It’s time to make a new recruiting push to grow my student volunteer team.  I started creating little 1 minute emails once a week called LYF Tech Minutes.  In my last minute last week, I talked about what do we need to do to recruit? I got some very interesting responses, and these are some of them.

• Big recruiting events, don’t work! It’s too intimidating.
• Announcements from the stage, or in our weekly announcements, also don’t work.
• Spreading the word through small group leaders, kind of works, but not well.

The best recruiting technique was suggested, was, word of mouth.  INTERESTING! So I’m going to try something I’ll dub Empty Seat, Open Spot. Granted that means I need to buy some more chairs for my production areas, but I want to see if my students can get some friends involved to fill those empty seats. I originally got this idea from Greg Atkinson.  Very ingenious, and something I want to try. I’m curious to my limited readers out there, what recruiting tricks work for you?  

So on the average Sunday, I arrive around 9am. I am the fortunate one who really doesn’t have an official service or task to knock out on Sunday AM. All my stuff takes place on Sunday and Wednesday nights. For reasons I won’t go into here, it’s not a tangible thing to invest in our volunteers in our Sunday morning services right now. Its a weird situation, that when I know how to approach without a whole lot of detail I’ll go into.

I make sure the LYF Center, our student building, is ready for the round-table/lecture style high school group. I just make sure whoever is presenting can get there laptop hooked up, make sure they know how to mute and unmute there body pack, and then I move on. I try to make it to our 9:30 service, and walk the room, make notes, and provide feed back to Rick to relay to the audio guys. We have a GREAT group of volunteers at Sugar Creek who take a lot of pride in their work. But they feel serving in the third service, our contemporary service, is too much for one Sunday.

We used to have two guys that rotated for the third service, but there jobs took them away too often. So I became the resident FOH engineer for that service. We’re starting to work some more volunteers in the mix, which is cool, because thats how should be, especially if your church believes in empowering those who wish to be a part of something.

Once our ‘Edge’ service is over with I get to crack-a-lackin for Sunday night. Our student ministry offers a Sunday night high school service, and a Wednesday night middle school service each week, which makes for a FULL week. I typically don’t get content till 2 hours before the service, so I try to get as much ready as I can, so that when the students who volunteer show up, I can work with them on being successful in the service. Around 9 o’clock, I walk into my apartment and do what a good friend of mine describes as a sheet dive.