I recently wrote an article about the ONE thing for a successful college ministry. To recap, I was asked by a supporter of another denomination's college ministry what I thought the one most important thing was in having a su cessful college ministry. They already have an excellent campus minister and a beautiful campus facility. My answer was "the one thing is student leadership".
In a meeting with great college ministers in another state recently, I was asked, "What's the one or main thing in developing student leaders?".
To me the One Thing in the One Thing is a set weekly meeting with each of your student leaders. Through the years we saw many of our students go into the ministry and they were ones who had been headed to Law school and Med school...so it wasn't like they had no options or goals prior to our ministry. People would ask why we saw so many students move toward ministry. For a long time I didn't know and just said, it must be God. I will stick with that answer but add to it.
From the beginning of my years of ministry on a college campus, I told our student leaders tha I wanted to meet with them one hour each week. During the first half of that hour we would talk about personal stuff, school, family, girlfriend/boyfriend, whatever. During the second half of the hour we would talk about their leadership responsibilities, upcoming tasks, things just finished, etc.
This takes a significant amount of yourntime each week. As our ministry grew and we had additional staffers, wen divided up our leaders to do these weekly meetings. A friend of mine met with two of his leaders at a time. If I were starting again with it, I might say 30 minutes instead of an hour.
Next: More on Weekly Meetings
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