Many Churches provide volunteers to help with Disaster Recovery. When a nearby city suffers damage from a natural disaster, the needs are great and immediate. The 1st responders will perform search and rescue operations. After that, there may be a need for volunteers in a shelter, or home repair, or delivering food and water.

The Church can help these efforts. One Church bought a trailer and outfitted it with emergency tools and supplies. They organized a team of people to be immediately available to go and help. They provided service to damaged communities in Christ’s name. This is the Faith Community in action.

How about adding a web page where volunteers could sign up for the specific service that they would like to give. It would list the current needs, and be filterable by area – e.g. children’s ministry. It would show each task and give some details about what is involved – e.g. VBS volunteer for 5 days meeting 8:00 AM to 12:00 noon each day, working with 8 year old kids. It would then allow people to signup – e.g. commit to being a VBS volunteer this year. They would give their contact information so the Church could followup – i.e. an email address for planning and announcements about VBS. This would help get everyone signed up and build the emailing list all in one step. Does your Church use your web page for this purpose? If so, then how is it working?

Given that most megachurches have extensive IT installations, would it make sense to give remote access to volunteers? If you trust these volunteers to come in on Sundays and work with expensive equipment, then why not trust them during the week? Some of these volunteers no doubt work with commercial implementations costing in the millions, so they are used to the equipment. And with the ubiquity of the Internet, they should be able to access any computer equipment from anywhere. What would really be the harm in giving the access? Nothing, since they already have it on Sundays.

However, access has to always be for a purpose. You could well insist that any access granted to a volunteer should have a well defined purpose. And that purpose should determine the level of access granted remotely. For example, suppose you had a volunteer who put together the slides for the song lyrics on Sundays. There is little reason to insist that they come in two hours before the service on Sunday mornings to type this in. That just doesn’t leave much room for proofreading, and you should always proofread anything that you display to the entire congregation – preferably by more than one pair of eyes! It would be better to have them type up the lyrics on Thursday mornings, following Wednesday night choir rehearsal. You could easily grant them access to the computer running the lyrics remotely, and they could type them up. Have someone else check the lyrics on Friday, just to be sure. And then you’re all set for Sunday morning! The volunteer is happier, not having to come in so early. And the staff has more confidence that they did it right; they could be the ones checking it on Fridays. And the service will go more smoothly, with less chance of a glitch.

Remote access for volunteers does make sense. It should have a purpose, and be tightly controlled. It can also be logged by the IT department, to monitor for abuse. However, it will make for a smoother service and happier volunteers serving the Kingdom!

Create Ministry Descriptions

Before people will commit their time to a ministry, they want to know what will be expected of them. Ministry descriptions that are specific and written are important because they give people the information they need to make a commitment.

Why not have a section on the Church’s website where there are ministry descriptions for volunteers. The idea is that this is a job description, but for a volunteer position. By reading through these, a potential volunteer would have a better idea about what is going to be involved. This usually helps people make up their mind to commit to a volunteer task. The Ministry Description could include any or all of the following sections:

• Description of the Volunteer Position
• Amount and Frequency of Time Commitment
• List of the Skills Required
• Ideas on Training (e.g. technical hands-on)
• Benefits to the Community of Faith

In addition, there should be a table showing the number of volunteers that are needed in each area of the Church’s ministry. This could be the overview page showing all of the open positions. Hopefully, this would decrease as people volunteered, until all positions were filled.

God has blessed the community of faith with tremendous gifts and graces. Using Ministry Descriptions will help tap that resource, so that the mission of the Church can be fulfilled with excellence!

Scheduling staff is usually taken care of via internal calendars or event management systems (i.e. EMS). But how do you schedule volunteers? Why not devise a calendar system on the Church web site that would let volunteers schedule themselves for various tasks. You would assign each volunteer a set of roles, e.g. sound technician. They could then look at the calendar and pick the days that they are available to run sound in worship. The calendar system would then keep track of the fact that they had volunteered to run the sound desk on a particular date. If they needed to change, the system would allow them to drop that commitment of time and post the task back to the available tasks pool. Another volunteer trained in sound could then volunteer online to take their place. You might need a hot list of items that were coming up, so that volunteers accessing the calendar would see what was most needed. Overall, this would take care of scheduling volunteers for technical ministry tasks automatically.

Does such a system exist? Perhaps, but it would need to be flexible and role based. If you know of such a system, then please comment below so that others can discover it.

These days it seems like everyone is vitally concerned with security. Political rallies have to have security. Sports stadiums have to have security. Airports are sometimes so tight that you have to plan to leave an hour earlier than normal, just to get through the security screening. Employers check the background of new employees, to make sure that they aren’t a security risk. So what about people working in the Church as a volunteer?

There was a time when the Church was considered a haven for those in trouble. Perhaps that time has passed. These days, with the concerns over security, perhaps we have to make sure that Church employees are people who are trustworthy. But what about volunteers? Should they have background checks done to make sure they are also trustworthy? What do you think?