Creating a Culture of Volunteerism

I received an email from a pastor who read my post titled You'll Never Have Enough Staff last week. His church has around 700 in attendance and he was getting ready to hire a children's pastor that he described would have been a "dumb, knee-jerk decision." He read my post and said, "I'm now going to spend my time motivating our congregation to do the work instead of spending time worrying about how to fund another pastor." I wrote back the following...

If it is any comfort, we were a church of 1,000 in attendance before we hired our first children’s ministry staff. And yet—people would have said our children’s ministry was rockin! I believe it was because there was a real culture from the beginning that we are going to do ministry through volunteers. You might think of the next 6 months as a full-press campaign on changing the culture. Might include…

• A weekend series surrounding making a difference with your life and finding significance.
• A volunteer expo that goes along with the series.
• Training for current volunteers that THEY are the ones best-suited to invite people into ministry.
• Make sure your systems allow volunteers to bring people with them to certain situations.
• Show videos that highlight some of the under-exposed ministry areas.

I'll dive into each of these ideas in more detail at the Simply Strategic Volunteers workshop in Orlando next month--but what do you think about my advice to this pastor? What would you add?