Aren’t our volunteers pretty amazing? I know you know this already, but we wouldn’t be able to be as effective as we are without them. They really do play a huge role in our ministries. They are also incredibly intelligent. This is why we leverage them when it comes to our planning.

This past weekend I had our leaders over at my house for some football, BBQ and some fun exercises. We played “Human Bingo” to get them up and moving and to find random facts about each other. We walked them through our new starter kits for new leaders and new believers and then we asked for their help. I know our team is pretty creative when it comes to planning for our services. We come up with some great stuff. But I know if we can leverage our volunteer’s minds as well, we will get ideas ten times over what we were capable of.

So we gave them a front and back sheet of paper with different columns representing different areas of our Wednesday nights and we talked about how one of our values is being “Remarkable” in everything we do, from pre-service to post-service, we want remarkable. So we let them loose on coming up with ideas for our ministry (we did let them know that just because they wrote it down doesn’t mean we are going to do it, but it could spark something else to happen for kids to turn to Jesus).  The categories we gave them 20 minutes to think and write through were:

  • Sermon series
  • Sermon Illustrations
  • Fun Cover Songs/Worship Songs
  • WOW moments (fun moments that would make a student say, “Whoa”)
  • After service events
  • Leader Training content
  • Pre-Service patio vibes (what to do the 40 minutes before students when students show up)
  • Random stuff

Let me tell you, there is some great stuff that came out of it and we are going to use a lot of it.

Here are a couple of reasons why we need to leverage the minds of our volunteers more:

  • The best idea wins. This is something I took from Josh Griffin when I worked on his team. I know our team has good ideas, but the best ideas could from someone on your volunteer team. Don’t miss out.
  • When volunteers speak into the ministry, they feel bought in. When you let your volunteers give input on the direction of the ministry they choose to lead in, they will be more willing to follow your direction because now they have skin in the game.
  • They know what students need to hear. In my position, I spent a majority of my time with leaders who hang out with students. So my leaders know things, hear things, get asked questions all of the time so they know the current state of the ministry.
  • It empowers them to dream about this ministry with you. You don’t want to be the only one dreaming and praying for the future of your ministry. You want others to go alongside you in the journey and letting volunteers speak into our ministries more allows them to do just that.

I’m extremely excited to see what this next quarter will look like for our ministries and I’m excited to see our volunteers have that much more skin in the game to help reach students for Jesus.

 

@justinknowles3