Speaker
Karen has been speaking to congregations and at conferences for almost 20 years, teaching the practical “how-to’s” of healthy church volunteerism and exploring the issues behind the processes. Presentations are adapted to the audience. She speaks on these topics:
Big-picture equipping topics
- Equipping Volunteers vs. Recruiting Volunteers
- Biblical truth on equipping people to serve
- How does a church help its people serve?
- Vocation
How-to topics
- How to Recruit Volunteers
- Designing Tasks for Today’s Volunteers
- Creating and Using Ministry Descriptions
- Volunteer Retention (training, supervising and affirming volunteers)
- Ministry Conversations (Interviewing)
- How to Delegate
- Evaluating Volunteers
- How to Fire a Volunteer (handling problems with volunteers)
- Risk Management
General Christian topics:
- Time to Serve – thoughts on time choices in busy lives and how it affects serving God
- Vocation as taught by Martin Luther
- He’s Calling You
- My Hero Wears a Dress
Coach
What would it be like to have someone spend an hour with you each month, helping you figure out how to do what God is calling you to do? Working with you as clarify goals, identify obstacles, explore options, and discover resources? Someone who both challenges you and cheers you on?
This is what a coach does. By providing resources, accountability, a listening ear, and provocative questions, a coach supports and encourages you as you set goals and work to achieve them. A coach is not a counselor, teacher or mentor. A coach helps you recognize and apply what God has already given you.
Consider a coach if you are a ministry leader wishing to improve your skills in working with volunteers, a new hire or new volunteer “point person” at your church, or simply desiring to advance your volunteerism skills.
Getting the most benefit from equipping services
Congregations reap greater benefits from a speaker or coach when church leaders understand the basics of being an equipping church and are prepared to follow through with implementation. A speaker or coach brings tools as well as ideas, information and enthusiasm. But the work must be done by the church. That work is most likely to happen, and be successful, when leaders have done their homework. Before engaging my services for anything other than a single presentation, I suggest a church invest by doing the following:
- A minimum of 3-4 people become familiar with the principles of equipping people to serve through such resources as:
- this website
- Me to We by Alan Nelson
- The Equipping Church by Sue Mallory
- The Equipping Church Guidebook by Sue Mallory and Brad Smith
- Key church leaders, including the pastor, understand and endorse the key principles of equipping people to serve, understanding especially that equipping impacts the entire church
- A team of 3 or more people, with an identified leader, has committed to lead the equipping effort.