What Every Church Should Know About Student Leadership Development

By Guest Contributor May 18, 2011

Loved this post from my friend Matt Gooch – http://nextinline.posterous.com/what-every-church-should-know-about-student-l

There are a lot of things that I wish I had known before I started developing student leaders. I wish I had been more prepared. I wish I had planned more. I wish I had thought through the whole idea. I wish I’d known how much time it would take, and how much effort.

I wish I had someone like Next in Line to guide me through the process. To tell you the truth, that’s part of my passion for Next in Line Ministries. There are so many things that could have gone better had I had someone with some experience standing beside me.

All that being said, I was thinking about what I wish I’d known before I started. I thought about the dirty truths that I should have known, despite what I was being told in the literature. So I came up with five things that I wish I had been told before I started. If you heard these things before you started, you were truly blessed. If you didn’t, then you probably know what I’m talking about.

My prayer is that I catch a few of you before you start a leadership development team. I don’t want to be negative, but I want to be real about what happens in a leadership team from day-to-day. I want to be real about the struggles that you will probably have, and about the kind of walls that you will probably have to break down. I want to be real because I would have benefited from someone being real with me.

So here’s the top five things that I wish I had known.

It’s Not Easy

It takes time

It will test your faith in your students

It will stretch your leadership

It’s totally worth it

We’ll talk about each of them in the weeks to come. In the meantime, if you have anything that you wish you’d been told before you started developing young leaders, let me know. I’d be curious to know what kind of things would have helped you.