Several years ago I was looking for wisdom on how to restructure our ministry to be prepared to handle ministering to hundreds of teenagers, I took my wife, pastor, and at that time our lone volunteer to Indian Springs Baptist Church in Bryant Arkansas the ministry that Mark Cox now heads up. I learned a lot during that visit and rather than tell you how I handle adults I asked Mark to share how he does it:

I didn’t get into youth ministry because I’m organized.

God called me.

He equipped me to start.

He’s been equipping me ever since.

That means I wasn’t a genius right out of college.

Have you ever taken a spiritual gift inventory multiple times over the course of a couple years and seen different responses each time?

I have.  The crazy thing is that as I grow, I can see God changing my desires and gifts.  For example, I’m not a natural speaker.  The first ten talks I gave should’ve been video taped and kept on hand for entertainment purposes.  Seriously, you’d laugh.  Things have changed over the years as I learn what works and what doesn’t in that arena, as well as many others.

This change is especially happening in me in the area of organization.  Let me pause for a moment to issue a quick disclaimer.  I’m not what most people would call organized. If my youth workers are reading this, they’re most likely laughing to themselves, knowing that this is definitely not where my gifts lie.  And I would agree!  But since I started in full-time ministry five years ago, I’ve really grown in this area.

One of the key areas that demand organization in youth ministry is volunteer staffing.  It’s probably not a surprise to you that youth ministry happens largely on the backs of committed volunteers that make the thing happen week in and week out.

One of the major pitfalls of youth pastors is to recruit volunteers into standing around on Wednesday nights.  The excitement usually dies after about a month, when the volunteer usually ends up feeling like they aren’t really helping with anything.  And in most cases, they’re not.  But it’s not their fault.  It is the job of the youth pastor to invite volunteers into the youth ministry for two main purposes:

1. To provide an environment for teenagers in which they can experience God in a real way.
2. To give the volunteer a vehicle for spiritual growth in their own life (serving = growth)

Sadly, a bunch of volunteers end up dropping out because they don’t feel like they’re making a difference (read: they’re not growing).  If we’re not leading adults into an organized vehicle for serving, they will drop out.

Our strategy for staffing volunteers goes a little something like this (before I go on, you should know this article isn’t about recruiting volunteers; it’s about what you do with them once you get them).

1. Only do what only you can do. I stole this line from Andy Stanley because it’s genius.  If you’re the one person in your church that can communicate God’s love to teenagers, why are you spending all your time running a vacuum or picking up the pizza?  Invest most of your time into preparing excellent messages!  Before you start recruiting volunteers, you need to know what you’re great at.  Start with the three things that you’re great at.  These are the things that make you super-valuable to your church.  These things are why you got hired.  Focus on these things and have volunteers help you with the rest.

1. Define the needs of your student ministry. What do you offer to your students each week?  Do you serve food?  Do you play games?  Does your room need to be clean?  Each of these areas need to be covered.  Decide from the beginning that you’re not going to get involved in these areas, other than providing leadership and resources to those who will.

1. Save yourself time by delegating authority. This is simple, but dangerous.  Some of your volunteers have gifts in the area of leadership.  Put the volunteers that you would trust with your children over the other volunteers.  To do this, separate the major areas of service into departments, and staff each one of them with a volunteer leader.  For example, our student ministry contains five major areas (Inside Operations, Outside Operations, Crowd Control, Service Programming, and Counseling.  Everything that we do is broken down under these five areas of service.  For instance, the café that we open each week falls under the leadership of Inside Operations.  The parking lot attendants fall under the leadership of Outside Operations.  I don’t ever need to be worried about having enough counselors at the end of a talk, because my Counseling Director has that taken care of.  In order to do this, it takes two strong elements: leadership and organization.  If you want to expect people to be strong in their area of leadership each week, it takes continual direction.  Also, instead of offering the eternally-coveted “stand outside and make sure no one dies, is making out, or making pipe bombs in the parking lot” task, you give your volunteers authority.  You can usually make this change pretty simply.  It’s all about the words you use to achieve the same result.  Instead of asking someone to watch the students in the parking lot (boring), invite them to ensure that each and every student is able to enjoy their experience while they’re outside.  That takes care of a lot of simple tasks (welcoming, keeping it safe, hanging with them).  The difference isn’t in the tasks that need to be taken care of.  It’s all in inviting someone into a greater responsibility than just a watchman.  After all, are you in youth ministry because you like to supervise kids?  I’m guessing not.

1. After you’re done coaching your volunteers, coach them some more. This is hard for me to talk about because it’s a personal weakness of mine.  It’s natural for me to think that the initial direction was enough to inspire people to commit to excellence for an entire year of weekly service.  This just isn’t the case.  Everyone needs to be reminded why they serve, and what’s expected of them.  The easiest way to do this is to creatively show them the effect they have on what happens.  As I said before, it’s inevitable for volunteers to fall into the “I’m not making a difference” trap.  Murphy’s Law applies to everyone.  Fight this!  One of my volunteers once told me something that changed the way I looked at youth workers for the rest of my life.  She said, “Mark, you just need to treat us like we’re 3^rd graders.”  I immediately reassured her that I had too much respect for them to do that.  She then helped me to understand that everyone needs reminders; even the most committed youth workers.  Think about all the things a 3^rd grade teacher has to remind her students of.  How many times do they need to be reminded that they have homework to do, or to turn in permission slips?  Exactly.

It’s all pretty simple once you recognize a couple important goals:

1. What am I really good at?
2. What are the things that I would ruin if I got involved?
3. What services do we want to offer our students each week?
4. How many people is it going to take to pull all of this off each week?

The beautiful thing about learning how to organize your volunteers in the environments is that it frees you up to focus on what you do best – the thing you got into youth ministry for, to see teenagers’ lives changed!

You can download Mark’s Volunteer application: YW Application (Final)

And the Remix Job Descriptions here: Remix Positions Packet

-Mark Cox is one of the premier youth pastors in the state of Arkansas and his passionate and sincere heart is still serving the people at Indian Springs Baptist Church in Bryant Arkansas. To get more from Mark check out his blog www.thinknextnow.com, and be sure to get his insights via twitter, and catch up with him on facebook.