Student Leadership

There are some things that just seem to go together, that just seem right together. A hot dog and a bag of peanuts at a baseball game, going swimming and drinking lemonade in the summer, drinking hot coffee on a chilly fall evening on your porch and having a student leadership team as apart of your student ministry.

I can't imagine not having student leadership as apart of student ministry. It seems like any student ministry worth its salt has a student leadership team. But the question that we had to ask ourselves was why do we need one. In my first year of working for Park Chapel I tried to implement this program without answering the question. The leadership team never really got off the ground and I believe it was because we had not answered this question.

Almost a year and a half later Danny Curry and myself sat down and started to answer the question of why and for what purpose do we establish a student leadership team. We came up with four reasons why we felt led to establish such a team.

Leverage and Influence-Influencing the students who are ready to step up in order that they can influence other students is worth a great amount of our time and energy.

Leadership Training-We believe that it is necessary for us to develop the leaders that will be leading the church in the future.

Another Layer of Discipleship-We know that there are students who are ready to take the next step in their discipleship process and student leadership is an avenue in which they can get that kind of discipleship.


Facilitates Communication-It is vital that we communicate to the students we want to be a positive influence for us. It is equally important for them to be able to communicate to our teen staff and volunteers. Being on the same page with our students will make us a much more effective student ministry.

Once we understood why we needed a student leadership team we also needed to establish what this group was going to look like. The expectations that we have of our student leaders are extremely high and we realized that just the average student would probably not want to be responsible for fulfilling these expectations. We were intentional in doing this so as to not create just another small group, or something easy that they can put on a resume, but actually something they have to desire and work at.

I have been so encouraged and excited to see the students who have committed to this thus far. We are already seeing some great results and we anticipate seeing many more. We are leaving Sunday on our mission trip and I can't wait to see how God is going to use the student leaders to make an impact during this week. Please be praying for us.