A Resource to Develop Student Leaders

July 6th, 2007

Gregg Taylor

What resources would you recommend to help develop student leaders…

…especially if you haven’t had any student leaders and want to begin to select and shape a handful of students for leadership in your campus ministry?

A great question from a friend of mine, now in his second year of trying to rebuild a Wesley Foundation that has had a lot of problems. It’s a great question for a couple of reasons. First, if you’re in a rebuilding effort and you’re just beginning to identify students for leadership in your campus ministry, and you don’t have a firm handle on where they really are in their discipleship, you probably want a resource that will help them grow and help you assess where they need the most growth so you can more effectively structure your future leadership development. In other words, you need a resource to act like a scale that gives you a reading on the discipleship and leadership weight of the students you’re investing in—to see where they are and where they need to go (or at least where you’d like them to go).

Second, my friend’s question rightly assumes that with the glut of leadership materials on the market there’s got to be something useful out there (even for campus ministry) that helps him avoid the very time consuming and often frustrating effort of trying to reinvent the wheel. Who wants to do that?

Tim Elmore of Growing Leaders, Inc. has developed an interactive, engaging, and scriptural resource that uses images to provoke deeper conversations around a variety of discipleship and leadership topics. It’s designed with the image-driven student culture in mind and can be adapted to suit your needs. Habitudes: Images That Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes is currently available in a series of four volumes, each focused a particular overarching theme: “The Art of Self-Leadership,” “The Art of Connecting with Others,” “The Art of Leading Others,” and “The Art of Changing Culture.” As with a lot of material, you can purchase a Habitudes kit, which includes a DVD with images and some other tools to help you take your students through it.

I recommended Habitudes to my friend, and I recommend it to you. Here’s some direct linkage to get more information.