Basic Training

Guess what… nedgable (or “nedjible”) isn’t dead. Even though it has been quite a while since I’ve posted a blog. Between Adventure Week and writing our fall curriculum I’ve been pretty busy. I’m still busy but Gina McClain has coaxed me out of hiding.

I had the chance to meet her at Orange and she encouraged me to keep blogging. She said I ought to just check out what people are talking about on cmconnect.org and post my thoughts. We’ll I’ve ignored that advice for about 6 months now but then I read something she posted about training volunteers on cmconnect. Turns out, we just accidentally stumbled upon what I think is going to be a great idea for volunteer training. So here goes…

We have several things we do to help train our volunteers.  All our new volunteers train with a master teacher for 4 to 6 weeks before they begin. We’re working to have coaches who move from group to group to provide on the job training. And we have a once a year, half-day mini conference that we call the children’s ministry summit.

In past years our summit was mostly logistical training and motivation. This year we decided to take it a step further. Our children’s team dug in and developed 8 different workshops to train our volunteers. During our summit we let our volunteers choose two of theses workshops in addition to one logistical training in their ministry area.  The results were incredible, our volunteers were so grateful for the training they received and they all wanted more.

Now, I realize this is nothing groundbreaking so far, and if you’re expecting something profound you may want to stop now.

Still reading… ok.

We’ve also found a good deal of success with holding parent meetings and volunteer orientation, called BrookwoodKiDs 101(this is another post) concurrently with our worship services (9:00, 10:30 and 11:59).  What we’re finding is that volunteers (and parents) don’t want to come out to meetings or events outside our regular service times. But they will take advantage of an opportunity while they’re already here on Sunday.  So we found a room and now we offer orientation once a month and parent classes about every other month.

Now since we’ve already developed our workshops, it’s easy to teach them over and over. So we’re planning to add these workshops to our Sunday morning rotation, about one workshop a month.  What we’ll ask of our volunteers is that they attend four workshops per year, two at the summit and two on Sundays. Outside the summit that’s only one every six months. And it’s on Sunday while they’re already here so it’s convenient.

The end result is that the average volunteer will get about 4 hours of ministry training per year. Very motivated volunteers could get a lot more. We’re thinking we could develop different tracks for new and experienced volunteers. We can even hand off some of these workshops to volunteers and develop even more training topics.

This all kind of happened by accident but I’m really excited about the possibilities. I’d love to hear what’s working for you.