Monthly Archives: April 2011

Setting the Table

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So my four-year old daughter has recently decided that it will be her responsibility to set the table for dinners at home.  It’s great that she wants the responsibility.  I love that she feels useful that it makes her proud to have a role.  I also really love my floors and my plates.  It’s not that she’s bad at setting the table, it’s just that every time a fork falls or a glass is just a little too close to the edge of the table, I hold my breath.  I just want things done quickly and safely, and I know that it would be easier to just do it all myself.

As I watched Isabel setting the table, I could not help but think of how often I want to just do things myself.  I was the kid in the school project groups who would tell the group on the first day that I would just take care of the project and they could put their names on it.  I am the kind of guy who looks at advertisements and thinks that I could have come up with a better approach, despite the fact that I have no marketing experience whatsoever.  Maybe you are not as bad as I am, but you too may find it easier to just do things yourself.

I must admit that I don’t make great use of my volunteers.  I am the primary person in most programs.  My volunteers in many ways are subjected to support roles.  This is basically because I just want to set up my table myself.  I know what I want my programs to look like.  I know how I want the material used.  This is a big area of ministry where I need to grow.

Having worked with volunteers for several years in different contexts, I have noticed some trends as to why volunteers  are under-valued and under-utilized.

  1. Using volunteers means being extra prepared.  You can’t wing it if you want someone else to do it.
  2. Using volunteers takes trust.  If you don’t trust your volunteers to do a good enough job, you probably have not trained them well enough or they are serving in the wrong context.
  3. Using volunteers makes you feel like you are not doing your job.  It’s easy to think that you should do everything because you are paid to do be the minister.
  4. Using volunteers requires volunteers.  The problem could be that the process of using volunteers got stuck at the recruitment stage.
While using volunteers is more work and more of a headache, it is so very worth it.  Here are a few reasons:
  1. You take the stress off of yourself.  So many youth workers quit because the task is too overwhelming.  Without delegating, the demands of ministry can eat your schedule and kill your passion for seeing the Gospel proclaimed.
  2. You make yourself less necessary.  When or if you leave, if you have not established a healthy volunteer force, that ministry will decline.  Imagine for a minute if you left tomorrow, what would be impossible for your church to do?  What would suffer?
  3. You allow people to hear other voices.  There are people that you and I simply cannot relate to.  I can’t do girl talk.  I can’t do Star Wars talk.  I can’t speak to certain people’s experiences as well as other people who have shared those experiences can speak to them.  You honor people by allowing them to see that there are even more people who care about them.
  4. You multiply creativity.  I’d love to think that I have all of the answers, but the truth is that I need other perspectives on how we do things.  I need to hear from parents and people from other walks of life who can give us a more robust approach to ministry.
Part of me thinks that even our use of the term volunteers is one of our issues with volunteers.  People are volunteering, but they are also taking on an enormous responsibility–to bring students to Christ and disciple them.  Already we have started talking about our Fall Retreat team and our Wednesday night team.  This serves as just a little reminder that without these people playing their part, the whole ministry team suffers.  I am on a journey to raise up other ministers.  It may more work, but I am coming to understand that I am not the only one who can set the table.

Leveraging Your Group’s Size

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Not long ago I had a conversation with a youth pastor of a large church in our area that absolutely rocked my ministry perspective.  Due to a school schedule conflict, a small group of about 15 students that were a part of his student ministry could not attend their church’s large mission trip.  As a concession, this lead youth pastor agreed to take this small group on a later trip.  The youth pastor went on and on about how great it was to get to spend time with such a small number of students.  Ironically, 15 is a pretty good number of students for me when it comes to getting students to attend an event that lasts more than a day.  It really made me wonder if I was using the size of my group to our advantage.  What were we doing that embraced our size rather than in spite of our size?  Are we making the most of our ability to be flexible and spontaneous with certain events?  Are we using our smaller size to have big conversations?

The term leveraging has become a somewhat overused one in church leadership recently, but I feel that it particularly applies to this discussion.  Regardless of your church’s size, you must use that factor to your advantage.  When I look at the big programs in our area, I lament our lack of resources and critical mass for big events.  When I look at their numbers, I admit that I get antsy and wonder if I am making a difference.  Here’s what is crazy: sometimes when large church ministers look at smaller churches, they wonder the same thing.  They worry about students falling through the cracks and wish they could run a simpler ministry that does not require charter buses when they want to take a trip to Sonic.

One of the problems with leveraging your groups’s size is that the models of ministry that are advertised in books and articles are almost entirely based on very large churches.  If a student minister with 40 kids tries to do everything Saddleback or Willow Creek does, there will typically be problems with duplicating that model in the smaller context.  The resources that come out of larger churches are great, but the problem arises when we think that our church should look like that church or our program should look like that program.  It would be like Mayberry deciding to restructure using the plans of New York City.  It just won’t work, and it really shouldn’t.  When we focus on becoming more like a larger church’s ministry, we are denying all of the benefits of being a smaller group.

The same holds true for larger churches wishing that they could be smaller.  The trick is to embrace the size of your church and determine ways to make the group smaller.  Perhaps my friend saw the benefit of the smaller mission trip group and will consider doing multiple mission trips with smaller students.  Maybe rather than having the large group times as your key point of emphasis, larger churches constantly discuss the importance of small group discipleship.  I served as part of a large college ministry that found it difficult to disciple the mass of college students who came in the doors.  The answer was to create small groups that brought certain people together and created different discipleship opportunities.

In the end, our mission is not to have an awesome program.  Our mission is not to have the largest number of students in town.  Our mission is to make disciples.  A huge step in doing that is to stop worrying about how cool our program looks on a flow chart or how awesome our logo looks.  When we get down to simply looking for the unique ways that our church can lead students to know Jesus and become his disciple, we will find that God has given us everything we need to accomplish the task that he has called us to.