Kidmin Volunteers: Make It Better!

Family ministries have an untapped resource to grow their ministry and expand their vision:  their volunteers.

The staff leadership of family ministry wear many hats.  Most of the time, they are overseeing multiple age groups (pre-school, elementary, middle school, and high school ministries are often combined at least partially) or multiple environments (small group rooms, large group production, guest services, etc.)  They also have a list longer than there are hours in the day of things that they, as leaders, are ultimately responsible for--recruiting, training, scheduling, curriculum production and distribution, security, guest services, production, technical support, materials wrangling, vision-casting, communicating with senior staff/other ministry leaders/volunteers/families, event planning, managing staff disagreements, and overseeing/implementing special needs ministry services--just to name a few.

You didn’t think they just showed up on Sundays and barked out the orders, did you?

And the sad fact is that too many leaders get burned out because they are taking on too many responsibilities, either because they are assigned too many, they lack delegation skills, or nobody else has agreed to help.  There are ways, however, that you as a volunteer can make things better.

In fact, every single member of the team bears responsibility for leading your ministry.  Every.  Single. One.  

In other words--you.

MAKE IT BETTER

Andy Stanley, the lead pastor of North Point Community Church, always tells volunteers that they should all work to “make it better.”  It’s what Sue Miller and Adam Duckworth would call “being owners not renters” in your volunteer role.  Instead of being threatened by new ideas or suggestions from volunteer staff, the North Point staff embraces suggestions and rewards ingenuity in making things go from good to great.   Not all organizations are like that, and the church seems to have a particular affinity for maintaining the status quo. In virtually every decision an organization makes, there is a tension between maintaining the status quo of how it’s currently being done and the energy of much needed change to serve our families better.  If we’re serious about reaching the next generation, we need to be willing to embrace change and join the new thing that Jesus is doing now.

Too often even leaders in family ministry who want to go to the next level are trapped into maintaining the status quo because of the “tyranny of the urgent” in their job--the day-to-day, week-to-week to-do list that usurps all of their time and energy, severely limiting or sidelining plans to make it better or grow the vision.  

As someone who has served as a staff member overseeing children’s ministry and who currently serves as a volunteer for Upstreet, I can tell you that staff members generally LOVE volunteers that help them MAKE IT BETTER and that you will rarely meet a staff leader who feels like they have tackled everything they need to in order to advance the ministry.  There’s always something that got sidelined due to lack of time or resources and that is usually a source of frustration for the vision-casting leader tasked with elevating the family ministry game to the next level.

WHOM SHALL I SCHEDULE?

Those crazy volunteers who would never say, “that’s not my job” but rather great every challenge with “how can I help?” are like manna from heaven to our personal ministry.

A challenge that most staff members leading family ministry have is when to ask volunteers to add to their duties and when not to.  The temptation once we find a reliable volunteer who brings value to the team is to ask them to do more.  There is, however, always that nagging fear that we will ask too much of them and burn them out.  It’s a constant mental balancing act.

So, here’s an idea:  If you are an “owner” as a volunteer--don’t wait to be asked.  Go to your staff leadership and tell them you are ready for more.  Share your heart.  What is it in your ministry that moves you the most?  That’s likely the area that God has appointed for you and probably an area your ministry needs help with.  You may be the blessing that allows your leadership to take the ministry to the next level.

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING...BUT IN THE RIGHT AUDIENCE

Andy Stanley also advises volunteers that “if you see something, say something.”  If you, as a committed volunteer, see something that could stand improving--tell your leadership about it and give them your idea for improving it.  And if you don’t have an idea, maybe spend some time in prayer about it before addressing it to see if God gives you wisdom on how to make it better.

You do run the risk of alienating your leader if they take this as a threat to their leadership or an undermining of their authority.  And some leaders who are not self-aware or secure in their position might see your suggestion this way.  One way to ensure that they take your idea the right way is to know your audience and your own limitations.  Take your legitimate concerns to your leaders privately.  Let them know that you are willing to help make it better.  Give them suggestions for what you’d like to do.  You might open your leaders eyes to something that they didn’t see, lead to a larger conversation about how to improve this area of your ministry, or give you the opportunity to take ownership of your role.  

CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER STAFF LEADER TURNED VOLUNTEER:

1. Leaders need help and support.  They need encouragement.  They need PRAYER. Don’t make the job of growing your ministry all fall on their shoulders.  It’s not all their responsibility.  Do your part or they will get burnt out and you will all suffer.
2. Leaders, more often than not, will listen to you if you are an “owner” who has demonstrated your commitment to the ministry.  Are you an “owner” in your role?  Do you go above and beyond or do you show up unprepared and sleepwalk your way through your duty?  
3. Leaders and volunteers should always be improving themselves.  Don’t stop growing and don’t refuse to learn.  You may have been involved in family ministry since the dawn of time.  Guess what?  Kids are different now.  Learn about them.  Find out what you don’t know about today’s generation and how that might impact your approach. The good folks at Orange have a gaggle of resources for you on that front as well as awesome training conferences and tour stops.  There are also great podcasts, blogs, books, and social media encouragement from leaders like Nick Blevins, Jarrid Wilson, Chase Snyder, Corey Ray Jones & others who constantly share their best practices, their wisdom, and their resources with family ministry leaders.  Connect with them.  
4. LISTEN.  Both leaders and volunteers need to listen.  Don’t allow emotion or insecurity to rob you of progress.  It might hurt your feelings, but if it’s coming from a good place, consider it, pray over it and see if maybe, just maybe, there might be some truth to it.

Imagine what a difference would be made in your ministry, your church and your community, if you chose every day to make it better by being an owner, sharing your ideas, and supporting your leaders and team!  It’s my prayer for 2017 that family ministry volunteers would be emboldened to take a larger role in their ministry and that our leaders would feel the love and support that they are due!  That ownership of serving will radiate through our families and our community.

The Father's Heart: MDW & Why Sacrifice Matters

To judge from the culture, Memorial Day Weekend is a time for people to hold cookouts and for a bunch of people to get drunk and make bad decisions.  In other words, it is a time to engage in pampering yourself and focusing exclusively on you having a good time.

And yet, we know that the holiday is set aside as a time to remember those men and women who have sacrificed their lives in the defense of the United States of America through military service.  It is a day to commemorate self-sacrifice and valor.  These admirable qualities are often overlooked in today's increasingly self-centered society.

Sadly, many churches have the same problem.  With an ever-increasing consumer mentality dominating our culture, so many people ask, "what's in it for me?"

In culture, we can easily attribute this to the falling away from faith.  In the church, however, we can probably trace this back to a lack of understanding about the foundation of following Christ.

A lot of people boil Christianity down to the idea of proper behavior.  If you follow Christ, you should follow this lengthy list of do's and don't's.  The focus is constantly on the rules.  The problem with a fixation on rule-following is that it misses the point of following Christ--RELATIONSHIP. Also, when someone falls short of the ideal that God has for them according to those rules without a proper understanding of the healing power of God in restoring broken people and using them for great purposes, they might understandably walk away from Christ in shame.

Even looking the grand-daddy of all rules--the Ten Commandments, we can see that the law that God had given to the Israelites was really more about relationship than behavior.

What?  Did I just say that?  How can that be?

Andy Stanley writes in The Grace of God, that we should note that the rules came AFTER the relationship.  God initiated a relationship with Abraham, like a bazillion years earlier.  He pursued Abraham's heart and the heart of each succeeding generation.

He was a personal God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  And Exodus 20 begins by reminding Moses that "I am the Lord YOUR God"  not "Lord THE God."  Before God hit Moses with the Ten Commandments, He reminded Moses of the pre-existing relationship with the Israelites.  Andy Stanley writes, "God initiated a relationship with His people even before he told them what the rules were." 

Wow.  If you are like me, you probably never looked at that from that perspective.

Why is this important and what does it have to do with Memorial Day and sacrifice?

Because as Andy Stanley points out, "Rules without relationship lead to rebellion.  God understands human nature.  So He gave the Israelites rules after they shared a relationship."

Because God is a God of relationship.  Your value to Him is not found in WHAT YOU DO FOR Him.  Your value is found in YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO Him.  He wants your heart.  And from that heart will flow obedience, service to others, worship, and yes, sacrifice.

So many people miss that point. Sacrifice and serving others is born out of relationship.

It is not in our own strength that we can keep God's commandments, but out of the overflow of an intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Putting others first and sacrificing your life for something larger than yourself is not commonly found in human nature, but it can be!  It is a reflection of the Father's heart for us.  Jesus made that point abundantly clear in his brief time here on earth and through His heart-breaking sacrifice on the cross borne out of love.

Those men and women who have willingly laid down their lives for us have given a powerful example for the world of the kind of self-sacrificing love that would be commonplace if people would just embrace their identity as a CHILD OF GOD.

If you think that being a Christian is all about following restrictive rules, you are missing the heart of God.  Yes, He wants obedience, but He wants your heart first and foremost.  Jesus wasn't a huge fan of the pharisees--a group of "rules" fanboys if ever there was one.  He was looking for something more than simple rule-following.  He was looking for something more INTIMATE, like RELATIONSHIP.

Not convinced?  Just think about it this way--most of the time when you mess up and do something really destructive in your life, it is born out of a selfish motivation.  In other words, you usually hurt yourself and others when you are motivated by prioritizing yourself--your needs, your wants, your desires.  When you put other people first by serving them and sacrificing for them, you very rarely end up engaging in destructive behavior.   Nowhere is that contrast more dramatic than on Memorial Day weekend as people engage in binge-drinking and self-indulgence to commemorate those who gave up their lives so that others could taste and retain freedom.

So, given that context, let's re-examine Jesus' greatest commandments in Matthew 22:36-40:

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Obviously, not every person who has died in the service of the military was a Christian.  They do, however, give us a glimpse of the power that "the greatest commandment" has in changing our world. Loving God will transform you.  Loving others will change the world.  Doing both is the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its purest form.

Take some time this weekend to thank God for the people who sacrificed for your freedom.  Take a moment to think about what motivated them.  Take some time to seek the heart of God and just see if it will motivate you to do the same.