Michael: Well this month's master class, I'm gonna talk to you about a new way to look at all your volunteer teams and structure and organize them for success. There are so many ministry teams that are just not firing on all cylinders, and it's not because the people are bad or because the idea of the ministry is bad, it's not because the church isn't doing important work. It's that that ministry team is just not structured or set up for success.

And so maybe it's like a guest service team. Maybe it's a worship band, you know, maybe it's a kids ministry team or leadership team, maybe it's a, you know, it's a group of small group leaders. Whatever ministry teams exist in your church, I wanna show you a framework to

get them working and firing on all cylinders. Now, the reason this is so important is because of a few principles, and one of the biggest principles that we've learned, and we see this with ministry teams, is that visionary leaders are often not great at execution, right?

The people who come up with the ideas, the people who can cast vision, and kind of get an idea up and running are usually not great at executing it and running it on a daily basis. It's like people that found startup companies. Why are so many startup companies, you know, why is one person or one guy or one girl, start so many companies? It's because they're wired to start things, not run things.

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Structuring Your Volunteer Team for Success

I N S A N E LY P R AC T I C A L | E V E RY M O N T H

You know, you can put this another way. An architect is usually not the person that goes out with a hammer to build the building, right? The architect can draw it out, they get AutoCAD out, they get blueprints up, and they can draw up and design an amazing, amazing building. But they're not the general contractor going out and building it and they're definitely not hanging the drywall.

Why? Because those are different skills. Designing something and building something are different skills. At Church Fuel we say it like this. We say, "You need WOW people." You've got to have the WOW people. Those are your visionaries, those are the people who say, "This ministry should exist. Here's what our team does, you know, here's why this is so important." Those are WOW people. Visionaries, you know, vision casters. But WOW people also need HOW people. A lot of ministry team leaders are WOW people. They're vision casters, they're the leaders, and they're just constantly reminding, "This is important, this is important, this is important." But there's

never any how people to actually get stuff done. So if you've only got a WOW person, your ministry starts with passion, or when you get new people on the team, right? And they come in because they're excited about it, but then they fizzle out because it's all passion. Now if you have only how people, you know, you have a bunch of people doing tasks but they forget the why. They forget why it's important. So every ministry needs a combination of WOW leaders and HOW leaders, and both are really important. So what I wanna do is I wanna show you a framework for how to recruit leaders, and put leaders in all your volunteer teams that blended this together.

One of the things that we believe and we teach here at Church Fuel is that every ministry team doesn't need a leader, you actually need five leaders. And I wanna draw these out and show you now, and I think it's gonna make a lot of sense.

So the first person every ministry team needs, whether it's kids' ministry or guest services, small group, however your ministry's structured, every ministry team, it

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H OW N O R T H P O I N T CO M M U N I T Y C H U R C H G E T S P E O P L E I N TO G R O U P S

first of all is gonna need just the person I'm gonna call the leader. This is probably your WOW leader. This is what you would traditionally think of as a leader of a ministry. This is somebody who really cares about the why. The leader here who really cares about it is so important and we have good greeters because we wanna create a good first impression, because we're trying to reach people. That's a leader that's talking about the why and the WOW, right? You've got to have a leader of the ministry. These are the people that everybody in the ministry is gonna look to and say, "That's the leader. That's the person we're following." And if you don't have a leader, this is where I would start. I would just start refining this one person. But the second person I think every ministry team needs is a recruiter. Now, what does a recruiter do? Well, recruiter gets new people onto the team. Now usually if you only have one leader, that's the leader's job. And so you say, "Okay, we want you to lead and organize this and cast vision for it. But we also want you to recruit

people." But what if you separated those roles out? You said, "Okay, listen. All we want you to do is recruit." I'll take kids' ministry for example. Let's take elementary ministry, okay? There's somebody who's gonna lead the elementary ministry/ But what if there was somebody whose sole job wasn't to work with kids, it wasn't to communicate with parents, but it was just to get people to serve in that ministry (a recruiter)?

There are people in your church who are wired this way. There are people that do this in their daily life. Their regular job is to recruit, right? The army has this. You can go in and you would talk to them and it's actually in their title. You would talk to an army recruiter. And somebody would get recruited to join the army, or the navy, or a branch of the service, right? They would get recruited by a recruiter to sign up, and then when that person shows up for boot camp, that recruiter's not there. That recruiter's long gone. Why? Because that recruiter's skill set is recruiting. Now there are people in your church

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serving in your ministries and this is their gift. By asking them to do all these other things, you're actually minimizing their gift of being able to get people on board, to build a coalition, to invite people in. These are salespeople type jobs, right? In the business world, these are salespeople, they can get people to do stuff, and your ministry team needs a recruiter. So you need a leader, but then you also need a recruiter. The leader kind of cares about the why, the recruiter cares about the who. Well, who's gonna do this? We got to get more people to do this. And that's a second person that you need. Now there's a third person that you need and we call this a trainer.

What's a trainer do? Well, they train. They make sure all the new people that the recruiter brings in actually knows what's going on. The trainer cares about the way things are done. The trainer cares about the how. So this cares about the why, recruiter cares about the who, trainer cares about the how. Well, here's how we're gonna actually do this. And again you think why this is so important? The recruiter

probably doesn't care too much about the training. They're not diving into the how, they just wanna get people onboard. And once somebody's on board, they wanna go get the next person on board. But this trainer is like, "Hey, we don't need any new people. If we could just train the people that we've got and get things working smoothly and get everybody up to speed we'd be okay." See, these are radically different approaches, and radically different personalities. The trainer cares about making sure that people have the skills that they need to succeed, that they have the know-how, that they know where stuff is, right? The trainer comes along. This is a skill set, right? Some people are naturally wired to train people, but if you go to somebody who's a trainer and say, "Hey, we want you to recruit or we need you to lead the whole thing," they would go, "No, that's out of my depth. I'm a trainer. I'm a teacher, and if I can train and I can teach I'll be in my sweet spot. But if I have to do a bunch of other stuff, I'm out of my sweet spot, and then I'm no longer effective."

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So imagine if your elementary ministry, you had a leader, who's leading the whole thing, right? Had a recruiter whose only focus is get new people, get new people, get new people. And then had a trainer who would say, "Hey, once we got people we're gonna make sure these are the best people in our church." Right? Now see we're beginning using people...we're beginning to build a ministry that's using people's skill set, rather than just dumping a whole bunch of responsibilities on one person.

Here's another person that you need. You need an administrator. You need somebody in every ministry who can just administrate and organize things, right? The administrators care all about the details, right? These are the people who know here's how many...here's exactly how many leaders we need. Here's who's showing up. Here's who's not showing up. Here's where the calendar is. Here's the communication. Here's the email that we're gonna send out, on what day of the week we're gonna send it out on, right? The administrator is like the glue that holds

a ministry team together. Now, again you can see the difference in personalities here, right? If you go to a leader who cares about passion and vision and the why, and give them a bunch of admin details to do, they're gonna drown, they're not gonna succeed right? I'm not wired this way. I'm not wired to care all about these details. I care that they're done but I don't wanna do 'em.

But your ministry team, it needs an administrator and just somebody to kinda hold the calendar together, hold the communication together. It makes all this thing good. This is a HOW person. This HOW person facilitates some of these other WOW functions in your ministry. And so every ministry...what if every ministry in your church had somebody who was gifted in administration? That's a gift. I think that's a spiritual gift. That's a skill set that people in your church have. And if you go and say, "Hey, we want you to be involved in elementary ministry," they're gonna go, "Oh, no, no. I'm not good with kids." But if you say, "No, we actually need you to use Excel and we want you to

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use our email program, and we need you to track things." You go, "Oh, wait. I didn't know that was a job." And suddenly you've opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for people in your church, who think working in elementary ministry is just working with fourth graders, right? No, you need administrators to hold everything together. And then number five, I think this is the secret sauce. Every ministry team needs a pastor. They need a pastor. What's pastor do? A pastor cares about the soul of the people that are serving. A pastor is like a shepherd, it's a nurturer. It's somebody who says, "Hey, I want us to know each other. I want us to grow closer to the Lord through serving. Not just do a bunch of tasks. I actually want this to be good for our spiritual vitality and our spiritual health." A pastor cares about the soul of the volunteers, of all the volunteers in the ministry. A pastor looks to shepherd the group of leaders who are leading the ministry. And see a pastor, what do they care most about? They care about the people.

So look at this, right? So a leader cares most about the why. Why are we doing this? What's at stake? Recruiter cares most about the who. We got to get more people. We got to get more people to do this. The trainer cares a lot about the how, right? Here's what you need to know. Here's why it's important, here's what matters, here's some skills that we need to develop. An administrator cares about the details. Is our calendar, our communication working? Is it smooth, is it working properly? And a pastor cares about the soul of the people. Now here's why this is so important. If you have a ministry team in your church that just has a leader, maybe you just have this top person right here, you're asking that leader do all of these things in order to be effective. But here's what I found. Very few people are good at all these. In fact, I don't think there's anybody that's gifted in all five of these things. So it's possible in your church, you say, "Well Michael, you're telling me I got a problem getting one leader to lead a ministry. You're saying now

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I gotta get five leaders to lead a ministry?" Let me talk about that because that's a great question, and here's why this is so important. First of all, when you break down the leadership roles like this, you actually make it simpler for people. You actually open more doors and even though it's more people involved, its more specific people involved and it's tapping into people's specific gift mix, rather than asking them to do something that's overwhelming. So in a way you're making a leadership role smaller, you're making it more manageable, you're making it more detailed, and you're opening the possibilities of leadership to more people who may think only this is...I'm not this person. You're opening up somebody who's gifted at recruiting, or pastoring, or administrating, or training, a teacher. You're opening up more doors for people to serve in your church. You're actually...and the second thing is, you're actually making their job easier. You're making their job easier that they can

do it. So not only are you opening up more possibilities for people to serve, when they do step in, you're creating clear lanes for people to serve in. And now here's the thing. You say, "Well, I can't get five people." All right. Well, here's what you could do. You could just start with two. You could just say, "Hey, instead of asking the leader to do all five of these things. What if we found, you know, let's just start with the recruiter. What if we just added recruiters throughout our ministries and start there, and then when we get ready to do that, find administrators." And here's the other thing I would say to this. Is occasionally you'll find people that are good at a couple of these things. So you may find somebody who is good at leading and recruiting. Sometimes those could go well together, like a naturally energetic person, one person could do two of these roles. Maybe you find somebody who's really good at administrating and pastoring, right? Maybe you find somebody who's good at training and pastoring, and they can do two of those roles. Maybe there's a super volunteer in your church

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who can do three of these roles. But I don't think there's anybody that's naturally gifted to do all five of these roles. And so as you can split it up, just start by splitting your one leadership role in two, just creating two tracks. Then maybe you can go to three, then maybe eventually you can get five. But I want you just to imagine with me. If every leadership team in your church, if every ministry team, kids' ministry, worship, small groups. If they had this structure, if you blended WOW people and HOW people together and say, "Hey, for every ministry team that we've got in our church, we're actually looking to fill five specific roles," and you made that your mission to fill each of these roles, imagine what would happen.

Now there's two documents that I think can help you take action with this master class. The first is this. The first is a volunteer job description, and we've created a template, it's a Word document, you can download it because you're a Church Fuel One member. You can download it and you can create a volunteer job description, you know, for the recruiter of the elementary

ministry. Recruiter for 11:00 guest service team. You take the job description and you customize it, not just for the leader of the whole ministry, but for each one of these roles. It doesn't have to be complicated, it could be a half of a page. But you simplify down job descriptions. So when you go to people and say, "Listen. Here's exactly what we're asking you to do. I'm not asking you to run the whole thing. We're asking you to be a pastor here." Incidentally these three people, they all work under the leadership of the leader. So you get the leader. And the leader has now four people to lead through, rather than do everything. And so a volunteer job description is gonna help you create clarity around roles, and get your people on the same page as your ministries. The second thing is the ministry action plan. We've talked about this before, but this is a one-page document that every ministry in your church in should have. And you'll see down on the bottom right, that there's a space for you to write these

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people's names in. And if every ministry in your church, not only was working to fulfill the mission and vision of the church, but they have their strategy and their numbers and their goals, and then they also have this leadership structure just clarified all on one page, imagine the clarity that comes from having all of your ministries on one page, using common language, common leadership roles, and common systems and processes to function in your church. It's a huge way to get everybody on the same page. So make sure every ministry has a ministry action plan, and make sure every volunteer has a job description. And those two things will help you set up your ministry for success. Those two things, right? This new leadership structure will help you structure every ministry team for success, so that you don't have a leader trying to do all the stuff, and then get burned out and quit and just have to keep replacing 'em and keep replacing 'em, keep replacing 'em.

This structure is healthy, it allows you to grow, it allows you to scale, and it allows you to get people serving in their sweet

spot. So take a look at this, download the job descriptions, download the ministry action plan. If you've got questions about any of this, jump into the Facebook group. We talk through any of this. We have great discussions happening in there. You got questions for us, you can email us, you can hop on office hours. We'll work through any of this with you as a Church Fuel One member, and we're so glad that you're part of the family, and we're so glad that we get the opportunity to serve you. I hope this framework helps you think through your ministry teams, and how they can be successful.

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