How Do You Choose Student Leaders? part 2

Last week, Justin introduced the first part of How Do You Choose Student Leaders?

The story of leadership at the Christian Campus House at Northwest Missouri State University, where I serve, is a work in progress. We have gone through many course corrections and adjustments over the last several years. This year, though, we decided it was time for a massive overhaul on how we chose and train our student leaders.

Here is the story so far.

[INVITE]

One of my early struggles in leadership development was determining what I found more advantageous: a student with strong natural leadership abilities or a student with a willing heart, although perhaps not the strongest leadership gifting? (You can see my original musings on this here and here.)

I decided I wanted both on my leadership team. And so, I needed to attract both.

I personally asked those students with a strong natural leadership ability to pray and seek God’s will for them concerning joining our leadership team. These students, because they have such strong leadership capabilities, are probably highly involved in lots of activities and organizations. I wanted them to consider using those gifts for the Kingdom, which is of infinitely more value.

Then, in order to discover which students have a willingness to lead, but perhaps have not developed those leadership skills, I publicly invited interested students to join us. I only had one requirement: that they be second year students within our ministry.

[EXPECT]

We gathered all of our new potential leaders on a Sunday evening in September. The purpose of our meeting was to share expectations. A basic rule of leadership is to have high expectations and to make them known up front. We had short-term and long-term expectations.

Short-term expectations:

• You will be at each of the leadership training sessions for the next 7 weeks.
• You wil participate and be engaged in our discussions.
• You will have all of the assigned work done. (Each week we had a packet of “homework” materials from the book “Leadership Essentials” by Greg Ogden. The assignments included in-depth Bible studies, discussion questions, and memorization.)

Long-term expectations:

• If chosen to be a leader, you will make a 1 year long commitment to leading.
• You will serve at CCH requiring an average of 10-12 hours per week.
• You will lead a specific area of ministry within CCH.
• You will meet weekly with a staff member for accountability and discipleship.
• You will also meet weekly with (at least) one younger student for the purpose of accountability and discipleship.
• You will be attend all CCH meetings, leadership meetings, and events (retreats, mission trips, etc.)

We realize these are steep expectations. Honestly, they were designed to test the commitment of each potential leader. We knew some students wouldn’t want to make these commitments and would bail. And we were OK with that. We wanted only the students willing to make and follow through with their commitment to be on the team.

[TRAIN]

After our initial informational meeting, we agreed to meet the following week. Those who were willing to make the commitment came back. Those who didn’t want to had our permission to bail.

And we lost a few after that first week. We figured that would happen. But, as the quantity of leaders went down, the quality of leaders went up.

And then, we embarked upon a process of training these potential leaders. As I mentioned earlier, we some of the elements of Greg Ogden’s workbook, “Leadership Essentials.” These packets laid the groundwork for some of the characteristics and qualities we want to see in our student leaders, such as humility, a commitment to spiritual disciplines, and so forth.

We spent some time discussing spiritual gifts and administering spiritual gifts analyses. We also talked about the history and vision and core values of our ministry. We want everyone to be on the same page as to why we, as a ministry, exist.

At the end of our 7 weeks of training, we had two handfuls of students who had put forth their time, effort, and energy into growing as leaders of our ministry. They are all on board with our ministry’s vision and values. They are primed for what is next.

[UNLEASH]

And what is next is the part of the story that remains to be written. We have finished up our training just one week ago and are now in the process of meeting and praying with our new student leaders as we discern where God can be use them within our ministry. Once we have navigated through this process, we will turn our new student leaders loose to lead.