Take Your Ladies Ministry Volunteer Temperature
Dee Foster

Does your Ladies Ministry have a volunteer-welcoming culture? It’s good to know, because slick ladies ministry recruitment won’t make a bit of difference, if once ladies sign up, they don’t like how you do business.

Think about Disney World. Disney spends a fortune on advertising that it’s a great vacation spot. But if kids bounce through the gates and all they find is Grumpy the Dwarf and a couple of lame rides, what’s going to happen?

I’ll tell you: Disney will be out of business in six months. Disappointed people talk, and they talk loudly. It will be all over the Web, all over the news, and for Disney it’ll be all over–period.

Ladies talk about what it’s like to volunteer in your ministry too. They talk about what the leadership is like, whether it’s fun to volunteer, and whether they plan on coming back. People are talking…but what are they saying?

If you want long-term Velcro volunteers, you’ve got to have a culture that encourages people to stick around. You may think you’ve accomplished that, but what do people in your church think?

Ask them. Create a quick survey to give your volunteer. Here are four questions to get you started:

Fun: How much fun is it to be involved in Ladies Ministry at our church?

Fair: In your ladies volunteer role, are you treated fairly?

Forgiving: In your ladies volunteer role, are you expected to be perfect–or just growing?

Faithful: How much trust do you have in your ladies ministry leaders?

Before you distribute it, ask someone you trust to collect the completed forms, type up a summary, and destroy the original surveys. That way volunteers can give their honest opinions anonymously. When you see how your ministries current culture is evaluated, it might be an eye-opener.

Your ladies ministry culture will make or break your volunteer program. If it’s not fun, fair, forgiving, and faithful, you won’t hang on to volunteers that stick–you won’t have volunteers at all.

Creating a volunteer-welcoming culture is huge, and you can’t do it alone. You need to get lots of people on board, especially people in leadership. Jot down the names of people who are already making your ladies ministry volunteer culture a place that’s fun, fair, forgiving, and faithful. Who’s already helping? And who do you need to recruit?

Consider Disney World again. They’ll let you get away with a lot, but if you cross the line and start ruining the culture of the theme park, you’re history. Disney World is a fierce defender of its culture. And it’s smart for you to do the same. Don’t let anyone go chasing volunteers away because of a nasty attitude or a lack of commitment to the vision of your ministry.

Creating a volunteer-welcoming culture in the ladies ministry is a great first step–but it’s just a first step. It’ll make volunteering to your ministry attractive, but it’s not going to keep ladies on board long term. Most of what you do to turn volunteers into long-term volunteers who stick–the Velcro volunteers–you’ll have to do anyway, just to have a healthy volunteer culture.

This article “Take Your Ladies Ministry Volunteer Temperature” written by Dee Foster, was excerpted from www.churchcentral.com web site. June 2010. It may be used for study & research purposes only.

This article may not be written by an Apostolic author, but it contains many excellent principles and concepts that can be adapted to most churches. As the old saying goes, “Eat the meat. Throw away the bones.”