Tips for leaders

Things I Wish They’d Told Me When I Started

1. Kids will leave.

I wish someone had told me this, the number of times that I sweated over this worrying and panicking, blaming myself, my wife, the youth team and God that someone had left.  When it came to the crunch they chose to leave. Now I think that you need to create opportunities for people to leave. There are two main reasons… a good reason and bad reason.

A good reason could be a ministry opportunity. We lost two of our best young people when someone offered them a role as a youth pastor in another church. That’s great reason to leave. Another great reason for someone to leave is because they simply don’t flow with where you are going in terms of direction and vision.

A bad reason is when  you make someone feel unwanted or not a part of what is happening. Whenever and why ever people leave – it happens. It is tough and that never changes. You should feel everyone, but it isn’t always your fault.

2. Who you are makes what you do.

Do an assessment of what you spend your time doing, probably you spend the majority of your time doing things that relate to other people, working on a programme for the young people, planning a leaders meeting, talking to someone about their life.

The greatest leaders have learnt the lesson that who you are shapes what you do. So to become better at what you do you have to work on who you are. Examine issues of your character and check your relationship with God way before you examine that of a young person. When you look at the time you give to youth ministry make sure there is a chunk of time in there for you. But what should you be doing? Here are my suggestions:

a) Read great books – ask people who you respect what they are reading, buy those books and read them slowly; reading a book is not a race but a chance to learn.

b) Listen to quality podcasts – think of world class preachers, type their names into iTunes and see what comes up!

c) Meet with a mentor – we all need them, and not just a name but a person who connects with us.

d) Pray – I know, inventive and really radical. We need to pray on our own.

e) Study the Bible – study in a way where you are finding out what the Bible is really saying and work out it’s application to your life; don’t prepare a sermon.

3. When you build leaders, leaders build young people.

Quality, fast growth is all about multiplication. Multiplication only happens when you give yourself to growing your leaders.

a) People seldom grow by accident you must plan to build people; two skills you need to develop to grow people:

i. Nurture – the process of bringing up or training.

Follow the simple acronym B.E.S.T. Believe Encourage Share Trust. Begin by letting the person you are building know that you believe in them, not in their gift or what they can do for you but simply in them. This means you hang out with them and do life together.

Encourage them – this literally means to put courage inside of them, not simply make them feel nice about themselves.

Share your life, inviting them into who you are and all that you are doing, take whatever opportunity you can to be doing things together.

Trust them with something to do that they know matters – most young leaders are under-challenged and we need to make sure that this is not the case for those we nurture.

ii. Equip – Supply with what is needed.

This can only truly happen with individuals. Look at their lives and ministries and bring them into worlds where they can learn from those who have what they need. Often for me this means getting those I believe in into someone else’s world ‘cause I know I don’t know everything! Some of the general things you can do through group teaching but for nitty gritty you must give individuals time and good training.

The difference between developing followers and leaders is focus – it is a focus on the now or a focus on the future. When you focus on the future you never look at who you have but who they could be. This is having a vision for someone else’s life maybe you will see something that no-one else can see, perhaps you will have to fight for that person to be accepted in that way. The bottom line is this you want to build a big youth group you have to build big leaders.

4.Numbers Matter – Oh yes they do.

Pet hate time – when people tell me no-one has been saved but we have really grown in God over the last… (insert time period here)… Really bugs me. With 19 million young people going to hell in this country please don’t tell me numbers don’t matter. The danger is when it is the only thing that matters. Numbers without love, faith and hope, they don’t matter. Numbers without connection with God, they don’t matter. But it does matter that we are growing and people are being added to our numbers.

Stuart Keir is a core team member of Audacious. Stuart is the Associate Director of Youth Alive UK and the Senior Pastor of London City Life Church.