TIM HAWKINS says youth leaders must invest time in other leaders, not just kids, to multiply their ministry.

It will come as a surprise to most people, but for some youth leaders their love of youth ministry can become a trap that hinders the very ministry they are trying to do. Let me explain why.

Most of us get involved in youth ministry because we love it; we have an affinity with teenagers and we love their spirit, their idealism and their teachability. We love being on the front line, helping them to discover Jesus, growing them as his disciples and equipping them as life-changing disciple-makers.

The difficulty is that in the local church, the youth ministry is limited to the number of students that the leader can contact. Many youth groups never grow much beyond 30 or 40 kids simply because they have a youth leader who loves spending time with the kids and wants to do most of the ministry themselves.

That’s why it’s vital for youth leaders to be able to develop and nurture other leaders, so they’re not running things on their own.

Youth ministries need to develop strategies for not just growing a ministry, but growing a team of leaders who can continue that ministry and allow it to multiply. That is, if I invest in the lives of six students, the lives of those six students are changed. But if I invest in the lives of six leaders, then potentially the lives of 36 students can be changed.

Youth pastors or key leaders should spend a lot of time with their other leaders, not just with the students. Someone has said that to have the maximum outcome, you really should spend 80 per cent of your time with the top 20 per cent of your leaders. Leaders need to be encouragers who will build up the other leaders around them and form a team.

One of the marks of a leader is that they can actually attract other leaders to work with them – not just that they can attract followers. A true leader gets other people on board with where they are going. Youth leaders out there don’t have to run themselves into the ground doing every program imaginable, to the point where they never want to youth ministry again. Sadly, that is a cycle that is often repeated. Working as a team means you avoid the ‘crash and burn’ mentality that many youth leaders have had forced upon them.

The number one job of a youth pastor should be to disciple his or her leaders. Grow together as Christians; focus on each other’s spiritual growth, and make sure someone is catching up with the leaders to see how they are going personally and in ministry.

If you’re ministering to a handful of students on your own, keep at it. But make it your number one priority regularly and faithfully to ask God to raise up at least one other leader to work in partnership with you. I’ve seen many examples of that prayer being answered for small churches. God is able to do things like that. That creates the possibility for the ministry to expand.

In the end, team leadership is important because that’s what Jesus did. That may sound pious, but if you look at his three years of public ministry, he didn’t run spectacular ministries that everyone was excited about, but which all collapsed when he left. What he did was handpick twelve men and train them as his disciples. His mission wasn’t just to establish a spectacular ministry for three years. He saw that there was a whole world to be saved, and to do that he spent most of his time with the twelve – raising them up as a leadership team.

Did it work? Well, here we are in the 21st century and people are becoming Christians at the ends of the earth.

Tim Hawkins is Youth Minister at St Paul’s, Castle Hill. This article is adapted from his seminar, ‘Developing effective youth leaders’ at the recent Willow Creek Leadership Conference in Sydney.