⛪️ Practical Church: Don’t give so many volunteer options
💡 1 SOLUTION FOR EFFECTIVE MINISTRY
When asking or inviting people at your church to volunteer, don’t overwhelm them with options.
Studies repeatedly show that the more options people have, the harder time they have to make a decision and the more likely they are to be dissatisfied with what they chose. Whether on your connect card, your website, or elsewhere, here is an example of how many different serving position options churches give:
Band // Vocalist // Sound // Livestream // Slides // Coffee // Greeter // Setup // Cleaning // Nursey // Pre-school // Elementary // Middle School // High school // Parking // Safety // Announcements
And the list can go on. As you can tell, this is simply too many options. Especially when many times people don’t have a particular position in mind, they just want to serve. At New City, we simply offer these options on our connect card/website:
Hospitality
Band
Production
New City Kids
Once someone picks a category, we then follow up with the various positions in that category (but even then go ahead and just assign them to a position if they don’t have a preference). People can always change their position once they are serving, but the goal is to make the entryway into serving as easy as possible.
Reduce your volunteer options, put them in a position, and go from there.
💬 1 HELPFUL QUOTE
I. W.H. Griffith Thomas on the importance of spiritual vitality:
“We cannot make up for failure in our devotional life by redoubling energy in service. We shall never take people beyond our own spiritual attainment.”
🎙 THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
I share 4 tips for starting new things in ministry and why you should be careful about you how talk about your job in public. Listen below:
💯 1 PRACTICAL RESOURCE FOR MINISTRY
One of my all-time favorite books, Deep Work shows the importance of uninterrupted work and walks you through how to schedule it into your day. In my experience, most people can actually get far more done in a lot less time if we would only be more intentional with how we spend our time. If you are feeling overwhelmed with all you have to do in ministry, I highly recommend Deep Work to you.
🤔 1 CHALLENGE FOR LIFE AND MINISTRY
If you had one less hour to work each day, how would you better consolidate your time? What would it look like to artificially implement that time constraint and see what happens?
P.S. What did Adam say when he was asked his favorite holiday?
It's Christmas, Eve.
