starting a Growing Leaders – Youth edition course

I'm just starting to run a Growing Leaders – Youth Edition course in Leamington, where I now live. I'm running it with a youth pastor at another church in the town. Last weekend we had our first session, away at a great venue, Barnes Close in Bromsgrove.
We've got seven young people taking part, coming from five different churches in the area, and I am so excited! Excited because these young people are all really looking forward to growing as leaders. There was a real buzz amongst the group, who didn't all know each other before the weekend, and a sense of commitment and desire to dive into the course and not miss out on anything that God might want to teach them.
As leaders we came away buzzing too. Enthusiasm seems to be infectious and none of us can wait until we meet again next month for session two.
What impressed me was how each person was willing to get involved with whatever they were asked to do and how quickly the group bonded and started to support each other.
One of the sessions of the day looks at Jesus' model of leadership being that of a servant and it was great to see how this teaching was immediately worked out through the young people offering to serve each other at the lunch table and offering to pour each other drinks throughout the rest of the day.
For many churches the thought of running the course may seem too much or that there are not enough young people in the church to make up a group. This is why we offered the course to churches across the area and actually it makes the potential for kingdom growth in our town even more exciting. Now there will be five churches seeing the benefit of investing in our young people, not just one church. Hopefully this will be contagious and more young people from these churches will want to take part in future courses, but maybe that's just me getting carried away a little, we've only had session one!

Andy