15 Smart Things to Do During Your First Three Months:
Practical advice from someone who’s been there
Jim Wideman

It’s your first day on staff as volunteer coordinator at a new church. The senior pastor has introduced you to the staff, donuts from your first day welcome party have been reduced to crumbs in the bottom of an empty box, and you’re sitting alone in your office.

Now what?

How you handle the next few months will have a tremendous impact on the remainder of your ministry. Let’s make sure you get off on the right foot.

1. First, do nothing.

Spend several months not changing anything that’s currently in place. Use the time to find out what’s been done in the past. Ask lots of questions. Observe carefully.

You need to understand exactly how the pastor, congregation, and current volunteers define a great volunteer ministry. Focus on discovering what the senior pastor wants, and how that vision has—or hasn’t—been implemented.

2. Now fix something—but something small.

Find one small problem and fix it. Don’t tackle anything big yet—nobody knows you well enough to trust you and you may create a bigger problem than you solve.

You want people to realize you’re actually good for the organization and worth listening to.

3. Connect with your pastor.

When you go into a church, decide you’ll be committed to and support your senior pastor. I don’t see the terms “children’s pastor,” “youth pastor,” or “singles pastor” in the Bible. We all come under the office of the pastor, so we need to share the pastor’s vision for the church. Your teachable attitude will allow you to do significant ministry—and also grow spiritually.

4. Figure out where you are.

Once you understand the pastor’s vision for your ministry, see if you have the resources you need to meet it. Is the correct leadership in place? Do you have the right tools—the curriculum, furniture, budget and rooms?

Summarize how you view your current ministry situation on paper. Summarize where you think the ministry should go, too, and share what you’ve written with your senior pastor.

5. Join the team.

Go to lunch with other people on your church staff, one at a time. Ask what’s important to them. Hear their heartbeat for ministry.

If we want others to respect us, we need to respect them. That means respecting everyone on your team. The church secretary may save you from scheduling a children’s meeting the same day as a school festival. The administrator knows how to fill out reimbursement forms. And the church custodian can turn the breaker switches back on when the building goes dark halfway through your rally.

6. Determine where you’re going.

Set goals for every area of your ministry. Be specific. What do the kids in the nursery need? the small group leaders?

What will it take to achieve those goals? How many more people are needed? Will you need the pastor to reinforce the importance of Christians serving from the pulpit? What training will be needed?

7. Communicate with the right people.

There is a natural tendency to focus narrowly on those we’re trying to serve. Most children’s’ pastors, for example, spend 90% of their time working on communicating with kids. That’s great—but you need to communicate with other audiences, too: Parents, volunteers, and the church staff around you. If your senior pastor doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s happening in the volunteer ministry, it’s not the pastor’s fault. It’s your fault for not keeping communication flowing upward.

8. Update ministry descriptions

Everyone needs a ministry description. I like to give every volunteer his or her description, plus everyone else’s ministry description. When volunteers know where they fit, everyone does better.

Write your own ministry description first and submit it to the senior pastor for tweaking. Then write everyone else’s description. When your description aligns with the pastor’s vision, and the other descriptions align with yours, you’re all on the same page.

9. Build a Team

We say team building is important. We even believe it. So why don’t we do it?

The #1 reason we don’t let people help us is that we’re sure they won’t do it as well as we can do it. And we may be right.

But there’s a time when we couldn’t do it very well, either. If someone hadn’t allowed us to work through it and get better, we still wouldn’t be doing it well.

10. Be visible in worship.

At Church on the Move we have three weekend services. On a given weekend I teach during the first, roam the halls evaluating and coaching volunteers during the second, and during the third I go to church. The next weekend I rotate, so over the course of three weekends I get to see what’s happening in each service. And every volunteer gets to see me involved in worship.

It’s important for your own spiritual life that you be in worship. It’s also important that your volunteers see you as a worshipper. Your actions set an expectation that every volunteer should be growing in his or her faith.

11. Use the church calendar.

Make sure your church office has a central, master calendar and use it. Staying coordinated with other ministries avoids facility conflicts. It also increases participation because families don’t have to choose between conflicting meetings.

12. Tend to the budget.

Find out how budgets are done, by whom, when, and what the approval process is. Become an expert in the process before you have to produce an annual budget. You can accomplish more with money than without it, so don’t be shy about figuring out how to ask.

13. Shelve the great program you did in your last church.

Maybe you have a program that worked well elsewhere, so you want to do it again in your new church. But the program that went well in your last church may not meet needs of people in your new church. Always start by identifying needs, then finding a program or curriculum that addresses those needs.

This is also why you should be cautious about launching a program just because your denominational headquarters suggests it.

14. Be creative and open to change.

I go to other churches, to malls, and to amusement parks—anywhere kids and their families hang out—looking for ideas I can bring back. What’s attractive about those places? What draws the kids? What’s fun about the environment?

I’ve borrowed babies from my staff members, gone to other churches, and checked them into the nurseries to see how long it takes and how they move through the process. I learn from others.

Do you want to really evaluate how smoothly Sunday morning goes for your families? Call a family in your church with three or four kids and ask if you can take their children to Sunday school next week. See what you put that family through each Sunday trying to get kids to the right rooms.

15. Do the job only you can do.

The first priority for a volunteer coordinator is to work on leadership skills. We’ve got to be problem solvers. Encouragers. Cheerleaders. Coaches.

You simply cannot spend all your time in classrooms with kids, or in every living room holding a small group. There are other people who can fill those roles, but you may be the only one who can do your role.

This can be a tough truth—we’re in ministry because we enjoy serving, after all. But now you may be in a new role. Are you willing to do it?

Jim Wideman has worked in children’s ministry since 1978 and is currently the children’s pastor and the director of Christian education at Church on the Move in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he oversees ministries that minister to over 4,500 children weekly. Jim’s new book, Volunteers That Stick, is being released by Group Publishing this month.

This is a small piece excerpted from a more detailed article just added to Church Volunteer Central’s Idea Depot. You can read the full article here. The article comes from Group’s Children’s Ministry That Works.