2006 LEADERTREKS LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SURVEY
Executive Summary

The typical youth ministry in a local church includes four core components including ongoing programming, small group discipleship, evangelistic outreach, and retreats/summer camp.  The purpose of this study was to assess the importance of student leadership development in youth ministry.

Six thousand people on the YouthWorker Journal mailing list received a 25-question email survey.  The return rate was 4% (251) providing enough respondents to make broad generalizations from the survey results.  The typical church (55.4%) has a weekend attendance between 100-499 people.  The typical youth group has 50 or less students in their youth ministry (77.3%) with one full-time paid staff member (50.2%).  Youth workers gain information on youth ministry from two sources: books or magazines (38.1%) and internet websites (37.7%); however, the primary source of information on leadership is books or magazines (48.3%).  

There were several key findings in this study.  First, nearly two-thirds of youth workers believe that “students can learn to be leaders” (64%) and that “leadership development is important in youth ministry” (61%).  However, very few churches (6%) have a comprehensive student leadership development program.  Second, while youth workers generally believe that student leadership development is important, few senior church leaders (12%) and students (8%) believe it is important.  Third, despite the support of youth workers for student leadership development, only 1 in 5 youth ministries (20%) offers their students opportunities to lead others.  Finally, about a third of youth workers are really into leadership development (34%), believe that they should teach leadership development curriculum to students (34%), and that students should attend training events on this topic (32%).