If that’s not a sexy blog title, I don’t know what is.

Yesterday I wrote asking what your church policy is concerning meals with volunteers and leaders. For a holiday week and for inadvertently having comments turned off on my blog, it seemed like a question others were curious about. I’ll probably sum up this conversation next week, but I thought I’d give you an update on some of the information I’ve gathered so far. I have a “go-to” team of people who I often send emails to when I have questions like this. Depending on the questions, I mix up who I ask.

So here is some of the feedback I got:

“I might take one person a month out for lunch.  The majority of my meetings are coffees.  I either schedule early in the morning or late afternoon.  Rarely do I have trouble meeting with a volunteer due to time b/c they can usually break away from work for a 30 minute coffee chat.  Reduces our expenses from $15/head to $8/head if and when they buy the froo-froo coffee.”

“We investing in the people that make ministry happen week to week. We have never crunched the numbers hard but we make a pretty big investment each year also with those kind of meetings. With that said here are four things we are asking everyone on our team to do to help limit the cost…
1. Think 1 // think about those meetings in terms of 1 per leader. Those kind of meetings do not need to be on a regular basis with the same leader. Spread out the time.
2. Think save // the more coffee and not lunch meetings you can do the better. Save where you can!
3. Think office first // we have office space so try to do as many meetings as possible in office to save resources.
4. Just connect sometimes and don’t pay // some leaders just do not need this, it’s ok to meet just to connect and not have a meal expense hitting the church.”

“They’re not always expecting u to pay. In fact, I’ve got a few vols that get offended that I would use tithe dollars to buy them lunch. They just want my time and attention. Not the free lunch.”

“Full-time employees, $1,500 for volunteer meetings and $1,000 for church staff related meetings.  We ask that the total not exceed $18 a day.”

Some other great comments have come in on yesterday’s post. Certainly check out what others have said there. Like I said, I’ll summarize all that I’ve learned next week. Feel free to jump in on either this post or yesterday’s.