counseling and ministry

I've been thinking about switching to a counseling degree program at seminary (I am currently in the masters in being a sunday school teacher program).  But I don't want to be a counselor, I don't want to have clients and sit in a fabricated-living room-office all day.  I want to do youth ministry, to hang out for a living.  But I want to know what I'm talking about as much as I possibly can.  Which is why I'm going to school.  

However, it IS kind of weird, in one way, getting a counseling degree to do youth ministry.  Wouldn't you get a youth ministry degree to do youth ministry?  However, most of the issues that I see that kids actually need help in is understanding their families and their emotions.  This seems to be the bedrock of all other issues - even spiritual ones.

At L'Abri, I read somewhere and talked to some people who said that in the 60's, people used to come to L'Abri to intellectually discuss serious doubts they had with religion and spirituality and to get real answers.  "Real answers to real questions" was Francis and Edith Schaeffer's motto.  However, talking to the workers at English L'Abri in the Fall of 2006 when I was there, they said that the people who came to L'Abri nowadays were more in need of emotional healing and counseling - either from wounds inflicted by the church or by their families.  The focus was different.

What is this cultural shift?  Shouldn't I be focusing on learning tons of theology to minister to high schoolers instead of family systems?  Ideally it should be both, but realistically I must focus somewhere.