All youth workers want to be a hero to someone. Let’s be real, it’s in our DNA. You may want to be a hero to your students or their parents. Other youth workers may desire to look like a hero to their pastor or church board. Regardless of your ministry context, we all want to be a youth ministry hero!

So how can you become a hero in your ministry? All the youth ministry heroes I have known had one thing in common: they were action heroes! Super hero youth workers always are.

If you want to be a youth ministry hero, you will need to embrace the leadership bias. The leadership bias is simple: Great leaders have a bias toward action! Hero type leaders are doers more than they are thinkers. They seize opportunities more than they set strategies, because youth ministry heroes are action heroes.

If you want to become a youth ministry action hero, start by taking these three steps.

3 Steps to Becoming a Youth Ministry Action Hero

Just do it.

It’s not just the Nike slogan anymore, its what great leaders do! Here’s the first key to heroic leadership: Do something as soon as you know it needs to be done. You don’t have to suffer from analysis paralysis! Youth ministry heroes do what needs to be done as soon as they know it’s needed!

I don’t know about you, but I tend to overthink things. Especially big ministry decisions! Here’s what I’ve found though: 90% of the time I end up making the same decision I would have made at the beginning of the process. Great youth workers are heroes because they don’t wait, they do. So don’t wait too long to make the decision you know is right, just do it!

Don’t do too much.

This is the thing that holds a lot of youth workers back. We do too much! Great youth workers don’t. They know the importance of finishing one thing before starting another.

I’m an idea guy. I can have hundreds of great ideas a week, and I’m generally convinced they can change the face of youth ministry! The problem is I only have 8-10 hours a day to put them into action. This means that anything more than one new project a week is too much.

Youth ministry heroes tend to do more than the rest of us because they don’t do too much. When you have a game changing idea, write it down. You can always come back to it later, but don’t sabotage your success by trying to do too much!

When in doubt, do.

Sometimes you know the right thing to do and just need to do it. Other times you can go round and round and still have no idea what the right answer is. When you don’t know the right answer, it’s all too easy to agonize over a decision so much that you never make one. If we’re not careful, our indecision will keep us from making a decision.

The truth is we won’t always know the right answer, but the best leaders I know default to a “do” mentality. Action will always take us farther than inaction, so when in doubt, don’t wait. Do.

To become a youth ministry hero, embrace the leadership bias and default to action. What step is holding you back from becoming the leader you could be?

 

Jeff Cochran is the Pellissippi Campus Student Pastor of Faith Promise Church and leads the http://ymlead.com/ website. He is a veteran youth worker of over 12 years and a DYM author.