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

5

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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