Hot as Taco Bell’s Fire Sauce…
1. “Be clear about the adult role in this process.” (23)
The role of your adults should be essential to defining your practice of student leadership. As adults come side by side with your student leaders they become a more intimate part of their lives, as they “mentor, disciple and encourage these young people (23).” The adults are still part of the doing, but they beginning to do less alone, and more with a student leader by their side. Adults have to walked through this transition, but I have found that they enjoy it more in the end.
2. “In my specific situation what are the roadblocks to developing student leaders?” (26)
I think that this entire section is huge. We must recognize what are the barriers to allowing this to happen in our specific situation. The authors list a few; elitism, unrealistic expectations, performance-based lifestyle, being too judgmental on student leaders and using leaders as a quick fix, but the list could go on. There are many assumptions and judgments people tend to make about student leaders and if a student leadership program is going to succeed you must recognize them and work through them with your church.
3. The Life of a Leader Section (37-118)
The fact that the authors began the book with a cumulative section on how to build up the life of your leaders reveals their hearts. It is obvious that their passion lies not in what they can get from students, but what can happen in the life of a student leader. Beginning with the heart of the student, rather than the program is admirable and serves as a good reminder for those of us with student leaders. How their heart is comes before how they can help us.
4. Helping Friends in Crisis- Case Studies (131)
Helping your student leaders apply what they are learning is invaluable. Case studies help them put their new found knowledge into action. In the scenario of counseling other students in the Peer Ministry section it is essential to practice in simulate situations. This section helps them take the two previous week’s knowledge from head to hands, mouth and feet; especially if the adult leader prepares enough ahead of time.
5. The help boxes throughout the lessons in the book, entitled “You’ll Need”, “Leader Hint” or a resource/citing box.
Anytime you are planning a lesson that you did not write the “You’ll Need” boxes are ideal. They help the presenter to focus on what they need to do, and how they need to adapt the material to fit their group, rather than what they need to bring. Throughout the book when they use a resource they put it in a similar box to the side. This draws special attention to the resources that have helped them and make it easy to look those up if you are looking for more material on a specific chapter of this book. The “Leader Hints” were not as common, but provided options for size and style when needed.
Cold as Freeze-Pops…
1. The fluctuation in time and length of the sessions.
When I went through 5 of these sessions with my student leaders I found the time management to be pretty far off. I tend to time things out ahead of time, but went with their times the first session and ended up having way too much material and had to cut it short. At some times, although few, there isn’t enough material and you have to add a little to it or stretch it out. Even if you follow their times on the sessions they fluctuate enormously. It makes it difficult to be consistent. The primary problem I found is that it often would go too long if you don’t cut elements of it out. If you only have an hour for your meeting there is no way you can get through many of these sessions. Many student leaders are so busy that an hour is often all that most of us can have with them.
2. Lack of creativity at making the Scripture and goal come alive in Lessons.(37-118)
At times they hit strokes of genius at making the point of a lesson clear through an activity or object lesson, but it was common to read a lesson and not find any part of it that would really grab your students. Students today need more than filling in blanks of a paper, they need to see that Scripture can come to life and intersect with where they are today. They need ideas of action to test out the ideas they grapple with each week. I often got the feel of a Sunday School class when reading a lesson and I was looking for something much more enticing and captivating for my student leaders. It would have been awesome to end each week with an action or challenge to put feet to their faith. This could help them keep the lesson in mind all week through the constant opportunity of fulfilling that week challenge.
3. Discover Your Spiritual Gifts, Part Deux (75-79)
In Discover Youth Spiritual Gifts (Part 1), the students are turned toward the scripture to discover what it says about spiritual gifts. They are then encouraged to apply it to their life. In Part Deux, the spiritual gifts are brought into the scientific realm of a test or questionnaire. Although I have taken these tests in the past and given them to some of my students, I find myself getting more an more uncomfortable turning to a test to help our students discover their spiritual gifts through a scientific equation. The very term “spiritual gifts”, connotes that we ought to rely most heavily on the spirit to discover them. In addition, this test leaves the “touchy” spiritual gifts off of it, such as healing, tongues and interpretation, because there is really no good way to test them. My point is that we should not teach our kids to rely on a test to discover these gifts we ought to guide them into a relationship with the Lord and a lifestyle of ministry where the Holy Spirit is able to reveal them to them, with the help of mentoring relationships.
4. Session 31- Evaluating Your Ministry (211-214)
This final session for the Program-Planning Leadership Teams is hardly effective. Although the tools presented are decent for evaluating events/programs, the presentation of them has much to be desired. There isn’t a lot of interaction with the students concerning the forms themselves, but rather on their responses to them. The students ought to help determine if the questions are the right ones or if they need altered. The time of the meeting is shrunk to 25 minutes and the team building section of the lesson has virtually nothing to do with team building. It seems like this session was kind of dropped in at the end without enough structure or creativity to be the final session.
5. The way the book ends. (pg. 231…)
After a book packed with lessons to build your student leadership team it is concluded with a weak evaluation session that is intended as an end piece for the Program-Planning Leadership Teams. Following it is a decent appendix with some useful materials, but it lacks anything that ties the book back together. After beginning the book with the Life of a Leader section, the authors end it programmatically. It would be more appropriate to have some sort of Rite of Passage or Celebration of the journey the leadership team has been on. Whichever track a leadership team took they would end up at the same place tying together “The Life of a Leader” section and the track of ministry style or focus that they went through.
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