I’ve been thinking about this for a while but have never really put my thoughts down in a blog. Last week I was with 28 churches at Fuller Seminary starting a year long “Sticky Faith” intensive cohort program with my new church. At some point we started talking about our ministries and in particular someone asked a question about how we handle “Student Leadership Teams.” In a perhaps overly cynical and snarky moment I spouted out that I thought one of the main reasons we have these groupings of students is for control.
Let me unpack this thought a bit because I think that there is some truth to this. First, most of us in the youth ministry leadership world have been frustrated a number of times by our students not showing up to things. We’ve lost money, momentum and sometimes even respect as student/families see us do something that is lame. Second, we should probably confess that we feel pressure to get students involved in leadership and important roles within the ministry because people who have been doing it for a long time tell us its important.
One frustrating thing in Youth Ministry is that we can’t “make” any students show up for anything. We are not like their football coaches, band conductors, dance teams or tutors. We don’t have that type of relationship in our youth ministries where there are actual consequences if they don’t come.
Unless we form a leadership team. This is where the control piece comes in. When we form a leadership team we generally have applications, interviews, expectations, consequences and rewards. In many ways we create a system where we have some sort of control over the students so that we can make them come to our events. We now have a built in group of students that we know will come to our stuff. We probably even have a requirement that they invite all their friends and tell them how great it will be.
I think this is wrong.
The problem is I don’t know how to fix the system. I once had a student leadership team at a church that had almost 60 students on it. We had twice a month meetings and an annual retreat. The retreat was a big deal and the main reason that people joined the team. We didn’t do a whole lot with these student leaders but they knew they couldn’t miss our “training” times (not sure what we actually trained them in) and the retreat was actually fun.
I believe in giving students leadership roles and getting them involved around specific events that they themselves are excited about. But I’m against the “leadership team” approach to youth ministry because I just don’t know if it’s always done with pure motives.
Would love to know what you think.
