"BUT WAIT...THERE'S MORE" : A SPECIAL LETTER TO THE MVC CONGREGATION FROM OUR SENIOR PASTOR
Most people don’t like change. We do what we can to keep our settings comfortable and familiar, even if the world is changing around us.
And the world around us inevitably changes. It changes as information changes, and because of our technology, information changes (and is disseminated) at a much quicker pace than ever before.
If you don’t have mechanisms for change, you don’t stay in the same place. You fall behind. You stagnate and either quickly or slowly, you wither away.
Our problem here at Mountain View is insufficient parking. Our seats in the auditorium aren’t full, but our parking lot is. It’s somewhat baffling, but that’s the way it is. It’s a problem that must be solved. If we do nothing, we fall behind.
We tried shuttling to an off-site parking lot, but it was too much of an inconvenience. Few people made use of the shuttle service. The next step – and we would eventually have to go to it anyway – is two services.
Going to two services is not just a matter of announcing new times and then going on with things as they always were. It requires a tremendous amount of work that goes on mostly behind the scenes and is therefore not well understood. Some people grow impatient and wonder what is taking so long.
The easy thing to do is to work top-down. The person at the top dictates and everybody else, like it or not, does what they are told. That’s a great way to alienate people in a volunteer organization.
That’s “corporate America”, cold and impersonal, treating people like replaceable cogs in a machine. In business, you’re paid to be the cog. In a church, most ministry depends on the sheer willingness and passion of volunteers doing what they find meaningful. It’s in a church leader’s best interests to try to give such people as much of a voice and as much free rein as we possibly can.
But that means we first must get information from the people we’re trying to serve. Some people are right up front and will not only tell you what they want done – they may go so far as to demand it. With people like this, leadership must serve as a brake, not to stop them, but to slow them down until others catch up. There are others that will respond if you ask the right question. Some offer thoughts quickly; others – it’s like pulling teeth. And some people will offer an idea and then change their minds if they hear a different idea. Very few people don’t care one way or the other – except for that one option that you decide to go with – and they don’t say anything until you decide and then they express their disapproval.
Getting information takes time. It requires conversations and meetings – which most people find tedious and don’t want to attend. Until a meeting creates something they don’t like. Then they want another meeting so they can be heard.
When I was first in ministry, this angered me. It can still be frustrating, but I’ve learned that it’s the way people are and the way the world is and must be. Gathering opinions and sorting out information, helping people to feel heard, to feel a part of what is going on, takes time.
We took surveys of the congregation to set our time parameters for two services. The preferred parameters by a sizable majority were “no earlier than 8.30” and “no later than noon”. We are trying to work within those parameters.
The preferred length of the music time was 20-30 minutes.
The preferred length of the sermon was 45-50 minutes.
Those are the parameters.
The biggest challenge of going to two services is co-ordinating Children’s Ministries – nursery and Sunday School. The elder who oversees our Sunday children’s ministries discovered that to run everything from nursery to the 5th & 6th grade class for two services will take about 90 volunteers. (This doesn’t include Kids’ Worship – which we are still developing, and which will probably require at least 10 additional volunteers.)
Why so many people?
Every class needs a leader who has what it takes to lead and to work with children at each age level. Each age level is different.
Every class needs a second adult helper (and in the cases of the younger children, additional youth helpers). Helpers play a crucial role nowadays. If a child needs the restroom, the adult helper can make sure the child gets there and back. This is a safety and security issue (more on that in a moment). If there is a behavioral problem or a medical emergency, class helpers can fetch parents or go for help. The leader/teacher doesn’t need to leave a class alone and unsupervised.
All seven levels of classes (including nursery) require at least two teams of 2-3 people per service. Teams rotate so that one person doesn’t burn out and so that volunteers can substitute for each other, e.g. if a teacher can’t make it because of illness or a family event or emergency.
This is all necessary because of changes in our society at large. When I first got into ministry, there was no rotation in children’s ministry. One person (or couple) committed to teaching a Sunday School class fifty-two weeks a year. Substitutes were called only when a teacher couldn’t be there, and that was usually either a family vacation or a health emergency.
Vacation used to mean missing two Sundays a year at most. Planning a vacation was a big deal. This has all changed. People have more vacation time now. Our technology allows people to arrange a get-away on short notice, which means we need more potential substitutes to lead Sunday School on short notice.
Another change in our society is health and safety consciousness. Back in the day, if a teacher had a cold, or if one of their own children had a cold, they just came to church anyway. The child went to its own class and the teacher taught his class. Sickness wasn’t such a horror. It was accepted as a fact of life, and you coped with whatever inconvenience it caused. Today most people won’t come to church or bring children to church, even if symptoms are mild. People call out more often and for less egregious reasons – just to be safe – and that demands a larger pool of substitutes.
Another change in our society is the number of children’s events – sports, music – that are held on Sundays. If a parent commits a child to a team, they usually choose the child’s outside commitments over church, again necessitating a larger pool of substitutes.
And all of these people must be scheduled, and their schedules must fit with their lifestyle.
I hope you see the enormity of that task alone.
As they say on the “as seen on TV” ads – BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
We also need to consider the best use of our classroom space. It would be convenient if class sizes didn’t change. In August you’ll have five children in your third-grade class, and come September, when the new graduates move up, you suddenly have twenty-five! So sometimes we have to move classes around to different rooms. Sometimes we’ll temporarily merge classes that can be merged.
In moving to two services, we surveyed the congregation and asked which children of which age will be at which service so we could tentatively plan class size. I’m willing to bet that 2/3 of our people don’t recall which service they said they’d prefer. But we assumed that – and so we’re planning tentatively, hoping that each class will fit in the room that we hope to use for it. If we have to think on our feet and make changes, we will.
And we have to do it for two services.
This, too, has taken a good bit of work.
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
Another change in our society is the increased level of adversity to risk – or the demand for greater security measures, especially for our children. People are afraid of a lot of things nowadays, and they want more guarantees of security, especially for their children.
Both the law and our insurance companies now require us to provide background checks (renewed, I believe, every 3-5 years) for anyone involved with children’s ministry. This is an expense that the church bears.
In addition, we have constructed a safety team ministry that requires five people on duty at each service and if we have two safety teams rotating, that’s a minimum requirement of ten people. These people are trained in first aid, including CPR, and in security protocols – what to do in the event of a fire or even a live shooter.
All of these people, like the teachers, must be scheduled to fit with the service of their choice and there must be adequate substitutes available for the same reasons that we need adequate substitutes for Sunday School teachers.
The safety team has also designed and instituted basic safety protocols for children – like the child check-in and check-out system, the goal of which is to have a consistent chain of custody of children – parents hand the children over to the secured children’s wing of the building and into the care of our children’s ministry leader and then the children are released only to people specifically checked in to receive those children back.
This security protocol creates another necessary restraint on how we schedule activities and becomes one of the additional moving parts we have needed to consider in structuring two services.
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
Andrew Calamaro’s Sunday School class is an important resource for many of our adults. Presently the class meets before our service. With the early service moving much earlier (to 8.30 am), Andrew’s class needs to be put into a different slot while still allowing him the time to do what he has been doing so effectively.
Several have suggested that we just open up the space between the services from 45 minutes to an hour and just put Andrew’s class there. That seems simple – but that means that any Sunday School teachers, any safety team members, and all of the worship team members who are volunteering to serve both services will have an hour between services to just sit around waiting.
Some of those people are teaching Sunday School one week, doing worship team the next, and also serving on safety team.
I don’t want to presume upon their time if I don’t have to. People can make those kinds of sacrifices for a short time, but if it gets too long and there are no reserves, no substitutes, no back-ups, people burn out. I want to think about that, and about them. It’s in everyone’s best interests.
* * *
These are just a few of the MAJOR things that we’ve had to consider in putting together two services. Beyond this there are many smaller tweaks that have to be discovered or thought of – and sometimes they come up after you’ve made plans and forgotten to include them – and then back to the drawing board you go.
Or someone offers a better plan after you’ve finalized your really good plan. And back to the drawing board you go.
You tweak and tweak – and then you put the plan into place and learn more about what works and what doesn’t. And you tweak some more.
It’s not a matter of indecisiveness or a failure to plan. It’s how planning works when you’re trying to keep people in mind, when you’re trying to hear people out, when you’re trying to create a situation in which people can be the best that they can be, in which the gifts given them by God can be turned loose and used effectively.
It can be messy and inefficient. Caring about people often is. It takes more thought and more time than just putting a plan in place and forcing everyone to comply, like it or not.
If you’re wondering why it is taking so long to shift to two services – that’s why.
* * *
Finally, I would note that one of the rules of thumb organizational function is that 20% of the people do 80% of the work.
I tested that theory with our church.
Among our members, almost 60% are volunteering and serving in some capacity. A good percentage of the remaining 40% are either senior citizens or people with health issues and a limited capacity to participate.
Ten percent of our regularly attending non-members are volunteering and involved in some ministry. In a similar way, many non-members that aren’t volunteering aren’t able to do so, either because of age or health.
All told, about 45% of those coming to Mountain View are involved in some aspect of ministry. That’s an incredibly high participation rate! We are blessed!
A big thank you to all who have worked so hard for the past 8 months trying to shift gears and get us into two services so we can continue the adventure of the spreading of God’s truth!
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
And we’ll deal with it as it arises…
And the world around us inevitably changes. It changes as information changes, and because of our technology, information changes (and is disseminated) at a much quicker pace than ever before.
If you don’t have mechanisms for change, you don’t stay in the same place. You fall behind. You stagnate and either quickly or slowly, you wither away.
Our problem here at Mountain View is insufficient parking. Our seats in the auditorium aren’t full, but our parking lot is. It’s somewhat baffling, but that’s the way it is. It’s a problem that must be solved. If we do nothing, we fall behind.
We tried shuttling to an off-site parking lot, but it was too much of an inconvenience. Few people made use of the shuttle service. The next step – and we would eventually have to go to it anyway – is two services.
Going to two services is not just a matter of announcing new times and then going on with things as they always were. It requires a tremendous amount of work that goes on mostly behind the scenes and is therefore not well understood. Some people grow impatient and wonder what is taking so long.
The easy thing to do is to work top-down. The person at the top dictates and everybody else, like it or not, does what they are told. That’s a great way to alienate people in a volunteer organization.
That’s “corporate America”, cold and impersonal, treating people like replaceable cogs in a machine. In business, you’re paid to be the cog. In a church, most ministry depends on the sheer willingness and passion of volunteers doing what they find meaningful. It’s in a church leader’s best interests to try to give such people as much of a voice and as much free rein as we possibly can.
But that means we first must get information from the people we’re trying to serve. Some people are right up front and will not only tell you what they want done – they may go so far as to demand it. With people like this, leadership must serve as a brake, not to stop them, but to slow them down until others catch up. There are others that will respond if you ask the right question. Some offer thoughts quickly; others – it’s like pulling teeth. And some people will offer an idea and then change their minds if they hear a different idea. Very few people don’t care one way or the other – except for that one option that you decide to go with – and they don’t say anything until you decide and then they express their disapproval.
Getting information takes time. It requires conversations and meetings – which most people find tedious and don’t want to attend. Until a meeting creates something they don’t like. Then they want another meeting so they can be heard.
When I was first in ministry, this angered me. It can still be frustrating, but I’ve learned that it’s the way people are and the way the world is and must be. Gathering opinions and sorting out information, helping people to feel heard, to feel a part of what is going on, takes time.
We took surveys of the congregation to set our time parameters for two services. The preferred parameters by a sizable majority were “no earlier than 8.30” and “no later than noon”. We are trying to work within those parameters.
The preferred length of the music time was 20-30 minutes.
The preferred length of the sermon was 45-50 minutes.
Those are the parameters.
The biggest challenge of going to two services is co-ordinating Children’s Ministries – nursery and Sunday School. The elder who oversees our Sunday children’s ministries discovered that to run everything from nursery to the 5th & 6th grade class for two services will take about 90 volunteers. (This doesn’t include Kids’ Worship – which we are still developing, and which will probably require at least 10 additional volunteers.)
Why so many people?
Every class needs a leader who has what it takes to lead and to work with children at each age level. Each age level is different.
Every class needs a second adult helper (and in the cases of the younger children, additional youth helpers). Helpers play a crucial role nowadays. If a child needs the restroom, the adult helper can make sure the child gets there and back. This is a safety and security issue (more on that in a moment). If there is a behavioral problem or a medical emergency, class helpers can fetch parents or go for help. The leader/teacher doesn’t need to leave a class alone and unsupervised.
All seven levels of classes (including nursery) require at least two teams of 2-3 people per service. Teams rotate so that one person doesn’t burn out and so that volunteers can substitute for each other, e.g. if a teacher can’t make it because of illness or a family event or emergency.
This is all necessary because of changes in our society at large. When I first got into ministry, there was no rotation in children’s ministry. One person (or couple) committed to teaching a Sunday School class fifty-two weeks a year. Substitutes were called only when a teacher couldn’t be there, and that was usually either a family vacation or a health emergency.
Vacation used to mean missing two Sundays a year at most. Planning a vacation was a big deal. This has all changed. People have more vacation time now. Our technology allows people to arrange a get-away on short notice, which means we need more potential substitutes to lead Sunday School on short notice.
Another change in our society is health and safety consciousness. Back in the day, if a teacher had a cold, or if one of their own children had a cold, they just came to church anyway. The child went to its own class and the teacher taught his class. Sickness wasn’t such a horror. It was accepted as a fact of life, and you coped with whatever inconvenience it caused. Today most people won’t come to church or bring children to church, even if symptoms are mild. People call out more often and for less egregious reasons – just to be safe – and that demands a larger pool of substitutes.
Another change in our society is the number of children’s events – sports, music – that are held on Sundays. If a parent commits a child to a team, they usually choose the child’s outside commitments over church, again necessitating a larger pool of substitutes.
And all of these people must be scheduled, and their schedules must fit with their lifestyle.
I hope you see the enormity of that task alone.
As they say on the “as seen on TV” ads – BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
We also need to consider the best use of our classroom space. It would be convenient if class sizes didn’t change. In August you’ll have five children in your third-grade class, and come September, when the new graduates move up, you suddenly have twenty-five! So sometimes we have to move classes around to different rooms. Sometimes we’ll temporarily merge classes that can be merged.
In moving to two services, we surveyed the congregation and asked which children of which age will be at which service so we could tentatively plan class size. I’m willing to bet that 2/3 of our people don’t recall which service they said they’d prefer. But we assumed that – and so we’re planning tentatively, hoping that each class will fit in the room that we hope to use for it. If we have to think on our feet and make changes, we will.
And we have to do it for two services.
This, too, has taken a good bit of work.
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
Another change in our society is the increased level of adversity to risk – or the demand for greater security measures, especially for our children. People are afraid of a lot of things nowadays, and they want more guarantees of security, especially for their children.
Both the law and our insurance companies now require us to provide background checks (renewed, I believe, every 3-5 years) for anyone involved with children’s ministry. This is an expense that the church bears.
In addition, we have constructed a safety team ministry that requires five people on duty at each service and if we have two safety teams rotating, that’s a minimum requirement of ten people. These people are trained in first aid, including CPR, and in security protocols – what to do in the event of a fire or even a live shooter.
All of these people, like the teachers, must be scheduled to fit with the service of their choice and there must be adequate substitutes available for the same reasons that we need adequate substitutes for Sunday School teachers.
The safety team has also designed and instituted basic safety protocols for children – like the child check-in and check-out system, the goal of which is to have a consistent chain of custody of children – parents hand the children over to the secured children’s wing of the building and into the care of our children’s ministry leader and then the children are released only to people specifically checked in to receive those children back.
This security protocol creates another necessary restraint on how we schedule activities and becomes one of the additional moving parts we have needed to consider in structuring two services.
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
Andrew Calamaro’s Sunday School class is an important resource for many of our adults. Presently the class meets before our service. With the early service moving much earlier (to 8.30 am), Andrew’s class needs to be put into a different slot while still allowing him the time to do what he has been doing so effectively.
Several have suggested that we just open up the space between the services from 45 minutes to an hour and just put Andrew’s class there. That seems simple – but that means that any Sunday School teachers, any safety team members, and all of the worship team members who are volunteering to serve both services will have an hour between services to just sit around waiting.
Some of those people are teaching Sunday School one week, doing worship team the next, and also serving on safety team.
I don’t want to presume upon their time if I don’t have to. People can make those kinds of sacrifices for a short time, but if it gets too long and there are no reserves, no substitutes, no back-ups, people burn out. I want to think about that, and about them. It’s in everyone’s best interests.
* * *
These are just a few of the MAJOR things that we’ve had to consider in putting together two services. Beyond this there are many smaller tweaks that have to be discovered or thought of – and sometimes they come up after you’ve made plans and forgotten to include them – and then back to the drawing board you go.
Or someone offers a better plan after you’ve finalized your really good plan. And back to the drawing board you go.
You tweak and tweak – and then you put the plan into place and learn more about what works and what doesn’t. And you tweak some more.
It’s not a matter of indecisiveness or a failure to plan. It’s how planning works when you’re trying to keep people in mind, when you’re trying to hear people out, when you’re trying to create a situation in which people can be the best that they can be, in which the gifts given them by God can be turned loose and used effectively.
It can be messy and inefficient. Caring about people often is. It takes more thought and more time than just putting a plan in place and forcing everyone to comply, like it or not.
If you’re wondering why it is taking so long to shift to two services – that’s why.
* * *
Finally, I would note that one of the rules of thumb organizational function is that 20% of the people do 80% of the work.
I tested that theory with our church.
Among our members, almost 60% are volunteering and serving in some capacity. A good percentage of the remaining 40% are either senior citizens or people with health issues and a limited capacity to participate.
Ten percent of our regularly attending non-members are volunteering and involved in some ministry. In a similar way, many non-members that aren’t volunteering aren’t able to do so, either because of age or health.
All told, about 45% of those coming to Mountain View are involved in some aspect of ministry. That’s an incredibly high participation rate! We are blessed!
A big thank you to all who have worked so hard for the past 8 months trying to shift gears and get us into two services so we can continue the adventure of the spreading of God’s truth!
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
And we’ll deal with it as it arises…