4 Jobs for Your Check-In Volunteer
You’re fifteen minutes into your kidmin service. Your volunteers are all busy taking care of the kids who are here. Just then, a flustered parent shows up with 3 kids in 3 different age groups, and she needs to check them in just so she can get a few minutes of respite and Jesus.
It’s definitely an inconvenience for you, and a disruption to what’s happening in the service. But what to do?
3 Ways to Help Volunteers Serve in Their Purpose
My last post was 6 places you’re losing your volunteers. That’s a lot of places, but there is one key thing you can do to hold onto your volunteers no matter how long they’ve been serving with you. And that is to provide a place for them to live out their purpose.
6 Places You Lose Volunteers (and How to Keep Them)
One of the biggest challenges in every ministry, not just kidmin, is that you always need more volunteers. The maxim "never stop recruiting" exists for a reason. Turnover is constant, which means recruiting never really ends. But simply finding more people doesn't solve the problem on its own. You have to retain the volunteers you already have.
When a Volunteer Chooses to Sin
In ministry sometimes you have to deal with volunteers living in sin. It’s not fun, and there have been major abuses in the church. However, if we’re to follow Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18 it’s something we have to do.
The key throughout this process is to approach with humility and grace. You want to set the person up for restoration and reconciliation.
How to Celebrate Your Volunteers After Easter
It's Good Friday as I write this, and for many of us in ministry, that means Easter festivities are officially underway. I've written about following up with guests and celebrating with your family, but there's one group you simply cannot do Easter without.
Your volunteers.
Saving Daylight Savings Sunday
Last week was Daylight Savings Sunday. And as happens every year, attendance was down, volunteers called out, and momentum seemed to stall overnight. I get it. At my church, the Sunday before was my highest-attended Sunday of the year. Daylight Savings Sunday? Right back to where we started.
3 Ways to Intentionally Care for Your Volunteers
One of the most valuable assets you have in ministry is your volunteers. They can make or break what you're building. Getting a new volunteer, especially a high-quality one, can be a breath of fresh air. But even the most dedicated people can burn out and walk away.
As the leader, it's your job to care for them. Not just because you want to keep them around, but because they're people, and we're in the people business.
4 Principles to Get People to Come to Your Meetings
Picture this. You have an awesome volunteer meeting planned. You’ve spent weeks or months putting all the pieces together. You have food, childcare, printouts, and slides. You’ve been talking about the meeting for weeks. You even got your pastor to announce it from the stage!
But when you talk about it to the people who it’s designed for, they’re non-committal. They’re not excited, maybe even apathetic. You find yourself in a panic, thinking that no one is going to come.
Leading Change Without Losing Your Team
Leadership is hard and leading change is even harder. But it’s an essential part of the job. Every year I look back on the last and ask what could we do differently? What’s working? What’s not? And how can I make what I’m doing better? And set goals for the next year. With those goals inevitably comes changes.
4 Steps to Strategic Volunteer Recruiting
One of the problems any ministry faces, especially kidmin, is recruiting. There always seems to be a lack of volunteers. What’s worse, if you don’t actively recruit regularly, you’ll find yourself doing ministry all alone.
So how do you recruit? How do you get people to join your team regularly? How do you find these people?
4 Steps to Get to Know New Volunteers
I’ve talked about onboarding volunteers before. It’s one of my most popular posts. And while getting your new volunteers the tools and resources they need are essential, there are some questions you need to answer before you plug them in.
4 Ways to Identify Your Kidmin Volunteers
There are a lot of things you can do to communicate to parents that their kids will be safe. But one of the best ways to make it easy to identify who is a volunteer and who is not.
Developing a Ministry Lead Team
One simple truth about leading in church is that you’re not going to be there forever. It may be hard to think about the day you will leave, but it is a simple reality. You will leave. Either you feel the Lord calling you somewhere else, you will retire, or you will die. There will come a time when you’re no longer the leader of your ministry.
The best thing you can do for your church and your current leaders is to prepare them for this eventuality. But how do you do that?
How to Involve Elementary Kids in Ministry
In many church models, from birth to young adults, we ask kids to sit and consume. We mean well. We want them to learn about Jesus and follow Him. However, in practice, many times this means coming to a service, joining a small group, and watching what happens.
These are all good things, but they are also passive. In a service, we sit to be fed. In small group, we sit to be fed.
But this is not what Jesus modeled for us.
Using Planning Center Services in Your Ministry
A few weeks ago, I talked about how to set up Planning Center Services. You can see that post here. But once you get Services all set up, how do you use it week in and week out? How do you handle volunteer declines? How do you communicate with them what you’re doing in service, and how can they be prepared?
In this post, I’ll answer all those questions.
Setting Up Planning Center Services for Your Ministry
One of the most useful tools in my ministry career is Planning Center. I reference it frequently in my posts about planning. As much as I love the program, it can be daunting to a first-time user. That’s why I wrote this post about Check-ins.
Setting up Planning Center Check-ins can be complicated. But Planning Center Services is on another level.
7 Steps to Resource Your VBS Volunteers for Success Part 2
In my previous post, I talked about the importance of having a strong volunteer team for your VBS. In order to have a strong team you have to work hard and fast to get them ready. You only have weeks, not months to get them ready.
7 Steps to Resource Your VBS Volunteers for Success Part 1
One of the biggest indicators of a successful VBS is the strength of your volunteer team. You can’t do this big event on your own. I’ve led many VBSs with hundreds of kids in attendance, and it’s my team that made it all happen.
Dealing with Difficult Volunteers
I was early in my career as a kids pastor. I was doing the best I could to teach my kids about Jesus, lead my volunteers, and help the church grow. It was a big job for a 25-year-old, but I knew God had called me to this. We were making progress.
Except for one volunteer.
6 Steps to Effectively Delegate in Ministry
But over the years, I’ve realized I can’t do everything. I’m not good at everything and nor are you. The mission God has given us is too big for one person. Jesus even said the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. (Matthew 9:37) See that? “Workers” is plural. We were never meant to do ministry alone.
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