Youth Ministry – Rebuilding After COVID, Part 5

By Shane Thacker September 21, 2021

Check Out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this series on the LeaderTreks Blog!

How to lead a team

We’re on the last leg of this series. Hopefully you’re getting a clearer picture of what direction you need to take with your youth group. The next challenge you’ll need to navigate is how to lead a team. In this case, it’s your youth leaders; but this applies to any area of ministry. 

For you as a leader, you’re going to have a never-ending battle of problems to solve, and it’s unrealistic to think that you can do it all alone. 

Let’s look at the first ministry team (aside from the Apostles) recorded in the early church. There was a daily food distribution at the time, but a problem came about:

¹ In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. ² So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. ³ Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them ⁴ and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.” – Acts 6:1-4

They gave us a perfect model for how to lead a team. If you want to have a healthy model for leading a team, follow the Apostles’ lead:

Recognize the need

There’s always going to be a need. If you’ve followed the first two parts of this blog (Fall in love with the Lord and the church), then you should already know what God would want in most situations, and you would also have a good line of communication with your church about any needs that arise. Are you in tune with the needs? If so, what do you do about it?

Recognize that you can’t do it all

One of the biggest problems youth leaders have today is that we want to do it all on our own (or maybe we don’t, but there’s not enough help). There’s certainly plenty of tasks that you can do, but what should you be doing the most? For the Apostles, they could’ve easily served food, but so could many others in the church, and their job as leaders had many more problems at hand. You can’t do it all either. 

Recognize who can best fill the need

As we said before, the more you get to know the people in your church, the more you’ll see their strengths. When you find the right person for the job, that’s when you can delegate those tasks. Don’t just delegate tasks, though; you need to delegate authority. They need to know that they have the freedom to make decisions within the authority you gave them; that’s when their ministry comes alive. But who should you ask? Let’s look at the qualifications the Apostles gave in verse 3: they must be “known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom”. They’re “known to be” should cue you in on something big: The church knows them and they trust them. They followed the very steps we have been talking about of loving the Lord and the local church. When you have someone like that leading in solving a problem, they’re going to gravitate towards that person and be more than willing to serve alongside them!

What was the result of this? Look at the start of verse 7: “So the word of God spread.”