Supercharge your volunteer training
Volunteers don’t just show up on your doorstep fully prepared to handle all that student ministry will throw at them. Most of the time, their hearts are right but they need to be trained. It is your job to take their passion and form them into great volunteers.
When you have well trained volunteers, it will make your ministry super effective. You have one head, two arms, and two legs (unless you’ve been swimming too close to a nuclear power plant lately). That means you can only do so much. But you can train up your volunteers so that they become extensions of you, doing ministry as well (or in some cases better) as you.
Hopefully you are doing some training. You can always do more! Look for ways to go beyond the monthly training meeting without being too intrusive on your team’s time. Here are some ideas to help supercharge your training beyond the monthly training meetings…
Weekly Emails
You can say a lot with a short email. You don’t need to overwhelm your team, but giving them something to think about during the week will be helpful. If you have trouble coming up with enough stuff on your own, check out Doug Fields “Youth Leader Training on the Go”, it offers weekly pdfs you can send out.
MP3 Training
Most of your volunteers probably own an MP3 player or spend time in the car, so once a month give them a 30 minute (or less) MP3/CD to digest. Search online for podcasts, mp3s from SYM or YS Conferences, or other training from “professionals.” Sometimes another voice saying the same thing you are carries additional weight.
Yearly Retreat
Your volunteers are probably very busy with jobs, family, and life. They’re contributing to your ministry in the little spare time they have. So you probably can’t get them out for a weekend retreat or attend a conference. If you can, great! If you can’t, plan a 6-8 hour mini-retreat. Don’t meet at your church, go somewhere crazy. Go mini-golfing and have each hole be a 20 second training exercise. Have lunch at the local teen hangout, and talk about the importance of outreach. Be crazy, be creative!
Training videos
In this era of YouTube, we can’t ignore the value of video. This is especially helpful if you can’t meet regularly. Record yourself covering important topics. Don’t go longer than 10 minutes, and make them interesting.
Skype/Google + Hangout
Maybe you can’t get everyone together for a training session. To make things interesting, schedule a skype/google + group video chat. There are limits to how many that can chat at the same time, but for smaller groups it would work great. Note – Skype would require one of you to have a “Skype Premium” account, but its pretty cheap.
One on One mentoring
Take time each month to meet with some of your volunteers to mentor, pray with, and address personal concerns. These meetings will help to connect your relatively impersonal big training sessions to personally applying training in their lives. These meetings are invaluable.
These are just some suggestions to help train your volunteers. How do you train your team, and do you do anything creative to make things more dynamic?
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