In today’s youth ministry, we have volunteers ranging in both age and experience. From the recent high school graduate to the retired corporate executives, youth leaders are responsible for discipling and developing all of them. This is no easy task because there is no one size fits all method to ensure that we are preparing our leader in every stage of their personal life.

However, we can ensure that we are guiding them on a road that helps them invest in their personal growth, thereby preparing them to help us lead our students. If the old adage of “hurt people, hurt people” is true, then “healthy and whole people” should help to create more “healthy and whole people.” The following resources are great tools to use as we help our leaders remain healthy. 

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazzero

This book has been an amazing tool in helping leaders assess their personal spiritual health. For the places where they may have fallen short, it offers great tips for getting back on track. This book also comes with a companion workbook and a small group curriculum that your entire team can walk through. Not only does it give tools and skills necessary to maintain personal spiritual health, it helps leaders add tools to their arsenal of how to help ensure that the students are developing in ways that keep them spiritually and emotionally healthy. Also, there are additional versions of this book like Emotionally Healthy Leader and Emotionally Healthy Church that offer a deeper dive into how these principles can assist with the overall health of the entire ministry. 

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry

This book is amazing in helping us better understand how to relate to ourselves and others well. This book allows you to do a self-assessment so that you can strengthen strong EI areas and discover the areas of your EI that need work. Having a strong EI puts us in the best position to understand, empathize and lead others; especially young people that are growing and developing and learning to understand themselves.

5 Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell

This book is an excellent resource to help you and your leaders understand where they are on the leadership spectrum and how to grow to the highest levels. This book helps you and your leader understand both the positives and the negatives of their current leadership style and it outlines a path for getting to the next level. This is important because high level leaders develop other high level leaders.

Discipling and developing leader is by no means an easy task. But with tools and resources like these, we are better equipped to take our leaders, and therefore our youth ministry, to the next level and beyond.