Years ago, I realized that our children’s ministry teams often struggled to form genuine connections, highlighting a clear need to strengthen our kids ministry team through intentional gatherings.
While this may seem surprising, it pointed to a hard truth about my leadership: I was not creating enough opportunities for volunteers to get to know one another.
We consistently emphasized that volunteers should know the children in their small group—including their names, passions, and interests—yet we had failed to provide the same space for the volunteers themselves to build community.
Now granted, I was making my way around the room to get to know all of these volunteers personally. That is a fantastic start. But I found that a greater level of relational victory was going to be achieved if volunteers knew one another.
Be in Community.
People want to be in community and serving should lead to a greater sense of community. We just weren’t providing an opportunity for that to take place.
The way that our team sought to solve this problem was by creating volunteer family gatherings once or twice a quarter at someone’s house. These volunteer gatherings included family members and were quite well attended. We went so far as to host volunteer gatherings on a Friday AND Saturday evening to accommodate schedules.
It took a lot of work but we figured out ways to scale this opportunity. We created meals that could be easily stored from Friday evening to Saturday evening. We would have large crock pots filled with taco meat, we would have a soup night where we could save the soup one night to the next and we would have sign ups to allow people to bring food.
I cannot begin to tell you how important this was to the health of our ministry. Volunteers began to get to know one another, sit by one another at dinner, and their kids got to know one another. Volunteers were no longer these isolated entities who were somehow missing out on relationships with other adults.
Unintended Consequence
Part of the fear—and sometimes an unintended consequence—of serving with kids is that you will miss out on adult relationships. Therefore, we as ministry leaders have to find and carve out ways for our leaders to connect with us and one another.
These volunteer dinners did so much good. We found people rearranging their schedules to ensure that they could be there. We even had backyard barefoot kickball tournaments. These volunteer gatherings turned into an event nobody wanted to miss.
My encouragement to you, in your context, is to find ways for volunteers to connect with one another.
First published on KidMinScience.com. Used by permission.
