Notes from WCA’s Defining Moments: Developing a Strategic Plan – Revisited The first 20 years at Willow Creek: There was no formal strategic plan in place When the church first began, the whole plan was to lead people to Christ and grow them up As the years went by, the church grew and more sub-ministries […]
Myth 7: Volunteerism is a One way Deal — All Output, No Returns, No Rewards Quite commonly, a senior pastor will say to me, “Bill, our people are busy, they work hard in the market place, they’re raising kids, they’re doing stuff in the community. I just couldn’t ask them to do more than that.” […]
Extract from Bill Hybels’ article, The Seven Myths of Volunteerism Myth 6: Volunteers Need Encouragement from Heaven but They Really Don’t need Much Encouragement from Anyone on Earth. We ought to clean up structures so that staff know exactly who their volunteer team members are and we should be creating cultures of inspiration. It doesn’t […]
Myth 5: Volunteers Are Not Interested in Training or Development. Volunteers, generally speaking, love getting a little better at stuff. They would like to be a little sharper, their tools to be razor-edged. They would like to be developed. My opinion is that there should be training as well as on-going training whenever a volunteer […]
Myth 4: Most Volunteers Want To Serve in One Role for a Lifetime. Let me reveal a nasty little secret about pastors and paid staff. When a pastor or staff recruit a volunteer and train them and help them figure out their spiritual gifts and finally place them in a critical role in some ministry […]
Myth 3: Volunteers Are Free Help. I remember when we decided to do food service on our campus. It was a big decision. We knew that when we were going to provide food service that we were going to have to pay a small staff for a few key people. But we envisioned hundreds of volunteers […]
As I said at the start of the year, I’m planning on reading a lot more old books this year. I’m going to blog about the experience, in order to try and keep me honest in keeping it up! I’ve just finished “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. It starts with a student who murders two […]
Myth 2: Volunteers Are Only Capable of Doing the Busy Work of the Church By this I refer to the myth that volunteers are only capable of doing repetitive tasks that the paid staff doesn’t really want to mess with. That they’re only capable of doing the tasks that are low in strategic import. At […]
Myth 1: There Aren’t Enough Volunteers to Go Around Almost everywhere I turn when I meet with pastors and leaders, they’re bemoaning the fact that they don’t have enough volunteers for their ministries. But there’s always a reason why they’re not serving. I don’t know what it is in your church. We know some […]
Notes from WCA’s Defining Moments: Ask Bill How should those who have ministered faithfully but can’t seem to get their own churches to grow very much feel in this era of mega-churches? Bill struggles with this question because there are thousands of pastors in places all over the worldwho will never see what Bill has […]
