Your church is growing, especially with young families. And with these young families come more kids in your nursery and preschool rooms during worship services. Where do you find additional volunteers to care for these children?
Your church is launching a new campus with limited downtown parking. You have a strong parking team leader at your current campus, but the service times at both campuses overlap. How do you find someone so both campuses have equipped parking team leaders?
Your children’s minister just found out that she and her husband are expecting twins. Though she anticipated putting together her maternity leave plan over the next few months, her now high-risk pregnancy has placed her on bedrest. Where do you find someone to lead your children’s ministry in her absence?
You’ve likely experienced one (or more) of these situations in your church. What do you do when you need more volunteers, leaders, coaches, or ministry directors?
Far too often in our churches, we think it’s the job of the pastor and paid church staff to recruit volunteers and leaders when there’s a gap in ministry. This leads us to focus on leadership placement over leadership development, and we settle for warm bodies instead of weekly volunteers. After all, Sunday is coming and we need someone to fill in the gaps.
What if we instead equipped those under our leadership to feel confident in recruiting and developing someone to serve in their ministry role? What if we created a leadership pipeline that provides continuity of leadership when someone steps out of a role or when we need more help in a ministry area? How do you begin to create this type of environment that emphasizes the importance of recruiting and development with all people in your church or ministry?
You start with culture.
The Importance of Culture
Creating and curating a church or organization’s distinct culture is one of the most important, yet difficult, elements of leadership today. While the information economy paved the way for leaders to expand their knowledge and enhance their skills, it has also become increasingly difficult to create and maintain a distinct culture in the whirlwind of messages in the modern day. When it comes right down to it, the most important function of a leader may be the creation, management, and, when it becomes necessary, destruction of culture within a church.
Now, more than ever, we realize leadership and curating culture are intertwined and difficult to understand independent of one another. “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.”1 Edgar Schein made this statement in the early 1980s, well before the Internet redefined the dynamics of nearly every organization in the world.
Remember the 1980s were also much less transient times when a person tended to work within one organization their whole career. Each person is a carrier and conveyor of culture, which makes it all the more difficult to manage today.
This is an excerpt from Creating and Curating a Recruiting Culture by Todd Adkins. Learn more about creating a culture of recruiting in your church and download the full booklet here.
