Tag: Developing Students

Here’s to New Adventures

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Here’s to new adventures.

Our summer schedule starts in 10 days. By June 1, I will be halfway finished with our church trips for the summer of 2018.

Over the next 2 1/2 months, I will help lead a trip with kids to a place I’ve never been even to visit, I will experiment with a concept in a new environment (different from the one it developed in), and I will send both my daughters to camp for the first time.

It’s going to be a crazy 12 weeks, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

What new adventures are you taking this summer? What steps are you taking to step out in leadership? How are you going to challenge yourself to grow this summer?

Build Your Own Student Leadership Trip

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Here’s a post from May 2017 about our Student Leadership Trip. I’ve been prepping our 2018 trip for the past week and thought this was a good summary of what we do.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, I was on a Student Leadership Trip earlier this week. It was a great trip, and something we’ve been doing for the past four years.

I write most of my posts and try to keep them general enough to be applicable to most people who are seeking to grow their leadership capacity. My current context, however, is leading a youth/student ministry.

So, today, I’m going to share the master principle for my student leadership trip.

I contact men and women whom I respect in ministry and ask them to share for about 15-30 minutes any leadership lesson they’ve learned. Then, I load my student leaders into a van and drive to the people I contacted.

Simple, right?

With this setup, I get to customize my own leadership conference, and don’t have to pay the conference price per kid. Plus, I get great relational time in a 15 passenger van.

I’m extremely grateful for the people who poured into the lives of my students this year, and I love getting to hear each student reflect on what they learned.

If you happen to be reading this and were one of the people who shared this year, or have shared in the past four years, let me say thank you. Your investment in student leaders is paying off, and I am forever grateful for our friendship.

If you’re a youth minister, or know a youth minister, please share this article. I truly believe developing leaders is a joy, but it can be hard to find a place to start.

Lastly, I have written a few tips for how I process through my student leadership trip. If you would like a copy, comment below with your email address and I’ll be happy to send it to you. Thanks for reading!

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Learn From Your Mistakes

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Learn from your mistakes. Seems like a simple concept, right?

But when was the last time you stopped to ask yourself if you’re truly learning from your mistakes? When was the last time you admitted you made a mistake?

I think there’s a fine line in here. I never want to wear a badge of “proud to make mistakes” on my chest, because mistakes are embarrassing. But I also never want to wear a badge of “mistake free since ’93” either.

Mistakes come from 2 places. New mistakes and mistakes of comfort.

New mistakes happen because we are trying something new. We step out of our normal routine, maybe swing for the fences with something, and make a mistake along the way. Whether the something we tried is a success or a failure on the whole, the mistakes we make are all part of the learning process.

Mistakes of comfort, on the other hand, happen because we are too lazy to correct them. Sound harsh? It may be, but that doesn’t make it less true. Mistakes of comfort are the result of knowing we are making a mistake, but we’ve made it so many times that we know the outcome and think we can live with it. Mistakes of comfort are dangerous and damaging to our leadership.

If you want to grow as a leader, take some time to evaluate the last few months. What mistakes of comfort keep popping up? My tendency is to laugh them off, but I know they need to change. What about you?

The bottom line is this: if you desire to grow as a leader, you need to learn to eliminate mistakes of comfort but maximize new mistakes. Taking risks can aid growth, but accepting mediocrity kills it.

Let Go

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I took last Wednesday off to go on a trip with my oldest daughter and her class. In doing so, I asked one of the adults who helps on Wednesday to take over our weekly program.

I will miss a Wednesday night generally about one to two times per year, and I’m starting to realize the most creative times we have on a Wednesday are the nights I’m not in charge.

There is something freeing about being able to miss a service and not have to worry about how things are going to go. The temptation, however, is to want things to go just like they would had I not been there.

Very rarely will you find someone who will do a good job at keeping things exactly the way you have them, but part of leadership is letting a person’s unique voice shine.

So, today, what do you need to let go of in your leadership? Is there something to which you have been clinging but you know it’s time to let go? Or, maybe like a bunch of ministers, you need to take a Wednesday or a Sunday off, and let someone else lead for the moment. You never know what you might learn about yourself if you do just that.

Owners and Hired Hands, pt 2

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As a follow up to last week’s post on the difference between owners and hired hands, today’s post is going to shift gears, for a moment. But before reading further, you need to read this post.

Jesus was the ultimate example of an owner teaching hired hands to become owners.

If you think about Jesus’s interactions with the disciples in the Gospels, he was constantly preparing them for a day when he would not be there.

The disciples, however, were slow learners. They regularly missed the point (see the Sons of Thunder), or only made sense of what was happening much later.

But, when push came to shove, in Acts we read how the disciples were able to step up when the situation called for it. Jesus prepared them for the leadership call they were going to face.

In your leadership, I’m not saying you have to be Jesus. But one of our strongest goals should be the desire to help people moved from hired hands to owners.

In ministry, this means equipping people to find a place to serve, and to allow them to serve!

Some of my favorite conversations are with teenagers when I tell them they have the freedom to make a decision and I’ll deal with the followup, or that when they are serving their way, I don’t have to worry about what they’re doing.

Leadership means bringing other people into ownership. But you have to extend the invitation. Find the people who are willing and ready to serve, and test the waters.

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