Wordpress is an excellent blogging tool that with not too much effort, can be leveraged to a cheap content 'manglement' system - especially for a youth ministry.

That said, might I suggest taking a stab at Blogger first Yeah, you're probably not going to get into your t-shirt shop and/or Flash powered slide show at that point.

However, having run a youth web site or two, I think you may find yourself leaping into technology solutions before uncovering the not-so-trivial informational and operational issues with such a site.

Blogger would give you a free throw-away testbed platform to figure this all out. That way when you finally do determine which compelling content - versus cool components - will help drive into your ministry new youth, while aiding and retaining those currently involved in your ministry.

That way when you do get around to installing and configuring WordPress, you don't have to deal with a make-over and/or learning stuff the hard way and/or without frustrating potential adopters w/the fatigue that comes with such do-overs.

I have not extensively used wordpress before, but we started playing around with it to use as a platform for our church's Junior High Youth Group. The intent of the site is to be for the kids (and hopefully their friends), not a description of the ministry. We crammed every cool new technology into there that we could think of.
-A google calendar and rss driven events list (run through feedburner)
-an AJAX powered commenting system, polling system, and shoutbox
-A Flicker powered flash slideshow (filtered by tag) that shows the last 20 pictures tagged with their ministry from the church's Flickr account
-RSS to email with FeedBlitz (and even filtered by category for a parents newsletter)
-a SpreadShirt tee-shirt shop
-Kids are brainwashed by adults in churches at a very impressionable age, think about it, that's why they set-up preschools... a church is just a business and god is just the product your buying. I believe in the business model they use, just not the god they believe in.
-You are as christian as another kid is Muslum. If you were born in Iraq you would believe in a different god and *believe* it just as much as you do in your current god.
-Instructions on how to get rss feeds through text messages with yahoo alerts
Anyone else have any good ideas on what to add to make the ultimate kid's youth site?
You can check it out here...
http://rezjnr.com