Essential Leadership
Essential Leadership: Ministry Team Meetings That Work
by Kara Powell and the Fuller Youth Institute
Now Available!
If you’re like most youth workers, you hold regular meetings for your adult volunteers and small group leaders. And if you’re like most youth workers, all too often these meetings degenerate into a string of announcements about upcoming events and fail to lead your team toward deeper ministry philosophies or practices.
Essential Leadership offers you something different: a school year’s worth of training modules that are both easy to use but also geared for heavy contextualization based on the particular needs of leaders, kids, and communities.
Journeying as a Team
The companion piece to this curriculum, the Essential Leadership Participant’s Guide, is a complementary resource available for staff and volunteers that helps them mull over and apply the training to their lives and ministries during the few weeks following your team’s discussion.
Order the Participant’s Guide Online
Topics You’ll Cover
- An Assessment of Your Ministry’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
- Integrating Students into the Life of the Church
- Effective Family Ministry
- Holistic Ministry: Giving Kids More Than Just a Bible Study
- Giving and Receiving Mentoring
- Getting the Rest You Need
- Deep Justice/Maximizing Your Next Service Experience or Missions Trip
- Helping Kids Through Hurt, Pain, and Trauma
- Giving Your Kids a Faith that Lasts
Watch a 2-Minute Video About Essential Leadership from Kara Powell
What Other Leaders Are Saying About Essential Leadership:
Kara Powell isn’t just a terrific thinker and writer about youth ministry — she knows what it’s like in the trenches. This is deep impact material.”
Dr. John Ortberg
Pastor and author
Menlo Park Presbyterian Church
The quality of resources that are coming from FYI is unparalleled these days, and Essential Leadership is as good as anything I’ve seen. Deploying an increasing number of well cared for adult ministry leaders is the not-so-secret key to our ability to share Jesus with kids in life-on-life relationships. Our staff who use Deep Leadership will find it an extremely valuable asset in this multiplication strategy, a long-needed tool that will help busy people invest in their mission-partner volunteers.
Dr. Dave Rahn
Chief Ministry Officer
Youth for Christ/USA
Kara and the team at FYI have filled an important training gap with this excellent resource that moves volunteers from being chaperones to becoming shepherds. This thoroughly-researched, user-friendly approach (team journals, group meeting guides, etc.) is precisely the kind of mentor-focused training that our leaders need and the kind of motivating/equipping resource that wise (and busy) youth workers want to provide but seldom have time to prepare.
Dr. Duffy Robbins
Professor of Youth Ministry
Eastern University
Essential Leadership is an essential tool for building your youth ministry team into a group that forges ahead with unity, passion, knowledge, and depth in ways that will take kids deep in their faith…both now and for the rest of their lives.”
Dr. Walt Mueller
Center for Parent/Youth Understanding
Additional Resources for Deep/Essential Leadership
Deep Leadership and the Deep Leadership Training Journal were available exclusively on this website in Fall 2008 as electronic files. Youth Specialties/Zondervan has released these resources in hard copy form under the new title in January 2010.
Below you will find video, audio, and article resources that complement the Deep/Essential Leadership training materials.
Video Resource for “Deep Impact” Module
Note: Click the PLAY button to watch this video on the FYI site, and click in the center of the video to be redirected to YouTube, where you have the option of showing the video full-screen.
