Beginning to Equip Volunteers St. Peter Lutheran Church, Arlington Heights, Illinois by Karen Kogler

 

Background: In October 2007 I began working two days/week at St. Peter Lutheran Church, Arlington Heights, Illinois, as Director of Volunteer Equipping. St. Peter had been without a long-term senior pastor for almost a decade until the arrival of Rev. Ted Andrada in January 2007. Rev. Andrada and I agreed that my goal would not be to recruit or direct all the church's volunteers, but to help individuals find places to serve according to their gifts and to help all of us become better at helping each other serve.

I decided on these priorities:

1. Get the word out about my purpose and goals; get to know the leaders; hear their concerns
2. Build teams of volunteers to help me in each area/project of my job.
3. Make a visible difference as soon as possible.
4. Focus first on helping new members find places to serve.
5. Hold off on a major recruitment push until we have a system and people in place to follow up on the many people that we pray will respond.

What's been done:

I wrote up a mission, vision and goals summary.
I met individually with each professional and support staff person to hear their concerns and share my vision.
I met with groups of volunteer leaders (our Board members, Social Ministry commission, Youth commission, etc.) to hear their concerns and share my vision.
We added staff volunteerism training frequently to many of our weekly staff meetings. We're now using Betty Stallings' "Training Busy Staff to Succeed with Volunteers" series, with "Delegating to Volunteers" in May and "Designing Positions for Volunteers" scheduled for July.
New members
1. Pastor Greiner, our outreach pastor, recently redesigned our new member classes. He teaches one session on vocation and I teach one session on serving in the church. Using his template, I created a serving brochure.
2. Met individually with most of the December 07 new member class.
3. This spring, I recruited and trained 6 people to meet with new members. We call them jMinistry Guides. Four of them each met with one person/couple from the March 08 class and they are now doing the same with the June 08 class.
4. I did not have time to meet with the rest of the March 08 class members, but will come back to them later this summer. I have begun meeting with the rest of the June 08 class.
With our membership secretary, I reviewed our current membership database, ACS Technologies' People Suite. We added a web-based component (AccessACS) through which trained volunteers can add/edit certain member information (such as new member contacts and ministry participation) from home

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