Your support is helping raise strong leaders for the future.

Your prayerful and financial support plays an important role in helping young people to be equipped to share the gospel and grow to be strong leaders for the future.

Matt Jacobs, youth minister at St Jude’s Anglican in Bowral, has seen the impact of ministries like Leaders in Training (LiT) on his youth ministry. He believes that introducing LiT to young people has been a great opportunity to identify their leadership potential and discover the gold in them. Matt says:

“...We identify those kids who have great potential and starting to train them in the mindset principles, theories and practices of good leadership. I'm also taking a more broad approach, and inviting everyone in that age group to come along, because the people that we might immediately identify as potentially great leaders, often there's gold in the kids that you don't think are going to rise up and sometimes it's the shy ones or the kids that struggle with self confidence that really surprise you down the road in ministry things they do.”

Thanks to the generosity of Youthworks supporters, young people are being trained and equipped through the ministry of LiT and are gaining skills that will help them share the gospel with future generations.

Matt sees the benefits of LiT, as it encourages leaders at St Jude’s to step outside of their experience of their own church and learn from others about how they run their youth groups, putting what they learn into practice. Matt says: 

 “…I think it’s helped youth leaders here at St. Jude's to see good youth ministry outside of their experience. A lot of our youth leaders just haven't seen other youth groups and haven’t seen memory verse segments run really well or testimonies run really well.”

Not only does LiT influence students’ leadership skills, but since Matt has integrated LiT into his youth ministry, there has been a greater eagerness for young people to serve in the ministries at his church. Matt says:

 “I think integrating LiT into the life of the church has been big. So, getting a lot of our teenagers involved in kids ministry has been a big step. I was struggling to get the energy, struggling to recruit more and more, but with LiT becoming a significant part of the thing that we did, we had this group of eager teenagers and young adults who came out with an eagerness to serve, with an eagerness to be involved. I think the team of volunteer kids leaders has changed quite dramatically over the five and a half years of being here, from predominantly older adults to now predominantly young adults, teenagers, in terms of involvement in the youth ministry…”

Matt sees the importance of students attending LiT, not just as a camp to receive teachings, but a camp where they can be active contributors to grow God’s kingdom.

“It's training them to serve at youth group and play your role in building not just this youth group, but God's kingdom. We are not passive receivers, we are active contributors, on a team of God's people, and so to train them in that when they're young is an excellent mindset. You hope and pray they carry that with them for the rest of their life.”

The LiT camp is one to which Matt will always send his youth, and it’s one that he encourages youth ministers to consider - because it’s an opportunity to train future leaders so that they can share the gospel with future generations.

“The quality of content they're (students) going to get is far better than we've got time to write ourselves. And the depth of fellowship, they get across a breadth of kids from all over the place, you just can't provide in your own church. It does things at a structural level, an input level and then a cultural level that you just can't do yourself. To me, it's a no brainer. To ministers and wardens, I'd say it's so worth funding. Setting aside part of the budget to train future leaders, we would do that with things like student ministers or MTS workers. Well, here's a way you can feed future MTS workers and student ministers is to subsidise part of their costs. And our wardens are really supportive of that.”

Thank you for your investment, which is helping young people grow in their leadership skills and equipping them to share the gospel with future generations.