Skip to main content

I Hate Volunteering

I came across this Best Practices in Internet Ministry post today about volunteers creating and maintaining a church Web site.  The topic itself wasn't so interesting as the idea that staff should be creating and maintaining the church Web site.

While I definitely understand and agree with some of the comments made of volunteers, I've found that the same is often true about staff (either in church or the workplace). 

  • Not good. Too often people think more highly of themselves and their skills than they merit.
  • So far it has been good. Although getting them to keep their pages up to date has been tough.
  • They each have their own ideas about what they think is cool and want to help but really are way behind the times.

    • This post though shows something I've seen happening in a lot of larger, and even some smaller, churches.  They are looking to staff because they don't feel that volunteers are reliable enough.

    This actually comes in different statements like:

    • Our volunteers are too busy to lead
    • The task needs 20 to 30 hours a week of work, which a volunteers don't give
    • Volunteers can't be managed
    • Volunteers don't have the time to manage

    I used to go to some youth minister lunches (when I was a youth minister) and I was the only one there who was a volunteer, the rest were staff.  During that process one of the other youth ministers mentioned that we had a pretty good youth group, so we must have been doing something right.

    There seems to be a growing idea that while the church needs volunteers, staff are necessary for the critical roles.  If we have to rely on volunteers, we'll only get second best results.

    What's interesting is that I attend one of the healthiest, and largest, Episcopal churches in the area.  I used to volunteer about 30 hours a week to youth ministry, but now lead one of the most impressive lay eucharistic ministry (the people in white who give you wine) groups (I didn't make them that way, but I hope to keep them there) and our technology team.

    While I'm probably a little unique, I'm certainly not alone.  We have a volunteer who commits a lot of time to leading our finance committee and leading our mission trips (we're going on four this year).  We have an incredible band which many real bands would be envious of, lead and composed of all volunteers.

    We're recognizing the gifts of the volunteers, and giving them the authority to use those gifts.  In leading Eucharistic Ministers, it's clear that I'm no good at planning and organizing, so my good friend Lisa takes care of that.  Together we've doubled the size of the volunteer group.

    My point here?  Find what someone is passionate about and ask them to volunteer.  If the staff and leadership continually communicate the need for excellence in volunteers, just as we give excellence to God in other areas of our lives, people will come forward and offer their excellence.  Only if no one has the skill, or won't follow the leadership, do you begin looking outside the organization, but even then many roles can be filled by consultants instead of direct staff members.

    I think it's time that we move past publicly "recognizing" how important volunteers are, and instead rely on them so entirely that they have no option but to recognize how important they are.

    Peace,
    +Tom

    Labels:

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    Using an Array of Objects in C++

     I've been programming for years (over 35 at this point, which is crazy  to think about). My career right now is much more Software Architecture, and much less Software Developer, but I still get some time to write out GraphQL APIs in TypeScript, Vue 3 UIs, GitLab pipelines, and just generally making "big" decisions and helping make them a reality. It's nice every now and then to come across different articles and ideas that get me to remember life in college when I was using C++. Who would have thought C++ was the "hot new thing" right now (though I suppose it's more like Rust and Go, both great languages as well). One of the things I find frustrating with most technical posts is where they focus on the "how do I build an app" and not so much on "how do I do this one slightly useful thing". I figured I'd throw one together what was front of mind, using user attributes for permissions (i.e., Attribute Based Access Control - ABAC) ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    Red-Gate SQL Compare

    Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...
    6 comments
    Read more

    Kids Activities

    I find myself often in a situation where it's some morning, I have the kids for the afternoon, and I'm not sure what to do with them. We could go to a movie, or play Legos, but living near Washington, DC, I want the kids to love the museums as much as I do, or to see what else is going on. This Sunday, while my wife was travelling, I took the kids to the Chocolate Festival in Old Town Fairfax. I didn't even know there wad an Old Town Fairfax, much less a chocolate festival. It was okay overall, but the best was seeing any type of chocolate you could imagine, and letting the kids pick something for themselves and their teacher. For finding cheap or free stuff going on nearby with the kids, I have to say About.com has consistently been the best. I tried si.edu (the Smithsonian Website) which is also good, but a little hard to navigate, partly because they have so much going on. At About I did a search of what to do with my kids this weekend, and a bunch of items came ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more