Raising Up Student Leaders: Empowering Teens to Lead in Youth Ministry

You probably got into youth ministry for pretty much one reason: you want to raise up the next generation of Christ followers.

Much of what that entails is you pouring out your knowledge, your expertise, and your relationships with teenagers and adolescents in the next generation. It means that you get to share what you know and pass on knowledge to them so that they can someday be the future of the church. But an idea that is becoming increasingly prevalent in modern Christianity, and rightfully so, is that teenagers are not simply the future of the Church. Teenagers are the now of the Church as well.

If you want the healthiest youth group culture possible, it is going to be incredibly important that you do not do all of the leading. Because the truth of the matter is, your students are leading whether you let them lead or not. Research from Fuller backs this up. Teenagers look up to one another and sideways at one another for cues on how to be, how to live, what to believe, what is cool, and what makes sense. And so, if in your youth group culture the only people being given the license to lead are you and the other adult leaders, you are missing an opportunity to capitalize on a dynamic that is already happening.

Students are already leading other students either toward or away from the throne of Jesus.

But leading with the next generation is not always as easy as it sounds.

So let’s talk about three things to watch out for as you empower teens to lead in your youth ministry.

1. Lean Into Where They’re Already Gifted

For better or for worse, we have kind of figured out as a society how to do church.

You need to set up chairs. You need to run the tech booth. There’s gotta be people who sing on stage. People have to do some talking from the Bible. Someone has to lead the discussion conversation. There is also usually some kind of game time. For the most part, this is how churches run, or at least how youth groups run, all across North America. And with that comes some pretty strong structures around where students can lead in your youth ministry.

There is nothing wrong with teaching students how to operate within the church and how to use their gifts within the normal structures of church world. That is good. That is helpful.

But, and the research backs this up, if you really want to unlock the potential of your students, and you want to empower your teens to lead in your youth ministry, one of the best things you can do is start paying attention to where your students are already passionate and allow them to lead with that skill set at the forefront.

How This Looked For Me In High School

Let me give you an example from my high school years. I did not grow up in a large youth group that had all the bells and whistles. My youth group was usually 15 to 25 kids, sixth through 12th grade. And our youth pastor was not particularly cool. She was a woman in her mid-40s who just loved us.

We may not have had the biggest budget in the world. We may not have had all the coolest toys and events. But one of the things my youth pastor in high school did extraordinarily well was let us lead based on where we were gifted.

In the early years of my time in that youth ministry, there was a heavy emphasis on prayer teams and home-based small groups that were student-led because the students who comprised the core of our youth ministry were gifted in those areas.

But in the later years of my time at youth group, some of those teams did not exist anymore. Instead, there was a fully developed student worship team, a team for dramas, and human videos (remember human videos? Like the Everything Skit, for example? Yeah. We were that youth group.)

The point is, the way our youth ministry looked, the programs we ran, and the leadership teams that were student-led were not set by the youth pastor based on her favorite way to do church.

Rather, our youth pastor was wise enough to look at the students she had in her youth group at the time, figure out what we were passionate about, and then point those passions toward kingdom purposes. And because she did that, many of us are still serving Jesus in one way or another through those same skill sets today, 20 years later.

2. Rules Are Good and Risks Are Better

When you allow teenagers to lead in your youth ministry, you are going to need to give them some structure and some rules.

Even the teenagers who love following Jesus the most are far from perfect people. Some of the students who are most gifted in music in your youth group may also not have the best theology yet. Some of the teenagers who can get up on stage and do an amazing job delivering a devotional to the rest of the students may also have secret struggles they are dealing with.

Having boundaries that align with your church’s view of leadership is going to make a lot of sense. So it is important that you figure out what makes the most sense for your church and what the standards are for students to lead in certain capacities in your ministry.

For some churches, you may want students who get on stage and deliver the Word to align with your church’s theology in every single area. For other churches, if a student is going to get on stage and play guitar during worship, you may decide that they don’t even need to be a believer yet. What rules you have around that stuff is totally up to your church and the way you handle leadership roles as a church culture.

But something that is really important to note is that while rules are good, risks are better.

Jesus Modeled This Principle

Jesus took risks when He developed the next generation of, well, really the first generation of leaders of the church. He didn’t pick guys who were ready yet. And He often unleashed them to go do things that mattered before they were ready, which meant that the disciples failed sometimes, both before Jesus’ death and resurrection and, if you read the New Testament closely, after His death and resurrection too.

So, if Jesus is our model, then one of the best things we can do for our teenagers is give them structure, give them rules, set boundaries, but then also take some risks in what we allow them to do.

You may occasionally put a student in a leadership position and then they say or do something that requires you to pull in the ropes a little bit. That’s okay. That’s part of leadership development. If we only allow students to lead in our youth group if they are 100% ready to lead, then we will not have any students leading in our youth group. Because they’re kids. That means sometimes they are going to do kid things.

But one of the coolest ways a person can grow in their walk with Jesus is not just by learning intellectually, but by actually going out and doing something with the knowledge they are gaining.

So rules are good, but risks are better. Start asking yourself: what risks can I become comfortable with in allowing my teenagers to lead in my ministry?

3. Sow Grass More Than You Pull Weeds

One of my favorite sections in all of Scripture is Romans 6. In that section of Scripture, the Apostle Paul shares with us the key to sanctification. He explains how it works in Christ and how it is that we become more and more like Jesus.

He says, essentially, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we are dead to our sin. And so, rather than paying a bunch of attention to our sin, we should instead consider ourselves dead to it, stop giving it center stage, and consider ourselves alive to God in Christ Jesus. We should put our attention and focus on the One who has saved us and on the One who is raising us up into a new creation. That’s how we actually get rid of the sin currently in our lives.

Rather than making our sin the main character and then waging war against it with all of our might, what makes more sense is to consider ourselves dead to sin, minimize it in our window, and maximize our view of Jesus’ work on the cross, who God is, and who He is making us into. When we do that, we become more like Jesus over time because of what we’re pursuing rather than what we’re running away from.

Another way I like to think about that is through gardening. If you’ve ever had to deal with lawn maintenance, then you may know that one of the most ineffective ways to get rid of weeds in your yard is to constantly go around manually pulling every weed that lives among your lawn.

What makes a lot more sense is to aggressively sow grass.

When you sow more and more of the good stuff, the bad stuff gets choked out. It dies away. It cannot survive because there is so much good being poured in that the bad just cannot take over. That’s the way it’s meant to be in our Christianity.

If you resonate with that idea and want to teach it in your youth group, check out the Crowded Series from the Shop.

And bringing this back to raising up the next generation of student leaders, when we sow more positive things into their development, when we call out the good in them more than we criticize the bad in them, we will see them grow in all areas of their development, both spiritually and as leaders.

Accountability matters.

Correction matters.

Rebuking is necessary sometimes.

But if students only ever feel pressure and disappointment when they step into a leadership position in your youth group, they’re likely not to last very long. And the effects of that can create church hurt that follows them well into adulthood.

Rather, when students step into a position of leadership in your church and, more often than pointing out their mistakes or where they didn’t execute perfectly, you’re calling out and drawing out the good things you see growing in them, then even as they correct those mistakes over time, they will do it from a place of security and identity in Christ rather than from a place of insecurity and feeling like they’re not good enough.

So when it comes to raising up the next generation of student leaders, one of the best things we can do is sow more grass than pull weeds.

No Matter How You Do It, Leading With Students Is as Important as Leading Students

Exactly how all of this looks in your ministry depends. For a small youth ministry, you’re probably not going to have an entire leadership program with booklets, monthly meetings and training. It is probably going to look a lot more chill than that.

If you’re a larger ministry, you may develop this quickly. Three years from now, you may have an entire internship program running at your church launching students off with ministry experience. Regardless of how you do it, just know that leading with students is as important as leading students.

Leading students is important. We have to lead students. If they lead themselves only, then it’s the blind leading the blind. Adult leadership matters. But even when it came to transforming the world, Jesus, who is perfectly capable of leading the earth all by Himself, chose to lead with us rather than just leading us.

He decided to involve us in the process, knowing that we would do it imperfectly. He did it because He knew it would be good for us to lead one another toward the throne.

So, as we develop our own little kingdoms in our church youth groups, let’s model Jesus. Let’s model the way God has led in the context of the gospel.

Let’s lead with our students rather than just leading our students. And when we do, the future of the Church will be just fine. But the now of the Church will be even better.