Building Your Volunteer Team
A 30-Day Change Project for Youth Ministry
Mark DeVries, Nate Stratman
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Building Your Volunteer Team
A 30-Day Change Project for Youth Ministry
Mark DeVries, Nate Stratman
About This Book
Do you find yourself again and again wondering what it would take to get some new volunteers onboard for your ministry? And yet does it seem that you are never able to focus your energy on recruitment? Maybe you find yourself saying things like: "It?s just easier for me to do it myself."At one level, of course, this is true. Almost always, it is easier to "do it ourselves." We avoid the hassle of having to coordinate and communicate. We avoid having to follow up with people who drop the ball.Youth leaders Mark DeVries and Nate Stratman have heard dozens of reasons why leaders choose not to build a solid volunteer team. But faithful ministry is not a do-it-yourself project. It?s more than just recruiting—it involves changing the culture of your ministry so that volunteers want to become involved.That's why they have developed this 30-day change approach. In these pages you will find the step-by-step support you need to actually make one of the most important changes you want to see in your ministry.DeVries and Stratman are so commited to the ideas that they offer the following guarantee: If you work this 30-day process for one to two hours a day, six days a week, for 30 days, and it does not create significant change in your ministry, Ministry Architects will gladly refund the cost of this book and offer a credit of $20 toward any downloadable resource in their online store at ministryarchitects.com.You have so little to risk and everything to gain. It's time to put together that team you've been longing for!
Frequently asked questions
Information
Day 1
Launch Day
but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests.
Today’s Mission
- Scan through the entire thirty-day plan (this book) to get a sense of the rhythms of the weeks.
- Answer this question in writing, and be prepared to share your response with your prayer partners when you meet with them: At the end of this 30-Day Change, how would I like my ministry to be different? (Hints: How many volunteers? What kinds of volunteers? What’s different about the recruiting process? The training process? How does it feel different?) You might know you’ve got this right when you read it and it creates a little lump in your throat.
- Invite two people to be your prayer partners through this process—to pray for you and for the process, to meet with you weekly and to help you think through the implementation steps found in the next twenty-nine days. Suggest meeting times, ideally in a rhythm that lines up with your reflection days (days 8, 15, 22, 29).
- Send an email or text or make a call to at least three previous volunteers who have left the youth ministry (or maybe even the church) in the last year or two. Let them know a little about this project, and invite them to give you some feedback to help you understand each of their particular reasons for no longer working as a volunteer. See the end of this chapter for a sample email you could send, including a few key questions to ask.
- Determine what day you will carve out as your reflection day (or sabbath day) each week. On reflection days the assignments will take much less time. We have provided questions for you to work through in preparation for your weekly check-in with your prayer partners. Once you have determined when your reflection day will be each week, orient your thirty-day project around those days. For example, if you determine your reflection days will be on Thursdays, select a Thursday at least eight days away and make that day eight of this project. Make the day before day seven, and the day after day nine. Keep numbering days accordingly until all thirty have been assigned to a specific day on the calendar.
- For each of the non-reflection days, schedule two hours to focus on your 30-Day Change project. It may not take two hours every day, but having the time set aside will ensure that you have appropriate margin to accomplish each 30-Day Change daily mission.
- Read the following brief excerpt on recruitment from Mark’s book Sustainable Youth Ministry.
Recruitment: The First Step Is the Hardest
- Blanket appeals often attract volunteers who would simply not be appropriate to work with teenagers (I refer to blanket bulletin appeals as “pedophile invitations”). Getting the wrong person to stop being involved takes a lot more time than never having him or her involved in the first place.
- The kind of initiative-taking leaders we’re looking for seldom flock to blanket announcements. They need to be recruited personally, one at a time. They’ll need to be contacted anyway, so blanket appeals only multiply the amount of time required.
- A flurry of public announcements about the desperate need in the youth ministry perpetuates a climate of desperation, which almost always results in a flurry of unsolicited advice-giving from well-meaning church members and senior pastors who assume they need to help the youth worker fix his or her problem.
Day 2
Balcony Day
A View from Above
in arriving at my destination.