We have been hearing a lot about cliques and other problems with student leaders recently. In the past, we talked about how our goal is never to try to eliminate the perception of cliques. Merely attacking the perception of cliques can be an impossible goal because, unfortunately, there will always be the few that will still voice their unhappiness. Plus, chasing after an impossible goal can be incredibly discouraging.

What the goal should be is for your students to be doing everything they can to love other students and to be as inclusive as possible. This goal wasn’t new to our student leadership team, but we noticed that the student leaders were no longer doing their best to love other students. So we decided to talk about what it means to be a student leader. Instead of talking about the actions we can take, we talked about the characteristics of a student leader. That student leader is one that can’t help but to love and serve people. After compiling a list of the characteristics, we had a time where we could intentionally pray for those things to be true of them.

We are stoked about this exercise because it will hopefully not just combat cliques, but several other problems we have been seeing in our student leaders (setting an example on social media being a BIG one—probably a subject that deserves its own blog post!).

What are you doing to motivate your students into being more inclusive in your ministry?

Colton