Healthy and active student leaders are an important piece of an effective campus ministry. As both a former student leader and a campus ministry leader, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of high quality student leaders over the years. But I (and we) cannot coast on yesterday’s leaders and successes to accomplish what God has for us today and tomorrow.
There is an important theme in Scripture, something that is essential for the body of Christ generally, and certainly also important for every specific campus ministry: God’s method is often recursive, one generation telling another generation (Josh 4:1-10), disciples making disciples (Matt 4:19), and leaders developing leaders (2 Tim 2:1-2).
In the Church, this process may happen over the course of months, years, or even decades. But in college ministry it must occur in just a few years or hopefully less, and this can be quite the challenge!
As current leaders, there can be a temptation to just throw any warm body into a position of responsibility. Or to seek out the super smart student who’s bored and has free time, or the students who neglect their studies and are interested in something social and happy to help run the show. Or, maybe, we spend all our time looking for someone with a high “leadership quotient” (natural ability to influence those around them), hoping for that perfect student leader to come along. The first might work, the second isn’t headed in a good direction, and there might be something to the last one, but all of these approaches are missing something key.
Unfortunately, I’ve fallen prey to these temptations at times. My natural approach is to tackle problems head-on and solve them quickly. We need student leaders? Then let’s make a list of students who are involved with the church and love Jesus, then go through the list quickly evaluating the potential of each student. And then pursue those ranked highest on the list. I’ve done something like this before, and I’ve found some success, but often it doesn’t work out and is an inefficient use of time and effort.
Consider how Jesus chose his “student leaders”:
“Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, He called His disciples to Himself; and from them He chose twelve whom He also named apostles.” Luke 6:12-13
He went out to pray, and prayed all night. Then He chose twelve.
Here’s the key: we need to pray. How often is my first response to a problem either Google or a pros/cons list?
Let’s pray for God to send us leaders, for God to enable us to identify the right leaders, and for God to give us the grace to faithfully develop these leaders.
I’m not saying to ignore gift sets, clearly God has gifted and called some students more to public ministry and responsibility than others. But we need the wisdom of God, not merely a quick human analysis!
This semester, I’ve made my list, but I’m praying over this list. Instead of trying to “solve this problem” on my own, I’m spending weeks in prayer over this list, and I’m asking my current student leaders to do the same.
We need the wisdom Jesus had when He selected the twelve; we need wisdom from Heaven. I encourage each of us to do likewise.