Church Organized: Make a Leaderboard

We had a saying that our church was driven by God, but fueled by volunteers.  The church is a volunteer organization – you’ll never be able to hire your way out of developing volunteer leaders. 
 
So let me ask you a question…
 
Who is caring and leading EVERY volunteer in your church?  
 
Every single volunteer needs a staff member or a committed leader to pastor them, a person involved in their lives, who cares not just about their tasks, but about their souls.
 
Since volunteers fall through the cracks when they are not personally pastored by someone, you need to be absolutely sure that every volunteer has a clear place on someone’s radar.  One of the best ways to do this is to create a leader board.
 
A leaderboard is a large, physical org chart – not for your staff, but for your volunteers.  It should have every single volunteer on it, along with clear lines identifying who is responsible for them.  You can use a dry erase board, chalkboard, or large sheet of paper, but your leaderboard needs to be large and visible, so that the names of your volunteers are constantly before your team.
 
Here’s how we did this:

• We attached a 8’ piece of sheet metal to a wall in our office.
• We purchased a bunch of colored dry erase magnets and wrote the name of every volunteer on one of the 1” magnetic strips.
• We color coded them by teams (group leaders, kids, students, production, etc)
• We could move and rearrange people, since the whole thing was magnetic.
• Every single volunteer was underneath a leader, who had the job of providing pastoral care to that person.

When you see the names of all your leaders and volunteers every day, you’ll be reminded that ministry is about people, and effective ministry takes people.  Create a visual representation of pastoral care.
 
Blessings!
Michael
 
P.S. You can use an online tool like gliffy.com to make a digital version of this.  That may be a great place to start, but I highly recommend you put up a big, visible chart with everyone’s name on it somewhere in your office.  There's something about seeing it on the wall.