How to increase my sphere of influence

My influence and impact as a leader are the direct results of how well I empower others. Maybe you are juggling multiple ministries in your church. Maybe you’re working another job to support yourself and your family. Maybe you want to have a healthy, thriving student ministry, but you feel stretched to the max already. You can’t do it all. Look, I’ve been there and know how it feels to be in those seasons. I remember feeling pressure to grow, wanting to accomplish more and reach more students for Christ, but not feeling as if I had any more capacity to accomplish that task. I wish that I had really valued the concept of empowering others when I first started out in youth ministry, but better late than never, I suppose.

If you want to have a healthy and thriving student ministry, you have to empower other leaders. However, I feel the need to say that empowering leaders doesn’t mean just giving away the stuff you don’t like doing. In fact, one of the greatest ways to empower leaders is to give away parts of the ministry you enjoy. 

If you hold on too tight to the reins of your student ministry, you will have a hard time keeping leaders, you will be frustrated with the influence of your ministry, and it will ultimately collapse from the inside out. This is hard for some of us because we are the leaders or the youth pastors, and honestly, sometimes we let pride keep us from really empowering the leaders around us. If you struggle with empowering leaders and feel threatened by other strong leaders around you, you are probably an insecure leader and need to deal with that before you hurt yourself and others.

I will never forget one night when one of my adult leaders asked me to come out and hang with him and the guys in his small group. I got there just before students started arriving, and one after another I saw students coming up to this leader and greeting him as “Pastor _______.” To be perfectly honest, internally I struggled with it at first. I wanted to stop and correct them—after all, I was their pastor. But then it hit me: This was a huge win! At that moment I started to shift my focus and realized that the more I empowered leaders around me the greater my sphere of influence would be. Up to that point I had been small minded about our student ministries. If you want to have greater influence and reach more people than you have to focus on empowering others.

Matt Moore

Pastor & Author of Intentional Youth Ministry