Choosing Volunteers
No matter the size of your church, finding and keeping a strong volunteer team is vital to the strength of your Children’s Ministry. Your three main objectives when choosing your team are the following:
- Keeping your children safe
- Finding volunteers that have hearts for children
- Finding volunteers!
- Keeping your children safe – Every volunteer, no matter how long they have been at the church or how long you have known them, should complete a background check when they sign up to work with your Children’s Ministry. We recommend doing a national search, not just a state search. Below are links to forms you can use as well as a link to one of the more inexpensive background check sites that I have found. I recommend you complete your own search as well.
- Finding volunteers that have hearts for children – You want to make sure you are working with a team of people that at minimum “like” children (LOL!). Don’t just put people in classes with your children because you need bodies in there. It’s probably better to just not have the class if you don’t have people working with you that want to share the love of God with kids. Finding quality volunteers can be a challenge, but it is not too hard for God. Pray that He touches the hearts of the right people and brings in the volunteers that you need so that you can offer the highest quality of service to the families at your ministry.
- Recruiting volunteers – Recruiting new volunteers can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. As mentioned before, you really want to use people that already have some sort of heart or passion to work with children. How do you find these people? Well, that could be what is challenging.
A couple of tips that could help:
- If you don’t already have it (and you really should have it), gain the support of your senior leadership, specifically your Senior Pastors. They are key in helping to recruit new team members. If they are not directly involved with what goes on in Children’s Ministry, then you are going to have to make sure they understand the needs there as well as help them keep a pulse on your successes and progress.
- See if your Senior Pastors would encourage new volunteers to join Children’s Ministry from the pulpit or maybe even with individuals one-on-one. Sometimes when the congregation hears directly from the Pastors that Children’s Ministry is important to them, then it becomes a little more important to the congregation OR they just have an ear to listen a little better when the Pastors address the church. This is not always true, but generally it is.
- If your church has a way to assimilate new members into the ministry (i.e. New Members Class or Orientation of some sort), see if there is an opportunity for your Children’s Ministry to be mentioned during that time. Maybe you can even be there to meet people afterwards and let them know how they can become involved. Have applications in hand! LOL!
- Have Children’s Ministry Orientations frequently to orientate new volunteers into Children’s Ministry. Be prepared to equip new people at anytime during the month by having your orientation packets ready to go; applications, background check forms, policies and procedures, volunteer t-shirts, etc. Whatever a new volunteer needs to get started working as a new worker, have your materials available on hand so that you can move them quickly into a class for service
- If you don’t already have it (and you really should have it), gain the support of your senior leadership, specifically your Senior Pastors. They are key in helping to recruit new team members. If they are not directly involved with what goes on in Children’s Ministry, then you are going to have to make sure they understand the needs there as well as help them keep a pulse on your successes and progress.
