I don’t know about your ministry, but our ministry does not slow down during the summer. Between our end-of-year volunteer appreciation picnic, recruiting (for summer and fall) and Summer Bible Camp, our workload during the summer keeps us quite busy!
One of our biggest tasks for our summer is preparing for summer programming. We give our school-year volunteers the summer off to rest, recover and re-energize for the fall. This means that in order to staff our ministry, we rely on parent volunteers and members of our church body to serve. This poses quite a challenge, considering travel schedules to work around and the reality that people just don’t want to serve.
To make the transition to summer programming a little easier on our seasonal volunteers, I have chosen a summer volunteer-friendly curriculum for the past 3 summers. We use a video-based teaching time (which takes a huge burden off of a seasonal volunteer’s shoulders) and have our volunteers facilitate small group discussion, games and activities. This is something that our volunteers are very comfortable with.
Although our summer volunteers are seasonal and may serve just one or two Sundays, it is important that they be aware of some basic ministry information, such as arrival times, class schedule, safety policies, and classroom discipline. I recently put together a “Summer Serve Handbook” for our volunteers containing this important information.
What does summer look like in your ministry?
