The Study Corner    

Ted Harro of Willow Creek Community Church (South Barrington, IL) recently shared with Christianity Today his insights on keeping volunteers happy.

Consider these excerpts, paraphrases, and additional thoughts on seven things your volunteers need:

1. Meaning. Give your volunteers a clear, compelling purpose. Your vision makes their investment important.
2. Involvement. The deeper your volunteers are involved in your ministry; the more passionate they will be about it. Don’t simply involve them in your plans, but get their input and feedback.
3. Celebration & Tradition. It is important to continually reinforce your ministry’s core values and to regularly give your volunteers encouragement, meaningful moments, and opportunities to build relationships with other volunteers. Celebrations and traditions are great ways to achieve this.
4. Positives. Neutralize the negatives, and you will strengthen the meaning.
5. Efficiency. Be prepared and have direction so that your ministry can use your volunteers’ time wisely.
6. More Efficiency. Prune the unnecessary things that waste your ministry’s resources so that your volunteers can have the resources that they need to effectively minister.
7. Opportunity. Give your proven volunteers the opportunity to do something bigger than menial tasks. It will help them grow and give you more time to do what only you can do.

James 2:8-9 (NIV)

8 “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,”you are doing right. 9 But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers.”;

While studying James, chapter 2, one can read about the way that favoritism should be viewed, and while I was studying this it very much impressed on me how horrendously wrong discrimination is; and how both favoritism and discrimination are a manifestation of our lack of humility to God, his will, and our fellow man.
I don’t just mean against any one of the typical groups that is stereotypically discriminated against, I mean against the kid at the drive thru window, the person in the car beside you in traffic, the person pulled over on the side of the road broken down.

Matthew 25:40 (NIV)
40 “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’