1. Revisit your ministry vision and purpose
2. Review what the team accomplished over the last three months
3. Provide time for volunteers to fellowship, especially those with opposite schedules
4. Allow for the introduction of new volunteers to the entire team
5. Outline the next three months and put them into context with the big picture vision

These meetings can be informal at someone’s house (be sure to rotate homes if you do this) or a big meeting room, over snacks or over dinner, and using Powerpoint slides or sticky notes. The biggest rule is this: make it different than your average week. Make it stand out, as it will be better remembered later in the quarter when needed the most. Have fun with it, and encourage the group to open up and share ideas that they’ve had but didn’t have the right forum to bring up. Allow for a brainstorming period, and allow time for everyone to spend time just chatting about off-topic stuff. If you have quiet people, which is often the case for tech ministries, start with an ice breaker. Get people talking and laughing. And pray. Start with prayer, end with prayer, and get people praying for one another. These meetings can sometimes build a bond that will last for months, recharge everyone, and break the monotony.

One final rule: for a week before and after the meeting, lighten everyone’s load. Set expectations with staff and others that response times may be a little slower. Give them time to get their requests in beforehand, or set timelines for delivery a little longer than normal. This will prevent the meeting from being “one more thing” for volunteers to shuffle during a week, and will give them a well needed rest.

1. [tag]Recruit[/tag] volunteers that may be less than qualified but have a heart to serve
2. [tag]Invest[/tag] in these recruits by pairing them up with more experienced volunteers, using the “I do, you watch. You do, I watch. You do. You do, someone else watches” training approach
3. Identify a method of having your bench “on call” – take signups for weekends that they are made available to fill in due to an emergency (and make sure you know how to reach them via home and mobile phones)
4. Rotate your [tag]volunteers[/tag] in and out of the [tag]bench[/tag] to vary their workload and give them a rest
5. Be sure to keep your bench engaged by having them train new recruits that will replace those that move on or need some time off for vacation
6. Bonus: Do not treat your bench differently than your frontline, or you will build resentment

This is often a difficult step to implement, as our first thought is to simply find the best and brightest and exclude the rest – this happens quite often in technology-related areas. Don’t fall into this trap! Be willing to simplify your process, make things [tag]repeatable[/tag], and invest in others that are outside your “inner circle”. The time will come when one or more of these people that were never prepared are able to step up and inject something into your ministry that you never even considered! It has happened to me, and it was a great blessing!

Using this approach for your ministry or church can enable:

• A web ministry whose strategic volunteers are designing a new version of the website, not making day-to-day content changes
• A media ministry who allows their most creative volunteers to find new ways to produce video or audio, or learn to better utilize existing equipment
• An IT ministry whose strategic volunteers concentrate on better network security, installing a wireless network, or evaluating useful software solutions rather than patching Exchange servers
• Gifted teachers or homeschoolers that can write amazing ciriculum for the variety of children’s church classes rather than spend all of their energy teaching only one class by themselves
• Staff members to suffer from productivity rather than burnout, not doing everything because only they know how things work

Sound impossible? It isn’t. It is what God wants us to do by “equipping the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph 4, NKJV). An “Agile Ministry” is one that is able to adapt to change in an ever-changing world while honoring our God-given calling. It is only through the application of repeatable processes that our ministries and the church body can be free to handle this change, be creative, and be available for the next calling to come. Focus on equipping your volunteers, both tactical and strategic, by giving them the very best that God has in store and enabling them to do what they are called and gifted.

Predictability in a ministry and within a church helps ensure that the lights work, video is recorded properly, the soundboard is adjusted, the song lyrics are correct, the website is updated, the computers are working, and the facilities are clean. It goes a long way to making the attendee experience a great one. It makes a church experience go from “Why is that paint chipping off and the carpet frayed?” to “This looks like a brand new building! How long have you been here again?”. Just like going to any McDonalds means you can order your favorite combo but have some local flavor, predictability ensures that things operate while enabling your church or ministry to be unique. This predictability brings comfort to those that don’t like change.

Here are some tips that I’ve found work well to create predictability within your church or ministry:

1. Favor repeatable processes over “on-the-fly” solutions
2. Document these processes so that others may learn how to solve similar problems consistently
3. Construct a paper or electronic binder of these documents and train each new ministry volunteer from “Day 1″
4. Recruit volunteers that prefer to be trained once and then repeat the process rather than those that prefer to be creative or enjoy a variety of tasks
5. Find volunteers that exhibit management skills for training and supporting these types of volunteers so you are free for other things

I’m sure you are saying to yourself (or yelling at your computer screen and getting some odd glances your way), “But, this is boring, not creative! We are going backwards!!!” Exactly! Each of us are wired differently, and those of us that are writing or just reading blogs probably aren’t those kind of people. And that is why many of us suffer from not creating a predictable church in favor of creativity. We’ll talk more about this in a future post, but for now, focus on making your ministry predictable and recruit accordingly. You will make a more pleasant experience for your church attendees, and make your ministry more scalable to see your creative ideas to fruition.

1. The request is taken in, research is done, a plan is formed, and then you implement this new offering with care, making sure that you have the proper staffing
2. The request is taken in, you assemble your team and find someone that has an extra hour, and you begin the new offering
3. The request is taken in, and then quickly forgotten

All of these are possible responses, but often it is one of the last 2 that are selected. Why? Before we did our ministry assessment, it would be easy to see why – we don’t have the time and resources. Now, we shouldn’t have an excuse right? So, how should a ministry process a new project or offering? Here are some tips:

1. Assess the criticality: Low, Medium, or High? How essential is this new offering or project to the staff? Visitors?
2. Assess the long-term investment: Short term, Medium term, or Long term? How long with this live – one day, one weekend, one month, or years?
3. Assess the SLA: should it function properly occasionally, most of the time, or always? The closer to always, the more of an investment it may be
4. Assess the delivery schedule: when time allows, sometime soon, or yesterday? The sooner it is required, the less likely a quality delivery is possible

Once you’ve done this assessment, hopefully with other stakeholders involved to obtain their input, you can determine what level of attention to give. You can also determine if you need to recruit of volunteers, outsource some of the work, or utilize your existing infrastructure. Either way, you now have a more controlled way to grow your ministry, and you have taken the necessary steps to determine what “good enough” really means for everyone involved.

Eventually, it happens – that breaking point – you know what I mean. The point when everyone realizes that its out of control and that help is needed – usually far past time and when people are saying “shouldn’t we have this fixed by now?” The trick is, this often happens unknowingly – kinda like how we are slowly steered off course until we realize that we haven’t been doing our daily devotionals, reading our Bibles as often, and missing our prayer time. So, we did it – we called in some experts to give us a hand because our sound team has been stretched too thin lately to assist, especially with another satellite service and main campus. Did I hear you gasp? Well, you should know – we’ve done this before and will do it again!

In the end, our sound was great, we got some more folks trained, and everything came together much better than if we had struggled and kept our problems in-house. So, as a lesson to you, consider the need to outsource some work. Whether its for your media team, marketing, or some other need, sometimes you have a large need and just need to outsource it. In the end, you may determine that it is something you want to outsource permanently. Maybe not. Either way, you may reinvigorate your ministry or even your church by a simple step like this. We did!

So, what is your ministry’s SLA for every service you offer? In the last post, Time Management Requires Process, we examined how a ministry can become overloaded and not able to make the impact they desire. In the process of this self-examination, there may have been a number of offered services that could be sorted into these categories:

• Legacy Deadwood – an offering that has “always been done” but really doesn’t need to be done if another alternative is presented or is just stopped altogether. Examples may include supporting old hardware by your IT department, producing those TPS reports that no one reads, or cutting the ends of a roast (read at least half way and you’ll get the reference
• Tactical – an offering that is not strategic to a long-term vision but necessary for church or ministry operations. These are things like installing printer drivers, printing weekly bulletins, and accepting offerings during service.
• Strategic – an offering that is targeted to your long-term vision but may not be necessary for day-to-day operations

As you begin to classify your service offerings, you also have to make the decision of your ministry’s SLA for each offering. If you’ve never considered your SLA in the past, you should visit with the customers of your service and determine how much they depend upon them – you may be surprised at their response! Using an IT example (since that’s what I know best), consider: how important is supporting your key operational PCs vs. loaner laptops for volunteers? Are you focusing your volunteers to support those operational PCs, and possibly even having an on-call vendor or internal on-call services for support? Or, do you bump those requests to ensure your TPS reports get generated?

When you begin to approach your ministry’s offerings as a series of contracts with other ministries or staff members, you begin to see what truly matters day-in, day-out, week-in, week-out, month-in, month-out. It often will shed light on how much time you are spending toward things that have a lower SLA, or may even be “ends of a pot roast”.

So, consider an internal audit and SLA assessment. It may help you get better focused and be more effective at what your God-given calling is, and your customers will thank you for the considerations you are providing to make them successful!

1. Make an assessment of what your ministry does. Do this by first taking an inventory, and then rank each item by the time it requires to execute each week, with 1 indicating the most time consuming. Be honest with yourself and be prayerful. This may take more time than you expect, so block out at least an hour to be sure.
2. Review your list and strike through half of your list the things that you do today that you can live without. You must remove at least half of your items, and if you have an uneven number, round up. Be brutal and honest.
3. With the remaining items left, circle half of those remaining that require your attention, or the attention of your ministry, on a consistent basis. Again, be brutal as you will often think that everyone on your list is important.

Tough exercise, isn’t it? Hard to imagine your ministry does all of those things and it is probably even harder to imagine the ministry not doing these things, right? Let’s face it – every ministry is doing way more than it needs to with less people than it should. And, as the leader, you may be the one doing most of the work! If not, it could be one or two superstar staff members or volunteers doing it all. Take it from a leader who did this himself – stop, take the assessment above, and start removing things that your ministry doesn’t really need. Apply this process several times a year, especially when you are feeling overwhelmed. You’ll be glad you did, and so will those that you serve!

Recruit like you life depends on it!

A technical team may have one or two “super-techs”, but that only means you have more talent to train new volunteers. It does not mean that this person has to do it all and surround themselves with a “team” of volunteers who merely serve coffee and bow before the super tech at appropriate intervals. Jesus said it best: “…For he who is least among you all – he is the greatest.” (Luke 9:48b). Your top techs must be willing to step out of the way and let others get involved.

Great stuff in line with recent coverage here about managing your voluteers.

1. Grow them – don’t hold back to keep them from moving on
2. Encourage them – if they have opted to leave, back them up! They are taking a bold step and will want your support
3. Assist them – provide references if necessary and lend them a hand as they transition out

If you re-examine the list above, you’ll notice a single thought: others-focused. The ministry isn’t about its duties or tasks, its about others. You are serving others in what the ministry does (external ministry), and you are serving side-by-side in doing so (internal minstry). In no way are you serving yourself – so, why should you lead that way? This is not Biblical and it isn’t effective. If you are truly others focused, you will want to see the painting of each individual emerge onto their canvas by enabling each volunteer to serve others, grow themselves, and be what God has called them to be. Now, this is true ministry!