ASSOCIATION UPDATES

In addition to all the additional ministry descriptions in our Tools section, classes in our Training section, and articles in the Idea Depot this month, we’ve added something else new: Suppose you remember that an article in the newsletter a couple of months ago had great ideas, but you didn’t print it and you’ve deleted it from your inbox. What do you do? Click on Idea Depot and find the new Archived Newsletters link on the left! This will let you browse through every article from every newsletter.

But wait, there's even more! An important part of the equipping process is providing your new workers with a ministry handbook. To make this easier, we've added a handbook template to our Tools section. The template is divided into several chapters, with each part downloadable separately. This way you can download the sections most important to you, change the wording to fit your church, and have a complete handbook in only a fraction of the time and effort!

We’ve also added a new button to the bar at the top of every page. Clicking on Links will take you to a page of other resources we think might be of interest to people leading volunteers in the church. For example, we’re proud to announce that Sue Mallory, speaker at the National Pastor’s Conference and author of The Equipping Church, has chosen to link her Leadership Connection Web site with ours. Similarly, Nancy Gaston, president of the Association for Volunteer Administration, has chosen to link AVA’s Web site with ours. We intend to continue to be the single best resource available anywhere for church volunteer leaders. But this is about God’s kingdom, and we want our members to be aware of other resources that might help them identify, equip, and release people into their gifted ministries.