A staff member and I recently met with another local multisite church who wanted input on how we operate with volunteers during weekend services. The other church was completely blown away (literally, jaws dropped) that weekend services are pulled off by over 750 volunteers! I was shocked that it was almost the opposite in their case! This revealed to me even more:  the culture we have put in place at FOTP of investing in our people. The faithfulness of our volunteers is something we need to praise. It also reminded me of how important it is for us to continue building relationships with our teams and to recruit as much as possible.

One of my goals for 2019 was to implement some sort of recruiting program for our Media Team across all campuses. Rusty Martin, our Media Director, and I brainstormed many ideas with the goal in mind to have small effort, big reward.  I mean, who has time to do a big cookout every weekend with 4 campuses to recruit?  They would have full bellies, it would cost a lot of money, we would be exhausted, and I bet we would be disappointed with the lack of responses to serve! What we came up with and put into action was so simple yet so effective, a personal invitation.

I started with our Grapevine campus and asked Charles, Grapevine’s Campus Pastor, to show me people in the atrium, before and in between services, that were not serving anywhere. I went up to them, introduced myself and made small conversation. The relationship building started immediately! I was able to take them back to the media room that day, show them an overview of what we do, cast some vision, and personally ask them to serve! The results were amazing! Six of those non-serving people are now volunteering, and it took less than 30 minutes to get them on board!  People want to be personally invited to serve! It works, it’s simple, relationships were started, personal invitations were given, and now we can invest in each of those six people

We try extremely hard to be intentional with each volunteer we have on our media team. We take the time to make our team more like family and have fun while doing so! Our main goal with volunteers is to invest and empower each of them! We want to know each volunteer on a deeper level than just saying, “Hi.”  We empower each of them to learn different positions with the intent to take on more leadership roles.  We try our best to show them how much they are appreciated with Sonic drinks on Saturday and breakfast on Sundays.  It’s the least we can do for how much we appreciate them and rely on them each weekend! We could not pull off weekend services if it wasn’t for our volunteers! 

Build relationships, personally invite others to serve alongside you, and invest in each of them!