Teaching Students to: LEAD

For our second installment in the “Teaching Students” series, I want to tackle the topic of student leadership. During my first year at Greenwood Christian, I was the associate youth pastor. I remember my first student leadership team meeting that I attended. They were great students. As time went on, I kept on hearing other students and adults talk about the previous years’ group as if they were the founding fathers of student leadership. From what it sounded like, they were amazing. That didn’t really matter to me though. All I saw were the students sitting in front of me. I felt no pressure to have this team be just as successful as the previous. Call it a luxury of being new. During that first year, the lead student pastor did a great job leading and challenging that team. Towards the end of my first year, I learned he was leaving to pursue another ministry and I took over ministry leadership.

In one of my first rookie moves, I had the leadership team meet and I told them that we were going to “disband” the team. Sound crazy? Yep. I was a “trained” missionary coming off of his first year working at a church for the first time. Foolish? I don’t think so. My philosophy was a little different and if you hear me out, I think it can benefit you. The problem: I felt guilty. I knew that we had “called” leaders in our ministry who wanted to lead but were not on the team. I knew that we had a random way of picking who was on the leadership team. I knew that not everyone on the team was gifted at the call of leadership. I began to think about how we handle the students who feel God calling them to lead, but were not on the team. Do we add them to an already huge student leadership team? I didn’t want to do that. I knew that we needed to do a better job with students who were actually called to lead in the church and the ones who were considering vocational ministry. We needed something different. For the record, I gave each student currently on the team time to think about their calling. Were they called to be supportive, a leader, or an encourager? I explained how we were going to change our process entirely and that I would get back with them.

Here is what I did:

1. I encouraged each student to take a spiritual gifts inventory. This was to help us see who were gifted by the Spirit to lead or not. (My love was/is not conditional based off of the findings.)

2. We were not going to have people “apply” to be on the team. From that moment on, my new associate and I were going to be the ones deciding who was on the team and who wasn’t. The only way to get on the team? Be personally invited by us. The qualifications? We invited people who were already leading in the ministry. We looked for students who were standing in the gap without a promise of leadership or a fancy “student leader” title to go with it. We didn’t want someone to “start” being a leader–we wanted leaders.

3. We changed the name of the team from “Student Leaders” to “Student Interns.” The name change is on purpose. More on that in a bit.

4. We would make personal contact with the prospective students and give them a student intern covenant. I’ve attached the covenant here if you want to download and use it. Once they and their parents signed the covenant, we would move forward.

5. Once both parties had accepted their new role, we would work with them to use the spiritual gifts that had been identified. We would then place them as “interns” in those areas. For example, the first year we had preaching, communication, missions, worship, and small group interns. Each were high school students who were gifted in those areas. Once placed, we treated the student intern as we would a college student intern. They got responsibilities. The preaching interns met with me once a week (most of the time) to assist in developing my messages for the coming Sunday. They helped plan series, points, choose scriptures, and refine the message.

6. Each male intern was/is required to preach at least once per school year. If these students are going to be preachers, worship pastors, elders, or deacons one day, then they should know how to preach. I’ll be writing in more detail about teaching students to preach in a couple days. *This required was/is non-negotiable.

7. We gave each student intern real responsibility, set measurable goals, and had regular meetings. Our goal wasn’t to push off busy work on them; our goal was to give them a taste of what it is like to be a minister. My end goal is that these students leave our ministry knowing the basics of ministry. If they choose ministry as a vocation, they aren’t starting from scratch. If their role/gift ended up not matching in the long-term then we would try something else. We wanted to get them as far down the line as possible. Interns also had to make tough calls and witness tough situations. If something was going on in the ministry, I would get their opinion on how to proceed. Each incident was an opportunity to teach. Our interns are “on staff” with the ministry.

After three years of interns, I’ll say that we’ve learned a lot about our new philosophy. Some things haven’t worked out and we’ve tweaked even more. The one thing that I can say is that we’ve helped students to discover their God given gifts and enter ministry successfully. At the end of this school year we will have had 7 students graduate and enter Bible college from this program.

I’ll be happy to answer any questions about the process! Comments and dialog are welcome below!

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