagerly to the request to update their youth contacts.

"I believe that young people like me will always find a way to play a part in God's mission, whatever opportunities church institutions offer us or whatever obstacles they put in our way," says Yueh-Wen. "I hope that, through my work, people in our Alliance churches - especially those who have the privilege and grace to serve in positions of leadership - will not forget that when they themselves were young, they raised exactly the same questions with which young people still struggle today."