What’s in this Episode?

Have you ever had a high caliber person tell you they’d serve in some way, and then the next thing you know, they quit on you. It’s unbelievably frustrating when that happens. And now you’re back to the drawing board trying to find someone to help you fill that role. Well, that’s why you need a pipeline of volunteers, and in today’s episode, we’re going to share an eight step process to recruit church volunteers, so the positions are always filled.

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Read the Transcript

Dick Hardy 0:29
You know, I serve in the Connect Center at our church. And so before and after service, we have guests coming in there and I serve with another gal who, we’ve worked together for the last year or so. And a couple of months ago, we’re just chit chatting along in the kind of a lull in the action and she’s a schoolteacher, fourth grade school teacher, and one thing led to another and I kind of found out that she enjoys writing and that she can do editing. Well, I’m saying to her, “well man here at Leaders.Church, we’re constantly producing written material, would you be open to volunteering to edit some of this? I don’t want to pressure you on is it. Slam dunk, she’d love to do it. Well, boom, just in that moment, she’s become the initial editor when we write a blog, and you know, we ship it off to her, and she does the first edit, then it goes through a series of other things, but the point being, it was in conversation, that my antenna was up, not to say I’m big and bad and all that smart, but the point is, as a leader in our organization, I was watching for that. And that’s the kind of thing that we want to encourage you with today, as we’re talking about… this is a two-part episode of a podcast where we’re going to talk about how to help you recruit volunteers. And the very first thing is what happened when I was meeting with Shelly. I had to have my antenna up. You’ve got to be attuned to exactly what’s going on around you, so that you can watch for volunteers because volunteers are ready and willing to go.

Step #1: Pray and Think

Dick Hardy 2:05
So, we’re going to take the first four here today, and I’m going to give you the first one. It’s not rocket science, but it’s absolutely critical. If you’re going to recruit volunteers, you have to pray and think. In other words, you have to engage your heart, your spirit with the Lord, and you have to engage your intellect. When you merge the two of those together, you’re going to see great things happen. If you think you’re so smart, that you can do it on your own, you’re going to be sorely disappointed, sorely mistaken. But if you think you’ll pray, and everything will just fall in your lap, and I’ve tried that, that doesn’t happen. You need to pray and think. That’s your very first step when you’re going to start recruiting volunteers.

Dick Hardy 2:49
Second step, Jonathan.

Step #2: Contact the Prospect

Jonathan Hardy 2:50
So, second step is to contact the prospect. So, at the outset, let me just say this, whenever you’re recruiting someone, you’re asking for someone to step up and be involved maybe it’s, you know, whatever the position would be, you have to be mindful of the genders and you know, if you’re going to be meeting with someone, you want to make sure that you’re bringing another person with you. So that way, you’re not just meeting one-on-one with the opposite gender, but you’ve got to contact them somehow. So if it’s a phone call, obviously, you can call them, text them, whatever is going to be personal. But you just want to be careful as you contact people to make sure you’re protecting yourself, protecting people, and having those hedges around you. But you have to make that call. I mean, once you’ve prayed, once you’ve thought about it, then at some point, you have say, okay, hey, I’m gonna make a contact here. And I’m gonna throw out this idea that I want to get in touch or I want to meet over coffee or lunch or whatever to present what I want to ask them to do or to talk to them about what you want them to do. And so you’re never going to have people if you don’t first make that contact with them. I mean, you can you know, say, “hey, fill out the card in the sanctuary and you know, do this,” but you know, and you’re going to pick up a few people who are going to be like, I want to be involved, but most the time you have to recruit. And so this is the second step is you have to actually go out and make contact with people right out of the gate.

Jonathan Hardy 4:09
Third thing.

Step #3: Communicate Vision and Mission

Dick Hardy 4:09
Third thing is, when you meet with the person, you need to communicate vision and mission. Let me tell you how not to start your meeting. Hey, Jonathan, great! I’m glad you were able to meet with us. I need people to work in the kids area. I need people to work in the in the auditorium. Can you help me? Well, I’ve said nothing about vision and mission. See if I’m going to recruit Jonathan to serve, I want to recruit him to something bigger than himself. I want to talk to him about the vision The Lord has given our church, the mission to reach spiritually lost people. And I want to get his head… you see what his head started doing just a little bit? We didn’t even set this up but his head started doing this.

Jonathan Hardy 4:53
Nodding, right.

Dick Hardy 4:53
The head needs to start doing this, before you go to the point where you’re going to ask. You need to cheer lead. The initial part of meeting with someone, as a prospect, is for you to be the cheerleader and talk about the wonderful things the Lord is doing across the church, not just in the area you’re talking about. But if you’ll do that, you’ll set the stage for good things.

Jonathan Hardy 5:16
And if I recall, I think we talked about that a little bit in Episode Two of when we talk about building your volunteer corps and beefing up that volunteer core of how to communicate the vision, because that’s going to be so important for you when you are recruiting people.

Dick Hardy 5:31
Exactly right. So number four.

Step #4: Talk About the Prospect

Jonathan Hardy 5:32
Okay, number four. The final thing we want to cover today is, you want to talk about the prospect. So you want to be focused on them. You don’t want to be just talking all about you, all about your needs, all about the churches needs. You want to also talk about them, and how can they capitalize on their giftings and on their interests and their needs. And then from there, you’ll eventually be able to move them hopefully to the point where they’re recognizing that they can use them their needs, their gifts, their talents, their resources, all of that, their life experience, their work. I mean, you could go on and on. All these things, how they can culminate together with the need that the church has. But until you identify that with them, they’re not going to necessarily be able to see that and be able to figure out how that can all work together. And so, this is a huge aspect and sometimes overlooked, I feel like is, we just jump straight to our needs. It’s like, you know, once we’ve contacted them, once we’ve communicated the vision, now it’s like, well, now here’s what we need. And can you do this? And I recognize that this feels like well, this is a slow process. But, especially when it comes to recruiting someone who’s in a leadership role, where you’re asking for a big commitment, you have to take the time to talk about them. Find out where they’re at, and you want to do that anyway because you want to take care of them from a shepherding standpoint, but helping them see their gifts, talents, resources, experience all that, helping them see that and articulate that then makes it easier for when you say, “so this is what we need.” And by that point, they’re like, well, this is a no brainer. I mean, I got all this experience, like I’m gifted in this. And so the yes is going to come a lot quicker if you do take the time to talk about the process. So, those are the first four things, Dick, why don’t you recap that for us.

Recap:

Dick Hardy 7:28
Okay, the four things are to pray and think. Number two is to contact the prospect. Number three is to communicate vision and mission. And number four is to talk about the prospect themselves. Those are the four things.

Jonathan Hardy 7:42
So these are the first four out of the eight step process that you want to use to recruit church volunteers, no matter what the ministry is, whether it’s a, what we would call the high level leadership role, or whether it’s more of a general role, you want to constantly be working almost to where you have like a pipeline happening and people are constantly coming in, because the reality is, people are going to come and go. So, we want to make sure we’ve got those people that we need ready to go to step up to levels of leadership, step into new roles, even if it’s just changing the diapers, you know, we talked about that in the volunteer core, episode number two, but it doesn’t matter what it is, you have to make sure that you do these things. So then in the next episode, we’re going to talk about the final four things you need to do so that way by that eighth step, they are just saying yes. They’re begging you to get to get involved. And that’s what can happen when you follow the eight step process that we’re talking about here. So, what else do we have?

Dick Hardy 8:41
I think that covers. That gets us set and we’re ready for next time.

Jonathan Hardy 8:44
All right. Well, be sure if you have not yet taken the Five Day Leadership Challenge, to take the challenge. 15 minutes a day for five days. It’s free. Sign up at Leaders.Church/challenge. It’s going to help you be a better leader. We’ve got thoughts in there that’s going to rock the boat a little bit. I got a text the other day about someone saying this was kind of challenging them and rocking their boat a little bit. And that’s what can happen when you take the challenge. Leaders.Church/challenge. 15 minutes a day for five days. It’s free. And be sure to sign up. As well, don’t forget to sign up for the podcast on the podcast platforms or subscribe on YouTube. And we’ll make sure to get those notifications to you so that way you don’t miss any episodes coming up. And I think that’s it for now. So we’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Talk soon.

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