Giving the Ministry Away

Are you up to your eyeballs in details and strategic planning?  Are you struggling to figure out how to fill the roles with your current team of staff and interns?  Let me suggest a potential solution to alleviate some of your burden: VOLUNTEERS!

In the past I’ve only thought of volunteers as bakers for campus events even though Steve Sellers talked about “giving the ministry away” during the last few National Staff Conferences.  While Home Depot’s slogan  “You can do it.  We can help.”  seems like a good rally cry, I hesitate:  Will volunteers do the ministry as well as me?  Will it take more work to train and develop volunteers? What about “quality control,” WBS DNA, and Cru distinctives?

I’m on the DestinoNYC stint team this year and part of our assignment is to develop a network of volunteers who will start and lead multiplying Destino movements throughout the City.  This assignment is broadening my perspective of who “owns” the ministry.  It also complements the work I’ve done with the 100% Sent Team to give lift to sending our students and faculty into a lifetime of living out their God-given calling.

Here are some of my new conclusions:

• Involving volunteers validates God’s call in people’s lives.
• It says you don’t have to go into full time ministry to be involved in campus ministry.
• It demonstrates that you can be passionate about your field of study and about the work of God in students’ lives
• It affirms what we talk about regarding using ministry skills after graduation
• It removes the fallacy that one must be a “professional Christian” to have a multiplying ministry.
• It communicates trust in God and His work IN and THROUGH non-staff people.

The biggest conclusion I’m discovering: Involved volunteers are evidence that I really believe in 100% Sent.

Our DestinoNYC stint team just hosted two Saturdays of training for students, church partners and volunteers.  We spent our summer contacting churches and asking pastors to consider a ministry partnership.  The attendance wasn’t as high as we’d hoped for, but we had more potential volunteers than I’ve ever had at any other event in 15 years of ministry.

But now what?  What will our volunteers do?  Certainly more than baking cookies for an outreach, though if someone wants to do that we’ll certainly take it!  So far we’ve brainstormed leading an evangelistic Bible study, discipling/mentoring students, leading a discussion group or focus group, giving a talk at a weekly meeting, doing evangelism on campus and sharing how they experience God at work.  Our homework for the next staff meeting is to pray and think through additional entry points into our ministry.

It will take some effort to think about the best way and the best time to train and equip volunteers, but we’re a ministry of transferable resources!  We have a wiki and this CruPressGreen site full of tools and training and videos.  We really are in a position to fulfill Steve Sellers’ exhortation to “give the ministry away.”

There will probably be some challenges.  There always are when you talk about a paradigm shift.  But as I recall, some staff were nervous about adding interns to teams.  Can you imagine your team without interns now?  Interns make all the difference on some staff teams.

But does it work?   The MTL for the New Orleans Metro Team is a volunteer.   In fact, the whole staff team is made up of volunteers.

I’m eager to say that for the DestinoNYC team, volunteers make all the difference!