Why Training Matters (Even in a Smaller Church)
This is the next installment in our ongoing “Small Church” series, which looks at guest services through the lens of the smaller congregation: those with 150 or fewer people in attendance each week. See the entire series here.
In a smaller church, it can be hard to convince yourself – or others – that training your volunteers is an absolute necessity. But I agree with your mama’s good advice: we’ll get out of something exactly what we put into it. If we train on nothing, we typically get much of the same. If we lay out clear expectations, our volunteers often rise to the challenge.
3 reasons for pushback against volunteer training:
- We don’t have time. I get it. In a smaller church, one person wears multiple hats. It’s hard to host a regular training when you’re also leading worship / balancing the books / mowing the yard.
- It feels too corporate. I wrote more on this in a recent post. When we get serious about training our volunteers, we’ll get our fair share of eye rolls and sighs.
- People will figure it out. Will they, though? If you have a clearly-defined idea for what you want the ministry to look like, do you really want to chance that you’ve recruited a bunch of mind readers?
5 reasons every church of every size should train their vols:
- It gives them an easy win. If you want to really frustrate a volunteer, give them responsibility with no authority. Start them on a journey with no clear destination. Training your volunteers lays out clear expectations from the very beginning. [Related post: Hitting the ESRC Button]
- It prevents them from filling in their own blanks. A lot of us have some really high-capacity volunteers. That’s mostly a good thing. Where it goes south is when they begin to define their own vision for the team…and that vision is several degrees off from yours. [Related post: Your Alternate Agenda is Not Welcomed Here]
- It rallies people to a common cause. Our Guest Services onboarding training is spectacularly boring. Not because the content isn’t engaging, but because we’ve changed a precious few things over the years. We want our volunteers to all know our North Star, and our training manages to do that. [Related post: Need an Inexpensive Option for Team Training?]
- It gives us an opportunity to celebrate. Sure, we should actually train when we gather for training. But let’s not skimp on the chance to say thank you, tell stories, and celebrate wins. [Related post: You Need a Story Repository]
- It reignites the “why.” All of us settle into a routine, but consistent training reminds us that the focus can never be on ourselves or on our comfort, but about those whom we serve. [Related post: Explain the Why]
As with all posts in the “Small Church” series, I have a team of advisors who live out these principles in their own smaller church settings each week. For the final two bullet points above, I’d like to thank Aaron Smith, Senior Pastor of Kernersville Baptist Church (Kernersville, NC) and Wanda Padilla, First Impressions leader at Crossroads Christian Church (Brooklyn, NY).
