Bootstrapping Your Church Growth

I have been wearing two different hats while serving in my church’s volunteer department: training coordinator and consultant. As the training coordinator, I’ve been responsible for outlining how we will ensure that lay leaders and staff are prepared to lead their ministries. As a consultant, I’m brainstorming and assisting with the plan to improve our overall church process, with a focus on volunteer management and leader discipleship for our upcoming move to a new building. This has been keeping me quite busy and the primary reason why posts to my blogs have been slower over the last couple of months. I want to provide some insight into what we’ve been doing and the decisions we’ve made, along with some help when it’s time for you to bootstrap your church for growth.

As The Consultant

While my primary focus is as training coordinator, our timeline for moving into a new building is short (5 months) and has required me to wear the consultant hat recently. As we prepare to take on the new building, we know that we will see an increase in attendance from those in the surrounding neighborhoods that want to “check out the new church”. This means we need to prepare our leaders, especially those on the frontline, for the increase of volunteers required to service these new visitors We know that we need repeatable processes to get the new volunteers trained, and a process that ensures volunteers are placed with the ministries that match their passions. This has required us to bootstrap our volunteer placement process, which I’ll try to post about in more detail soon. We also determined that we needed to train up our leaders.

As The Training Coordinator

We also had to consider our leaders’ strengths and weaknesses to determine how to prepare them for managing as many as 2-5x their current volunteer count. What we found is that the topics I’m writing about for an upcoming eBook are exactly what is needed for a leader bootcamp to get them better prepared for the growth. So, I’m using the material from my eBook to produce a 7 week training program for preparing ministry leaders for growth.

Lesson 1: Finding a Balance

What we learned is that it is good to spend time thinking about the entire process up front and the impact of your decisions. While bootstrapping a church (or a startup) requires making sacrifices due to resource constraints, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend some time to understand the long-term impact of your decisions. Our prayer has been to find the right path that allows our church to prepare for the move to the new building without negatively impacting our leaders.

Lesson 2: Looking Forward Is Important

It was initially thought that by focusing our efforts on recruiting volunteers, we would have the headcount to support the new building. Before starting a detailed plan for recruiting, we assessed what would happen if we gained a number of new volunteers. This helped us formulate a plan for what was needed immediately, and what could wait until later.

Lesson 3: Start Small For Big Impact

As we rolled out the recruiting workflow, we then realized that without proper training our leaders may not be prepared to handle additional volunteers. So, we then created the plan for our leader training. This includes a small bit of training on a new process for leaders to schedule their team and report team progress to staff each month. It also includes a leadership meeting to kick the process off and cast the vision for what will happen after the move.

While it takes an investment of time to prepare a leader, we know that there are some foundational principles that are needed to get everyone at the same level of preparedness. In the end, we know that the 7 week program will probably become 3-4 separate programs, but we know that time won’t allow us to build out the complete program, so we are building on what we have for what we need.

So, we still have much to do but we know God’s guidance has led us to this point and that the steps we are taking is the right ones at the right time for the largest growth. I’ll keep you updated!

[tags]church building, leadership training, bootstrapping[/tags]

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