Well, welcome to module three of The Leadership
Course. So far, we have talked about leading
yourself, the hardest person that you'll ever lead.
And we talked about how to create that personal
growth plan to have a plan, not just wishing to
get better as a leader. And then maybe sharing
that plan with others as a way to build up
accountability and create conversations, and
encourage other people to do the same.
And then, in the last session, we talked about
what a basic pipeline could look like. We talked
about how to maybe structure and just think
through the different steps along the way of how
somebody moves in your church from an
attender to a volunteer, to a leader, maybe
ultimately, in charge of the staff or a ministry, and
we talked about how to identify exactly what
roles we need, but then the skills and the
character traits necessary that you need to build
into people in order to see them move across the
way. And I encouraged you at the end of that to
just begin to make a rough draft and have some
conversations around what does our pipeline
looks like, and we gave you a one-page template.
Today, we're gonna talk about recruiting
volunteers and this sits all the way on the left
side of your pipeline. So, as you filled in some
stuff, you see here on the left side where it says
"recruit," we're talking about actually just getting
people, you know, getting people in as volunteers
and getting them into the right spot. And so, as
you move people through this pipeline, we wanna
start with volunteers. You know, what are we
doing to recruit volunteers in order to get them
into those volunteer roles that we write up in this
top box?
And so, you know, in most churches, you know,
we've got to find people and turn them from
attenders to volunteers, and then from
volunteers into leaders. And so, we can't move
them through until we encourage them to kinda
get off the ground. And this is really important in
churches because you're never gonna be able to
hire people, you know, the staff, you're never
gonna be able to hire enough staff to do all the
ministry. And so developing leaders often starts
with just finding volunteers, you know. Who's
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gonna go through this pipeline? Well, it's gonna
be volunteers that you find.
I was listening in church one Sunday. I listen in
church most Sundays, but one Sunday, I was
listening a lot and my family and I, we attend
North Point Community Church where Andy
Stanley is a pastor here in Atlanta. And Andy was
talking about volunteering, newscasting, vision
for serving, and he actually said this in a sermon.
He said, "We're able to keep our staff to attender
ratio low because we discover and develop great
volunteers." And this is really true and there's a
lot of people that work on staff at North Point,
but it's still a low ratio compared to the national
average because there are so many great
volunteers and so many great leaders that serve
in North Point.
He talked in his message that there is a senior
vice-president of a Target store, you know, Target
store, not a target store, but like the corporation
of Target. A senior vice-president was serving as
a small group leader in 4th grade, and this is a
testament, right, to a culture by which leaders,
high-level, high-capacity leaders can serve and
volunteer. And here's somebody who leads, you
know, a major, major, you know, Fortune 500
company who's serving and volunteering and
giving a few hours of a week to work with 4th
graders. Now, wouldn't it be great if we could
have that culture in our church?
And so, we want to create a culture where
volunteers are valued, where volunteers are
empowered, where volunteers are recognized,
where volunteerism is celebrated, and where it's
really normal to do stuff. I have not known a
whole lot of churches find success in guilting
people into serving, in, you know, saying, "Well, if
we don't get any more people, we're gonna have
to shut down the ministry," or, "What about the
kids?" or, you know, guilt is a really good short-
term motivator, but it is very, very, very
dangerous for a long-term, healthy culture. And
so, I wanna encourage you to have a system by
which leadership development happens because
volunteers are constantly coming in the pipeline.
Mac Lake is a friend of mine, kind of, a
leadership guru in the church, talks a ton about
pipelines and processes, and he said this. He said,
"When I ask pastors, 'What's your leadership
development strategy?' I only get two answers.
One is, 'We don't have one,' and the other one is
'Ours is organic,' which means they don't have
one," and I love the honesty that Mac has here
because as we talk about building a pipeline in
your church, we just don't wanna hope that it
happens. We don't wanna wish that it happens.
We do hope it happens and we do hope and we
do wish it happens, but we actually want to do
some things to ensure that it can happen.
And so, I wanna talk about a strategy by which
you can kinda have enough volunteers around to
begin to put people through the pipeline because
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remember, our one-page pipeline, it begins with,
"How are we just attracting volunteers and
moving them into volunteer roles and eventually,
into leadership roles, and possibly into more
meaningful, more deeper roles. And so, let's talk
about recruiting. How do you find these
volunteers?
From time to time, when I was pastoring, I would
have people come and they say, "Michael, we
need some more kids ministry volunteers," and I
would always get semi, you know, low-key
frustrated at that because I didn't have a secret
document on my computer listing a bunch of
people that could serve if we were just asked. You
know, I didn't have a drawer in my desk that had
the, you know, printout of people who were just
waiting to serve, and, like, I wasn't hoarding these
potential volunteers. But somehow, people would
come to me and be like, "We need to recruit
volunteers, you know, preach something. You
know, do something. Say something. Pray
something." And it doesn't really work that way
and I have a hunch that it doesn't work that way
in your church as well.
Bill Hybels, pastor at Willow Creek Community
Church up in Chicago is actually transitioning out
of being the senior pastor, and they've got a
transition plan in place right now, which is kinda
fun to watch. But he says, "All of us leaders must
plant leadership seeds in the life of young people
we see leadership in." And I love that because
he's talking about constantly looking for ways to
recruit people to come into the church, to
volunteer first, to give time, to give energy, to give
thought.
In the last module, we talked about, kind of, the
two main ways that this can happen. How are
you gonna recruit volunteers? Well, you can
recruit them from the stage. I believe that
volunteers, that you can attract volunteers
through what happens on the stage, and we've
got some training on this and I'll link to it if you
wanna go this approach, and it's a really good
one.
And I really recommend churches strongly,
strongly consider one or two times a year, taking
the whole church, the whole church, and you
gotta plan this. You've gotta put it on the
calendar. Take the whole church and take two or
three Sundays, and lead up to, lead up to this.
Treat it like a little campaign, put every ministry,
every department, every program where the
pastor's preaching on volunteering, where we're
asking people to fill out an interest card, where if
they fill out an interest card, we're ready for them
to give them next steps. We're ready for them to
match them up with maybe a shadow or a
mentor, and we're ready to get them in place.
But if, like, nothing else happened in your church
for two or three weeks other than, "New
volunteers, new volunteers," if you were a broken
record for a couple of weeks, a few weeks, in the
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spring or in the fall, or at a strategic time of year
and said, "Hey, no, we're not doing these other
events. No, we're not talking about this or that. It
is all volunteers all the time." And if you do that
long enough, if you do that over, you know,
several seasons, then what's gonna happen is it's
gonna become part of your culture and part of
your DNA that this is a way that you can recruit
volunteers not just for family ministry, but
churchwide. Every ministry benefits when there's
a concerted effort to, once or twice a year,
attract and recruit volunteers from the stage.
But there's another side that you may choose to
go this route, and that may be what we call
tapping shoulders. And this is when you go to
your existing volunteer base not just once, but
over and over and over, and over again. See, this
is also intentional strategy. It's organic, but it's
intentional. This is when you go to your existing
volunteers and say, "Listen, the thing that you do,
you know, like you're a greeter, that's now
number two on the list. Number one on the list is
find another person to greet with you, right?"
So, your task is number two. You got a new
number one, and the new number one is to find
one person, just one person, is to replicate
yourself, right? To find a way, find a way to
get...find somebody in your network, not my
network, not from the stage because you know
people I don't know. Find somebody to do this
with you and that is ultimately the win. Doing the
task is awesome, but that's number two. Number
one is as you rub shoulders with people out in
the church, in the community, that we don't know,
as you rub shoulders, tap shoulders and say, "Hey,
would you come do this with me?"
So, one approach is big, is from the stage, it's
kind of a top-down, works really well. The other,
shoulder approach, is kind of organic, it's from
the ground up, works really well. I'd encourage
you as a...with your leaders, with your team, to
talk through how are we recruiting volunteers?
Not in every different ministry. We don't need 17
different plans. But what is our church-wide
strategy for recruiting volunteers? Solve this
problem at the church level and not just at the
ministry level.
And so, one thing that won't work is if you have
one approach for these three ministries and this
other approach for these four ministries, and this
other ministry over here doesn't really have an
approach and they just constantly need people,
right? We want to find our strategy to recruit
volunteers church-wide. So you've got your
recruit volunteers.
But then, you get to train volunteers. You get to
train your volunteers. And so, the key question to
ask here in training is "What do your volunteers
need to know in order to be successful? What do
your volunteers need to know in order to be
successful?" Now, if you were to study
educational theory and, you know, all these kind
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of things, you might learn that really only 10% to
20% of what we learn comes through like formal
classroom training. Most of what you learned in
your job you kinda picked up as it goes on. Most
of what you learn in life you learned from your
dad who used to always say, your mom who used
to always say, you know, you watched your
grandpa, you watched your grandma do this, or
you were in this work environment and this is
how you learned this.
We learn by observing. We learn by doing. But
10% to 20% of what we learn should come from
some kind of formal training. Now, that's not to
say that formal training is not important. In fact, I
think it's that 10% to 20% that churches often
lead out, and the 10% to 20% of formal organized
training actually makes the learning on the job
that much better. And so, there are times when
we need to teach our volunteers what do they
need to know in order to be successful, what
feedback do your volunteers need in order to get
better, right?
Ten to 20% of our learning comes from training,
20% to 30% of our learning comes from
feedback. It's making sure that there's somebody
there to say, "Hey, as you were doing this, here's
some feedback. I mean, here's how this can get
better." And then, what kind of coaching does
your volunteer need in order to thrive, not just do
their job but to be, like, happy about what they're
doing? This is on the job experience and real-time
coaching?
I've realized this, that the best volunteers, they
actually crave someone to coach them. They
actually crave someone around and to say, "How
am I doing? How can I do it better?" Like
volunteers, at their core, they want to do a good
job. And so many times, we sign them up for a
slot and we turn them loose, but we never give
them any feedback. We never give them any
coaching. There's never anybody there going,
"How are you doing?" You know, "How's it
working? What do we need to know as a church
that you're seeing?" Like, there's never those
coaching conversations.
And so, I think this can start with formal training,
so let me give a few ideas for how to do training.
First of all, you can have some meetings. You can
have meetings. Training meetings are not bad.
They're just boring because we don't plan them
out properly. But training meetings can be a
really good idea. I'll come back and talk about
how to do that some more. But what about
video? What about video?
A Churchfield member that is a part of our family
here at Churchfield is Freedom Church in South
Carolina. They do a great job with video. And
they create kinda department ministry-wide
training videos that new volunteers get, like "Hey,
if you're a new volunteer in kids ministry, why
can't we just send you some five-minute videos
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spaced out over time that you could watch?" It's
the same content that we would say in a meeting,
but somebody could watch from their phone or
from their computer, throw it up on our Apple TV
at home.
Video is a great way to train volunteers. In fact, I
really believe if there's a new volunteer that signs
up, there should be three, four...the pastor can do
the first one, thanking them, casting vision, talk
about the values of the church. The ministry
director can do some of the videos saying,
"Here's some core things to know." Other
volunteers could do this. There may be people in
your church who would love to create, you know,
I use the term curriculum with air quotes because
we can create some videos that all of our
volunteers could watch to get on the same page
and know what they need to know.
And so, we don't always have to ask people to
come up to the church one night, find a
babysitter, figure out what to eat for dinner, you
know, cancel out on the kid's basketball game to
come up to the church to hear information that
could've been shared in a video. So, use a video,
you know.
What about conference calls or webinars? The
same principle, you can use Zoom, zoom.us, I
think. That's what we use at our Churchfield team
with our teammates. We just do video. We can
get 25 people on a video screen and
somebodycould teach. And people don't have to
come up to the office. They don't have to come
up to a meeting, they don't have to come up to
your church. You can use free conference call.
There's conference call. We're gonna have a
conference call at 9:00 one night, right?
After work, after…you know, people are winding
down for the day, have a conference call and let
people participate. Change the time. I mean, do
different times. But it's taking this information
that people need to know and distributing it in a
way that's convenient for the people. When we
talk about things being easy, sometimes as
church leaders, and I'm guilty of this, sometimes I
want it to be easy for me. But my job as a leader,
if I'm truly gonna equip people to do the work of
the ministry, is I gotta make it easier for them.
And then, of course, there's Train Your Team, the
resource that you have access to. You know, what
if every time you're leaders met...maybe you meet
once a month, maybe you meet once a quarter,
maybe you meet once a year. But what if you
took the first 20 minutes of that meeting, of that
training, and just watched the "Train Your Team,"
you know, one of the episodes that's on a topic
that's relevant to what you need to know. But I
really believe that there needs to be a time and a
place where only your leaders and your...I'll put
volunteers in there...where only the people that
are doing stuff in the church, they meet. And I
think it could be a really great encouraging idea.
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When I was pastoring at church, one of my
favorite environments that we had, we called it
The Leadership Summit. Not a great, creative
name. I'm terrible at naming stuff. I just name it
what it is. I'll be the guy to open up a restaurant
and call it Restaurant, you know, or Dry Cleaners.
That would be the name of my dry cleaners. It
would be called Dry Cleaners because, right, it is
what it is.
But we had an event called The Leadership
Summit and we would meet once a quarter, so
four times a year. We'd invite all our volunteers
and leaders. And I used the term leaders and I
explained what that meant. I would just let people
self-identify. I would say, "Hey, if you serve or lead,
or you make this church happen, right? If that's
you, you're invited." And we'd invite people
personally and we'd send out invitations and
emails, but I'd announce it a couple of weeks
ahead of time, and I'd say, "We're all getting
together," and we'd do it on Sunday night.
And we'd have childcare, and we bartered with
another church. They sent their childcare workers
so that our childcare workers could attend the
summit because, you know, I didn't want them
not to work. We'd have food. We'd spend money.
Yup, we'd spend hard, you know, hard-earned
people's tithes in order to get food because we
wanted people to eat and hand out. So, we'd
have childcare, we'd have food, and then we
would meet together, and we would always sing
some of the greatest hits.
And I'm telling you, there's something about when
just the leaders of a church get together. I don't
care whether it's 10 people or 50 people, or
hundreds of people, but we got just the leaders
together and we asked our band to lead some of
our favorites, right? Songs that didn't need whole
bunch of rehearsal, but like, you know, just lead.
And it was loud and people would sing, and it was
awesome. We'd give out an award. We called it
the Leafy Award.
You know, basically, the Volunteer of the Quarter,
we'd give a couple of them out. We'd recognize
people. And everybody would clap and celebrate
and hooting hard, right? And we'd give out these
awards and people would put them up on their
fireplace mantels. And they were cool-looking
and they were...it was like a Grammy Award but it
was for serving, and we'd just recognize different
people.
And then, I would always take a few minutes and
say thanks, and say, "Here's where we're going,"
and give inside information, "Here's what's
happening." From time to time, I would bring in a
guest speaker. One time, we just did all night of
worship. And so, it was fresh, but it was
consistent. There were some different elements,
but it was always the same. And it was a time
and place when just the leaders of our church
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would get together.
One time, we broke up into departments and we
did training. But it's a way to do training without
calling it training. Excuse me. It was a way to do
coaching without calling it coaching, and it was a
great way to do that. And it's called a leadership
summit. That's how it worked. And you could do
an event like that in your church. It was a really,
really, really cool event.
Now, the third thing, I would say, the third part of
your volunteer process is you gotta recruit, you
gotta train, but the third piece, and I think this
one's the secret sauce, I really do...Excuse me. The
third piece is this, you've got to pastor. You've got
to pastor. So, when I use the term "pastor," I'm not
talking about an official title. I'm talking about
someone who would shepherd these people,
right?
The volunteers who are serving in your church,
they should be the most spiritually healthy
people in your church not because they've got it
all together, but because they have a system
around them where somebody is looking out for
their soul and someone is caring for their life. By
the time, you know, a volunteer mentions the
word, "burnout," if you ever heard it, you know, if
a volunteer ever says, "Man, I'm really worried. I'm
thinking, you know, I don't...I'm just kinda getting
burnout on this." If they say the word, "burnout," it
is too late.
But a pastor comes along and says, "Hey, I wanna
make sure that you are good. I wanna make sure
not just...I'm not interested in what you do
necessarily or only, but I'm interested in who you
are," as somebody who's, you know, who comes
along and cares for the soul of your volunteers.
Now, this may be the leader of the ministry. It
may be a staff role. It could be a system that you
have in place like a small coach made pastor, as
the pastor for the small group leaders, right? A
kid's ministry coach may serve as, kind of, the
pastor to people who are leading in kid's ministry.
But somebody, every single volunteer in your
church, this is why I encourage you to have a
volunteer org chart because your org chart
doesn't say who's your direct report. An org chart
says who is your direct support. Flip that org
chart upside down and say, "Hey, I've got people
on my care. I've got people under my chart. I'm
supposed to be the pastor and the shepherd, and
what does the shepherd do? Protects, provides," I
mean, you can go back...you know, when you
read the bible and talk about what a shepherd
does, I love that metaphor. But somebody needs
to pastor your volunteers. Somebody needs to
know how they're doing, how their family doing.
What's going on with their work? What's going
on with their job? What are they worried about?
What are they praying...who were they praying
for? What are they praying about?
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And so, recruit, train, pastor, RTP. These are the
three parts of a really good volunteer system.
And if you can get these three things happening
on the calendar, like, when are you recruiting?
When are you training? And who's pastoring,
right? If you can create good systems around
recruit, train, and pastor, then you're gonna have
the front of that leadership pipeline constantly
full with people. Because where this is happening,
a church where these three things are happening,
is a church where people want to serve, a church
where there's good system for recruiting so
people, when they sign up, they go, "Well, I'm not
gonna be the only one here ever and just get
dumped on," a church where there's training to
where skills are being developed, and again, Train
Your Team is a great tool for developing those
skills that need to happen.
Some of those videos you could just share with
your volunteers. And if you can make sure those
three things happen, recruit, train, and pastor,
then you'll have a healthy church in the sense
that there will be people that want to be a part of
this. There will be people that want...you know, it is
an attractive thing to see this happening in a
church, and people will wanna be involved. And
the front of that funnel will stay full because you
will have some intentionality behind it. You will
have some reasons behind it.
It'll be on the calendar, right? It'll be part of the
plan. It will be happening in your church. Even if it
is relational and organic, it's still intentional and
planned, right? It doesn't have to be massive. It
didn't have to be event-driven. It can be
relational-driven. But whether you're event-driven
or relational-driven, one thing I know, for it to
happen, it's gonna require intentionality, and you
can do that.
And so, if you put these three things together,
recruit, train, pastor, I believe and somebody's
doing that, then I believe that you'll have a
system that is constantly ready to have people
move from being a volunteer to being a leader,
and ultimately, to diving into a deeper level in
your church.
So, in the next video, we're gonna talk a lot more
about moving people from the volunteer role to
that leader role. What does that look like? What
do leaders do? How do I identify them? You know,
how do we get them to take the next step? So, if
we've got volunteers, how do we turn some
volunteers into leaders? And that's what we're
gonna talk about in the next video.
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