Banging our heads against a wall: A model for student to student Leadership Developement

As we have gone along in Servant Leadership training at West E. Free, one of the biggest parts of servant leadership that is imperative is breeding a culture of leadership development and investment amongst students. What do I mean by this? This year, we have 6 seniors that will graduate from our servant leadership team hence leaving us with a perceived void. If all of these Seniors have done their "job" as High School students and servant leaders, they have invested in someone else that will step in and begin learning the ropes when it comes to servant leadership. How might this practically play out?

Our servant leadership team is in charge of planning some of the events that our student ministry has each year. During these events, we challenged our Servant Team to find one person that they might bring along with them, that they could invest in, love on, and really bring them into the understanding of leadership. In some cases it worked, and in other cases, we saw that we still need to cast the vision and continue to really breed a culture of leadership development.

Another practical application in this area is that we offer a "basic training" (leadership development for anyone that is interested) and this is a semester long comittment where students will learn about self leadership as well as comittment to the God of the universe. When we put this into place, there was a natural outlet for our servant team to invite other students to for leadership development. Because our servant team is "closed" we didn't invite people to be a part of servant team during the year, but rather invited students to be a part of basic training. And this worked. Again, in some cases and not others.

I guess I would encourage us to begin to cast vision by talking about investing in others and loving others as student to student. When we begin to do this, leadership development becomes less of banging our heads on the wall and more a flow of concentration that turns into great leaders for the kingdom of God. Let's face it...We can't do it on our own, we need other leaders, student leaders to be a part of this process!