Over the years, I think I’ve attended more Darren Kizer breakouts than any other. He’s a great presenter and shares some great stuff!

Daren began is talk communicating about a crisis his church recently went through, when a former volunteer was arrested for molesting a child. What helped his church make it through and probably saved Daren’s job was the good documentation that was kept. All this tied into his talk as an introduction, as we recruit and train volunteers, it’s so essential to follow our processes, take our time and do things the right way. Don’t take shortcuts and document thoroughly.

Darren shared some great resources, one was a tool called the VSI which was tool that indicates people’s satisfaction about where they are in an organization. According to this VSI, there are four factors that relate to retention. When an employee or volunteer scores high in these four factors, it relates to them being satisfied and happy in their role.

• Organizational Support – Do they have the tools that they need to be successful? Are they fully resourced? Are they frustrated due to a lack of training or resources? Equip, equip, equip!
• Group Integration – Do they feel like they’re a part of a team? Are there others that they can connect with while doing their role? People need community!
• Participatory Efficacy – If people don’t see success or hear stories of success, they’ll wonder why they’re dong what they’re doing. They need to know that they’re making a difference and that their efforts are valuable to the organization and to others.
• Empowerment – Do they have a say in the game? Can they make decisions or take action? Do they feel as if their hands are tied? This is one of the quickest ways to kill a high-impact leader/volunteer.

In addition to this VSI, Darren shared a great book called 12: The Elements of Great Managing. It too asks great questions that you should ask yourself as one of your volunteers to gauge the environment you’re creating as a manager/leader of volunteers.

• Do I know what’s expected of me?
• Do I have materials to do my work right?
• Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best?
• Does someone care about me as a person?
• Do my opinions count?
• In the last 6 months, has someone checked on my progress?

One of the key take-aways for me was this: What I did to recruit a volunteers is different from what I had to do to keep a volunteer. A person usually volunteers because they want to do something good. They stay becasue they they are getting stuff out of their volunteering.

Some resources that Darren shared are as follows:

Better Safe than Sued
Moodle – a free site for setting up training volunteers
Ubvee

My first breakout, hosted by Brian Vander Ark & Tim Vandlen was about some of the most important and strategic work we’ll do as a leader – duplicating ourselves into others. The fact of the matter is that one day, we will be replaced. One day it’s going to be over for us. It’s like death and taxes. However, there’s two approaches in dealing with this idea of being replaced.

• We can passively let it happen
• We can intentionally prepare

Most Children’s and Student workers are focused on what they do. Programs. Worship. Events. Emails. Recruiting. The problem is that most churches are distracted by the urgent and they neglect the important. If we set our sights on the future, what our future needs will be above our current needs, we’ll treat our volunteers differently. Rather than use people, we’ll develop people.

Here are a few ways a church can implement this strategic work of developing people who replace themsleves:

1. Create the expectation in your volunteer and staff environments. Do this by putting it in everyone’s job descriptions. Do this by modeling it yourself. In addition, create multiple entry points into the ministry.
2. Mobilize your volunteers to replace themselves. You can only really know 30 people, so it’s essential that you leverage your volunteer’s and their circle of influence. Teach your teams to recruit out of vision, not need. Most importantly, know that leaders aren’t moved by the passionate plea from the stage, they want to be asked. Replacing ourselves is very personal. Entrust this important task to every volunteer to hand select the person who will replace them.
3. Engage students in serving opportunities as part of their discipleship process. The beauty of this is that students can work out what they’re learning and wrestle with spiritual concepts int he context of serving. However, it’s important to help your adult volunteers know how to work with students. It’s important to give students something significant to do.

It’s time to take a break. It’s time to pause and focus on what’s most important.

Here are some of the resources they recommended:

• 7 Practices of Effective Ministry
• Simply Strategic Volunteers
• Making Your Chidlren’s Ministry the Best Hour of Every Week

A little over a month ago, we held our annual volunteer appreciation event. Last year it was a Christmas party, which I’m not entirely a huge fan of. It just seemed as if there’s already too much happening at Christmas time. So, we picked the end of February since there’s literally nothing exciting happening at the end of February.

This year’s event was so much fun. Over and over again the volunteers have told us how much they enjoyed this event. What did we do? A city-wide scavenger hunt. My elementary director did this at her previous church with much success, so we decided to give it a try this year. Essentially, we assigned volunteers into groups of 4-7 based on the region they lived, not by which ministry area they served. We hoped it would mix things up a little and give some of our people an opportunity to get t know others. After they were grouped together and everyone had arrived, all the groups took off for a two hour scavenger hunt across the city. Every group had at least one person with an iPhone or equivalent and so while the teams were out, we received a steady stream of pictures from everyone.

Once everyone came back, we had a catered dinner from Carrabba’s that was absolutely delicious and surprisingly financially reasonable. I shared a little about the successes we’ve seen in the last year and how we’re moving forward for 2010. In addition, we had our pastors’ wife come and share (she started the children’s ministry 11 years ago when Gateway was planted). It was perfect having her share about how it all started.We dismissed everyone after this giving them brand new volunteer t-shirts for the next year.

It was a great party and next year we’d love to see an even higher portion of our volunteers come out. We’ll come up with something new and different, but I think we’ve learned that the secret to a good volunteer party is something active and requires people to engage beyond the surface level.

Do you ever have to manage any kind of volunteer schedule? In the past I remember having created the schedule and then sending it out to all my volunteers. Now that we live in the digital age, one mass email and I’m done. Not too shabby. However, how long until that schedule is obsolete? Hours? Minutes? Volunteers call and email with their changes making the schedule you just emailed to everyone outdated. It would be pointless to email everyone with a new schedule every time it changed. Luckily several options exist.

1. Create the schedule in a Google Doc and simply share the document. I’ve done this before. It’s really not a bad idea. You can manage everyone’s rights and it allows everyone to see what the most current schedule looks like. There are some downsides though. Not everyone has used Google Docs. Some will be confused. Some will never look at it. In addition, you have to paste in everyone’s email to share the document with them which can be time consuming. In addition, you have to keep track of who you’ve shared the document with. If they’re no longer a volunteer, you may want to remove them from viewing rights. It’s good solution, but there’s still a hassle.
2. Here’s my favorite and the simplest option. Click on the “share” button and choose to “publish as a web page.” Essentially you can create a live page on the internet where people can always come and see the most up to date schedule. When sending out the schedule, rather than attach it like you’ve done in the past, sent them a link. The can go to this link at any time and see the most up to date schedule. If you manage your own blog or site, you can even embed your doc to one of your pages. For instance, I can permanently display my elementary schedule at mywebsite.com/elementary/schedule. My volunteers can simply bookmark that page and always go there to see when they’re working.

Want to see it for yourself? Below is the embed of of a spreadsheet I created several months ago. Before I left for Colorado, I was doing a little research into other mountains I might have climbed if I had enough time. Check it out.

As children’s pastors, we all want ‘em. We’ve all got ‘em. We’ve all been frustrated with ‘em. Often times, we really don’t now what to do with them.

Here are the various types of teens I’ve had help in my children’s ministries. Perhaps you can identify.

The All-Star: This teenager is a rock star. They’re super involved. They’re committed as much if not more than your very best adult volunteer. They’re awesome at what they do and the kids LOVE them. When you look at them, you see “future children’s pastor written all over them.” You wish you had 20 more of them.

The Fixture: This is the teenager who’s excited about serving, even if they don’t show it. However, they’re often not a lot of help. This is the teenager that misses your presentation slides because he’s busy checking his facebook in the tech booth or the teen who’s texting in the toddler room while little Jonny’s got Lucy in a piranha bite to the arm. We like them because they’re better than nothing, but sometimes we wonder if they’re more work than they’re worth.

The MIA: This is the teenager who volunteers to serve in your ministry but never shows up when you need him or her. This teenager may quit without any reason and good luck ever getting a hold of him or her. This teens is notoriously unreliable and we get so frustrated with ourselves when we’ve become dependent on them. Our schedule may show that we’ve got enough workers in every room, but half of them are MIA Teens, so we know that it’s a crap shoot. The MIA may have All-Star or Fixture qualities, but the thing that defines them is their unreliability.

Would you agree that this is a pretty good assessment of your teenagers? Here’s how these teens have broken down in my experience. All-Stars are like diamonds. You love them dearly. They’re valuable. However, they’re pretty rare. Usually you’ll be pretty lucky to find more than a handful. Fixtures and MIAs are a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere and they’re really not hard to find. Sometimes you tend to have more Fixtures than MIAs and at other times it’t the other way around. Based on my experience though, I’ve seen the fixtures gravitate toward elementary and the MIAs populate early childhood. Why? Often times elementary is less work intensive. There’s the possibility that they’ll get to hang out in the tech booth and goof off for a service. They come every week because they like it, but they’re not necessarily that helpful. The MIAs tend to gravitate toward Early Childhood. I’m not exactly sure why, but all I know is that my Early Childhood directors have often been so frustrated by them.

Tomorrow let’s look into what might really be the problem and see if we can work out some kind of solution.

One year later and my friend is one of the best volunteers I’ve ever worked with. He’s a small group leader at two of our four services and he along with another friend helps me lead our child dedication services. He’s passionate about kids and he steps up in a major way. There’s no doubt that this guy has it in his blood.

What if his wife hadn’t signed him up? Perhpas he’d still be sitting on the sidelines. I’m conviced that there are other men and women who can revolutionalize our ministries. They just need to be asked.

Before all of this started (before I got the email asking for my advice) I found this blog post by Tim Stevens. Tim addresses this very same subject we’ve been discussing all week. If he were a children’s pastor, he suggested that he would get rid of any volunteer who were not passionate about serving kids. He recognized that it would be a dificult time as there wouldn’t be enough people, but you’d have a much more exciting base of bought-in volunteers.

I agree whole heartedly with Tim. There are plenty of parents I don’t want in my children’s program. However, I think there is room for a middle ground. I’m going to actively recruit parents who are willing. Some of those parents will do what is needed of them and then  go back to something else. Others may discover a passion they never knew existed.

So in my book, requiring parents to serve is a bad idea, despite the handfull of cool results. As a leader, recruit some willing parents who are interested in joining the team. Oh, and whenever you do come across those “called to kids,” snatch them up before anyone else can get them!

Several of you had some amazing comments. However, one thing I kept hearing over and over again was this idea of calling. Several people said that if a parent isn’t called to be in the room, they shouldn’t be in there. This intrigued me and I knew I wanted to discuss it further.

So, let me set the stage. Let’s take the idea of requiring parents off the table. Let’s also not talk about parents we’d all agree don’t need to be in our classrooms. Do you feel the only person who belongs in a children’s ministry environment is a parent or volunteer who feels called it it? Really?

This afternoon I got this in my facebook inbox in regard to the comments on my first post:

“This “Only Serve Where You are Passionate” band wagon has got to stop.
Our desire for people to be “fulfilled” or more honestly, self-fulfilled, has back fired.
It is a superficial high, it is a false Happy Place.
True serving is a state of heart and mind. Not always warm and fuzzy.
It is often a sacrifice where we truly have to lean on God and go beyond our natural human selves.
Self-fulfillment is not what we should be seeking but is often where we find our greatest passion.”

What do you think about this idea of “called” volunteers? What about this idea of self-fulfilled volunteers? I’m really eager to see what you’re thinking.

What I found intriguing was Holly’s comment. They attended a church where serving was required and it eventually led to her and her husband going into Children’s Ministry full time. Surprisingly I’ve actually met a handful of long-term volunteers who came into ministry that way.

My opinion is similar to what many of you said. I worked at a church where my boss highly encouraged me to make this requirement. I respectfully declined and he didn’t press the matter. I remember having the conversation with him asking him if we were going to be the nursery Gestapo. “Am I going to stand in the hallway with my clipboard and deny the nursery to children who’s parents aren’t serving.” It’s a ridiculous image, but I actually think it’s a real issue some ministries face.

I know the situation. You don’t have enough volunteers. The same volunteers you have are overworked and on the verge of quitting. The only sensible option seems to be to require the parents to serve. I believe with all my heart that once this requirement is in place, your ministry will no longer be a culture of growth, excitement and energy. Although you may feel the weight lifted of a quick relief, it’s a system that cannot thrive. It will only continue to exist.

My encouragement to anyone in that position of hopelessness is to not resort to requirements, but dig down deep for a vision, a God-sized vision for what he wants to do in the lives of these children. Vision is contagious. Vision is exciting. People respond to vision. Chances are that the same people who would have reluctantly agreed to serve in the ministry out of requirement would probably respond to your visionary invitation, even if just for a short season. Partner with your lead pastor. Get his help in proclaiming this vision and start moving things forward.

Many of your comments got my mind thinking. I have a post tomorrow questioning some of the things you said. Stay tuned.

BTW, for the Gateway folks who read this blog, don’t worry, we won’t be requiring anyone to serve.

1.  Do you expect or require parents to volunteer?
2. If so when do you start expecting them (when they become members?
after attending 3 months?)
3.  How is it working for you?

I’m going to post my answer tomorrow. Before I do, I’d like to hear what you think. Have you had success with serving requirements?