Don’t Just Manage Your Team Members, Disciple Them

The goal is always forming lifelong disciples.

The best youth ministry leaders I’ve known all had one thing in common. It wasn’t that they were all fantastic managers, or even that they could cast an inspiring vision. What set them apart was that they all lived out Jesus’ exhortation to “go and make disciples.”

As much as they cared about running a great youth ministry and getting things done, they cared even more about seeing people grow in their relationship with Jesus. And that started with their own team.

They knew that if young people were going to be discipled, their team needed to be disciple-makers. And for that to happen, team members needed to experience discipleship themselves. So these leaders showed us what it looked like, through their ministry and their lived example.

Management and Leadership

If you’re in youth ministry for long enough, you’ll eventually find yourself leading a team. If you’re fortunate enough to have the resources, it might be a team of paid staff. But otherwise, it will be a team of volunteers.

When I first stepped into a team leader role, I was obsessed (and more than a little insecure) about being a good leader. So, I read a bunch of books on the subject.

Leadership books often draw a distinction between leadership and management.

Leadership is about casting a vision and inspiring people to work towards it. Management is about getting things done through other people; building the systems and processes that enable your team to work effectively. Peter Drucker summed it up this way: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

In youth ministry, you need both. You need to cast an inspiring vision, and also create the structures to make that vision a reality.

Veteran manager Claire Hughes Johnson points out that less experienced team members mostly need a manager. They need someone to train them, set expectations, and guide their work. More experienced team members, though, mostly need a leader. They’re already good at getting things done, but they need someone remind them of the vision and nurture a healthy team culture.

The Third Element: Discipleship

There’s a third essential element of leadership in youth ministry that you won’t find in the management books: discipleship.

There are many misconceptions about what discipleship actually is. Some think that any kind of faith formation activity is discipleship. Others think that discipleship describes any kind of small group ministry.

In reality, discipleship was a particular method of formation that Jesus himself used. In the first century, Jewish boys studied the scriptures in school until around age 13, when they typically left to learn a trade. To the brightest students, however, a rabbi would say “Come. Follow me.” These students would leave everything to live with, travel with, and learn from the rabbi.

There was no formal curriculum for this multi-year apprenticeship. It was a “continual daily relational experience, as Doug Greenwold puts it. Disciples learned by observing their rabbi’s daily life and sharing in it. This was the method Jesus used with his own disciples.

Discipling Your Team

Jesus didn’t just tell us to “go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19). He showed us how. If you want to disciple your team, it takes more than weekly one-on-ones or occasional training sessions. It’s about sharing your life with them; what I’ve heard one Christian leader describe as “life-on-life ministry.”

Here are a few ways to live that out:

1) Invite them to watch and learn

Don’t just involve team members in the parts of the ministry where they’ve got work to do. Invite them into other parts of your work where they can learn by observing.

In one past role, my boss invited me to sit in on our ministry’s rebranding process. I didn’t have much to contribute, but watching him communicate with a designer and refine the visual identity of our ministry taught me valuable lessons that I carried into my own leadership.

2) Break bread together

Some of my most formative experiences have come not from meetings, but from meals or coffees with leaders who invested in me. I don’t think it’s an accident that shared meals were a big part of Jesus’ ministry. They create a unique space for conversation and formation.

3) Get vulnerable

First-century disciples saw every side of their rabbi’s life. They didn’t just see him at his best, teaching in a synagogue. They also watched him navigate the challenging and difficult moments of his life.

In the same way, we’re called to be vulnerable with our team. We should strive to share the hard stuff: how we face setbacks, how we navigate challenging situations, and the role our faith plays amidst these difficulties.

4) Care for their needs

As you work closely with team members, you’ll start to see their wounds: their insecurities, their anxieties, the places where they are hurting. Part of discipleship is recognising these needs and caring enough to minister to them.

This takes courage. When you try to minister in these areas, you’re inviting someone to be vulnerable. They might not be ready. They might even get defensive, or tell you that you’re overstepping.

If a team member isn’t willing to open up, don’t stop caring. Vulnerability can take time. And even if they never let you minister directly into those areas, your awareness and compassion will still shape how you disciple them.

You Can’t Fake It

The challenge with real discipleship is you can’t fake it. If you just do an occasional one-hour training with your team, you can probably pretend to be the youth minister who has it all together. But if you’re really trying to disciple your team, they are going to see the real you.

That means you have to set an example worth following. You don’t have to be perfect, but as one youth minister put it, “If I want my team to be more like Jesus, the thing I’ve really got to prioritise is being more like Jesus myself.”

Making Disciple Makers

If you want to equip your team members for effective ministry, it’s not enough to be a good manager. It’s not even enough to be a visionary leader. These are important aspects of ministry leadership, but they aren’t the full-picture.

The goal of youth ministry is forming young people as lifelong disciples. But your team members will have a hard time discipling young people if they haven’t first experienced discipleship themselves. That’s where you come in.

Don’t settle for just managing your team. Disciple them.