Blended worship in 2019 referred to the style of music in services.  Should we offer contemporary, classic, country-western, or blended?  This has been an issue for decades.  

In 2022 blended worship, however, refers to the channels through which worship is offered.  What combination of live worship, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, Churchstreaming.tv, or other streaming services should we use?

Change through challenging times is an important part of what it means to walk with God. As the Serenity prayer instructs us, "hardship is the pathway to peace."

One of the reasons hardship leads to peace is that there's a significant part of that path where we're disoriented and uncertain about the terrain on which we're travelling.  It's along this section of the road that faith is built, that is, peace with God.  Covid 19 has been such a roadway for the church.

It is clear that something is different about church since 2019.  I mentioned this related to our voice of the customer research in my last blog.  But is this difference good or bad?  And, how can technology help?

Happy new year to you and your church teams.  May the Lord give you new insights for reaching people in the almost post-pandemic world of 2022.   

As part of our planning for the future, we recently contracted a Voice of the Customer researcher to interview eight of our most active customers.  There were lots of insights but two stood out to me that I'd like to address talk about in this blog post. 

You've spent significant time and energy to find, recruit, interview, verify, train, schedule, and track volunteers.  But, there is one last, and maybe most important, part of the volunteer process - caring for them.

On Saturday, boot tracks in the snow will mean only one thing.  Santa Claus has dropped off gifts meant to bring joy to you and your family.

The time your volunteers spend serving is a gift to your church.  But, it's also a reflection of the spiritual gifts God gave them.  That word in Greek is charisma. 

If you've ever done it or had a spouse who has done it, you know that scheduling volunteers to serve on a consistent basis on Sundays is a complex and often grueling task.  It can often mean Saturday night or even Sunday morning phone calls from someone you were counting on who needs to back out.  And you have to find a replacement.  This is stressful for everyone involved.

Last month I started this series on how to organize and build an effective volunteer system within Churchteams from start to finish.  As a reminder, here are the seven parts of this system.

You've cast the vision for a new year, a new building, or a new missions opportunity.  You've asked people to pray to determine the part God would have them play in investing in this vision over the next months or years.  Now, it's time to let them respond.

The cardstock pledge cards have been handed out.  With them you gave out some really cool, branded pens as swag. The cards are collected and expectantly prayed over.  

So far we've looked at how to use church software to recruit and interview potential volunteers.  Once you've determined that someone is a good fit for ministry, it is time to verify your assumptions by doing a background check.

Background checks are pretty normal for churches and I've observed how churches have gone from doing them just for children's ministry to doing them for almost all volunteers.  It's a great idea just to be sure you do your due diligence to make sure your volunteers are safe.

This is the third in a series of blog posts on everything related to volunteers.  In the last one we talked about different ways of identifying and recruiting volunteers directly and indirectly.

In all four approaches (direct registration, indirect registration, direct reports, indirect reports), we ended up with a group or "pool" of potential volunteers.

The next step in the process is to interview these people.  The purpose of the interview is threefold:

Everything related to volunteers starts by creating a pool.  This is the gathering place from which a volunteer pipeline flows. 

You might refer to it as a list of potential volunteers that you create before starting to recruit.  If you would have asked me at one point in my ministry what it is, I would have called it the directory.  The directory is still a pretty common tool for recruiting volunteers.  So are sticky notes.  But there is a better way.