Let me tell you about the vision I’ve had. I actually just started communicating it about 5-6 weeks ago. In recognizing where we need to go as a ministry, I knew that we need significantly more help. As far as room coverage and functionality is concerned, we’re pretty good. However, to have a truly small span of care, we’ve got many positions to fill.

When I’m with or talking to Jim Wideman, I’m always challenged. He talks about develop his first, second and third string of volunteers and backups for his backups. Jim Wideman is an incredible leader and gifted in this area, but there’s no reason why we can’t have a similar experience in our ministry.

So, about a month ago I began telling my staff that my goal was to double our volunteer base in the next 12 months. I’ve done this before when in a rapidly growing church or coming into a run down ministry that I was going to turn around, but that’s not the case here. Things are fairly healthy and we’re currently running more volunteers than we’ve ever had before. In addition, our church is growing, just not at any kind of “rapid” pace. So, doubling our base would be a purely intentional thing that will take a lot of effort as well as God’s help.

So, we’re currently at 300 volunteers at our largest campus. Probably half of our volunteers serve every week. In the next twelve months, my goal is to have 600 volunteers. In addition, I want 75% of our volunteers to serve every week. I’m very excited about this vision and I’m looking forward to working through various strategies and efforts with my team to make this happen. Tomorrow I’ll share how we did something these last two weeks to get 1/3 of the way there.

So, what’s your big vision for your volunteers this year?