Excuse # 2:
“I don’t have the right team”
“I’m all alone”
Missed the beginning of this series? Check it out here
Most of you reading this probably work in small churches and you get who you can get. Those who are committed to your weekly church services are the people God has brought there and that is the pool from which we have to draw.
Constantly saying “I don’t have the right team” is an excuse to do nothing. Even though you don’t have the right team may be true, you cannot use it as a reason to do nothing.
I have always had big dreams. I wanted to see kids receive Christ and watch my youth groups grow as a symbol of the growth of the kingdom of God. But I’ve had to adjust my dreams to fit my teams while I grew my teams to embrace the bigger dream.
Some of my teams, over the years, were just not ready for the full dream and I had to grow them into it. The question is “How long are you willing to wait?” What’s your patience like?
It’s possible that your dreams are too far out of reach for the volunteers you have and you have to scale back until you’ve grown them into your dream and this take time. Volunteers/Leaders need time to grow, time to marinate in your leadership style.
It could be that you’re not good at training others, try some of these ideas
- find some resources online in areas where your volunteers need to be trained and e-mail them out a few times a quarter.
- post photos or make videos for your volunteers to help them visualize what you’re trying to do.
- Break down your dream in stages and train them with a drip, drip, drip approach, feeding them your thoughts in small doses and in multiple formats.
No church has the perfect team, not even the big ones, just people who love teens and want to help minister to young people. We have to respect where our team is at and grow them accordingly.
“What if I am all alone?” If you’re starting by yourself, with no team, this is a great opportunity to build trust and cast vision with your students. Make them your team and add adults as you can. A good vision will attract the right kinds of people.
- Spend time writing on social media and sharing it
- Hang signs about your vision in your youth area
- Put small blurbs in the your bulletin and on your churches website.
You can’t over communicate who you are and what you’re wanting to do.
How do you kill that alone feeling or the feeling like the team isn’t getting your message?
Weapon of Choice: Patience
Think of movies like Oceans 11 or The Hobbit. Teams are formed to accomplish a certain task. Teams gather, they come along side, they join you for a portion of the journey and then your paths diverge. This make sense if you’re planning to stay at your church for at least 3-5 years.
Consider Gideon who had to pare down his army to win the battle. God told him to filter out all the people who would not be the best candidates for that mission. As crazy as it sounds, God new something Gideon did not, with God, less really is more. God knows who needs to be on our team. We have to be patient with the process.
When I was younger I enjoyed puzzles. I used to work on 500 piece puzzles with my in-laws. A 500 piece puzzle can be done in a few hours. A 1,000 piece puzzle can be done in a few days. A 5,000 piece puzzle, well, a long time, if you’re me, but depending on how captivated by the picture you see on the cover of the box, will determine your patience and how hard you will work to see that picture come together.
So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her. Genesis 29:20
Jacob was willing to wait for the one he loved. Fall in love with God, let your team gather, and the wait will seem much shorter.
What is the perfect team? (The picture on the puzzle box)
Describe it to me?
Are you willing to wait for them?