M.W. passed me a question that how to get over the barriers between a student follower and a student leader. Oops, it’s really a difficult question.
In fact, I think it’s not ONE question – we can rethink our experience… then we’ll find that there’re some barriers from THREE directions at least.
I’d like to distinguish them like this:
If a students cannot lead maybe because:
No.1 Most students cannot grow into leaders and he/she is not an exception.
No.2 We never stop challenging but the student is not a potential one on earth.
No.3 The student should be a leader but we haven’t challenged him/her properly.
Though all of them will make us headache, not all of them are impossible to overcome, while not all of them can be fixed either.
No.1 is about the environment. I have to admit that the students in Ch@ is not so mature as the students in North America, especially in emotional and social aspects. Communication and cooperation is difficult to them. That’s why we might get a handful of faithful followers, and some of them would like to stand up and be ready to lead. However, mostly, once the staff hand out the leadership to the student leader, those followers might not follow anymore. Because the student leader doesn’t know how to live among them and make the fellows to follow.
It’s not only about leadership skills. That’s why they cannot lead well even we tried to help them develop in leadership skills. For their personality is not as big as their responsibility.
You can recall some frustrated moment in ministry to find it out… How many times your disciples get late for Bible study group, and give you a “sorry” but not the finished assignments you gave them at the last time. And how many times they cannot bring their promises to reality, or word to action, or plans to events.
In fact, it’s difficult to us to get a student who has already been mature in personality, more or less he/she seems to be a kid. I won’t discuss the family education of pre-college education, for that’s why they are like who are they now. The immaturity of most students is like the gravitation in our planet of ministry. We just cannot get rid of it by ourselves.
If we keep the God Factor element in our mind, the status quo cannot disappoint us. For even most of the students are not mature in personality and not ready for leading. Why not pray for God that He pull us off from the gravitation? – He can bring us the natural leader who is mature in characters even there’s just only one on that campus.
No.2 is a not a big problem but just like sometime we might stumble by small fences, it will give us trouble if we’re not careful. That means we forget a very important principle in spiritual movements – selection and filtering.
It’s not wrong to expect all the students are potential leaders in our ministry, but we can never take it too serious. That’s why observation is the crucial step in a catalytic ministry. We have to choose a Mr./Miss. Right.
On the other hand, we shall be flexible. We’ll have some idea or sense to certain students for a while, but it not means he/she will be a leader finally. We must keep observing and keep selecting.
We might not know the students throughly and we just cannot escape from the failure of selection sometimes. For the students are always ready to “surprise” us in next second: disappear, abandonment, or depression will come out at any time. We have to be ready for looking for a substitute player all the time.
Like No.2, a barrier we made by ourselves mostly, No.3 is also a trouble we can figure it out. However, unfortunately, not all staff are good at developing leaders, especially in catalytic ministry, which means less time we can spent with the students and waited for them growing into a leader.
It’s not a difficult problem if the staff knows how to help a student growing both in spirituality and leadership. However, not all the staff know it. That’s why the No.3 problem happens. It’s not a barrier between a follower and a leader, but a wall between a talent staff and a unskilled one. We need help the staff but not the students in this circumstance.
All right, We’ve checked up all the three possible reasons that why the barriers are there. It’s time to you to evaluate where’s your barrier from. Pray and try to find out the biggest cause in your ministry. I think it’s the first practical step we can take.