Unhealthy Student Leadership

By Doug Franklin December 1, 2011

There are a lot of folks out there who have tried student leadership and failed. They put students in positions of leadership and saw no real change. In fact their youth ministry was hurt by jealous and accusations of favoritism. Doing student leadership wrong is not like doing a bad job of small groups. When a student leadership program goes bad it really goes bad for the whole ministry. If you want to do student leadership right you need a deep passion for leadership. You must believe that it can make a huge difference in your students’ lives and you have to be able to risk. In other words you need to go all in. Student leadership is risky because it is never the easiest, cheapest or fastest way to get this done. Most adults evaluate programs on those three levels. People developers don’t. They see the long-term value in letting students make decisions, mess things up, debrief with a mentor and then start all over.