Category / Church

How would you assess the strength of your volunteer teams?

• Strong and vibrant
• Steady and good
• Struggling but functional
• Trying to survive

Maybe it depends on the ministry.

Many of your volunteers have returned, and no doubt you are grateful for that, but how have they returned? How are they doing?

How are they at a soul level?

How strong are their serving capacities?

If your church’s staff and key leaders have been impacted by the realities of the past couple of years, your volunteers have been affected too.

My heart aches when I hear a horror story about a church board filled with division, conflict, and competition with the pastor about who leads. But thankfully, more stories are closer to a dream come true than a nightmare.

What makes the difference?

It starts with selecting who’s on your board, but that’s just the beginning. I wrote a brief post a few years back covering an introduction to selecting church elders. I’ll include a couple of abbreviated thoughts from it today, but you can read the full post here.

Cultivating hope, expressing encouragement, and maintaining an authentically positive spirit are vital to your leadership. People need to sense your optimism as a leader.

But that’s not always easy, is it?

• Discouragement may run close to the surface for you right now.
• You may be carrying the weight of a difficult decision.
• Attempting to anticipate what’s around the corner might be causing anxiety.

Sometimes, the difficult circumstances near us can blind us to the good surrounding us.

And because we devote a significant amount of time to solving problems (a normal part of leadership), it’s easy to forget the blessings.

It’s not unlike a farmer who works so diligently to tend the soil, fend off pests, get rid of weeds, and make sure the crops are watered. Yet, they can lose sight that all that hard work produces life-giving food that nourishes so many people!

What you do really matters!