By Greg Curtis: Let’s face it. 2020 has taken a huge bite out of our volunteer apple.

As churches cautiously regather, many volunteers have chosen not to return because…

The spike in COVID makes them afraid to regather

They are in a high risk demographic

They are moving away due to the economic impact of 2020

They have gotten used to church online

They have changed churches during the shutdown

They felt the need for a break and now is their chance

Their reasons may vary, but the reality is that only 30% to 60% of church volunteers nationally are returning to serve at this point.

Because attendance averages are down as well, not quite as many volunteers are required to serve as before. But even before the pandemic, my church established a way of letting an overlooked group of people taste what it means to serve God and others. In fact, for years now we have earmarked volunteer positions in every ministry for this group of people. These are individuals who would not be allowed to serve in many churches.

Curious as to who they are? Meet Katie by clicking on the video before reading on. She represents someone from this group who recently begin serving at my church. I dare you to keep a lump from raising in your throat as you watch.

I love Katie’s story as she represents a group of people largely overlooked by churches: those who don’t know what they believe yet.

Many churches do not let people who are unsure about God or who have not made a commitment to following Jesus yet. I even know many large churches where you cannot serve unless you are a full fledged member.

I think this is a mistake for 2 reasons:

Jesus didn’t make disciples that way. In fact, his followers were serving alongside him for about a year and a half before one of them finally figured out who he was! (Matthew 16:13-20)/

Many people figure out who Jesus is by getting their hands dirty first. Seeing God move through them toward others (like Katie did) is what draws them to the discovery of who Jesus is for them.

As a result, I think serving is not for the discipled. It’s how you make a disciple.

Here are 3 things you can do over the next month or two to tap into this group for the sake of not just your church’s ministry, but for their own spiritual journeys.

Determine what qualifications are necessary for people who do not believe yet to serve at your church.

Our qualifications for them are these: they are regular attenders, they can show up on time, and they play well with others. If you have those 3 things going on, come serve with us. You can come up with your own. I just encourage you to define them.

Have each ministry leader at your church make a list of volunteer positions that could be filled by a “pre-christian”.

We call these “green level positions” I think around 20% of all your serving opportunities should be in this category. Here are the 3 levels of volunteers

Green means “go”: “Are you new to this, still exploring your faith but want to give back in some way?” These opportunities include things like data entry, tech team, playing a musical instrument, nursery, craft lab, facility maintenance, local compassion, greeting, and more.

Yellow means “caution”: “Do you consider yourself a new follower of Jesus or one who has not served through a local church before?” Let’s have you move into opportunities like being a next steps discussion leader, being a live chat moderator at our services, video editing, social media, info counter, virtually any team member.

Red means “stop”: “Have you been following Jesus for awhile now and want to expand his influence in a new way through your life? We would like to have some time get to know you and train you so you can consider roles like being a small group leader (in homes or online), Next Step Host, or a team leader of any kind.. Stoping allows time for these people to hav their readiness assessed so they and others do not have a negative experience serving or being served.

Communicate these opportunities where new people at your church gather.

I suggest communicating your entry/”green” level positions in these ways:

On your website. Make a webpage where people can not only see these opportunities, but sign up for them.

Through your team leaders. If they know which positions are “green” and know people that are still processing their faith in their relationship circle, empower them to invite them to serve on their team.

At your One Program for guests. We have a connection environment called Next Steps where new people to church can identify what they have to offer and match it to our entry level opportunities to serve. Watching this happen is one of the most meaningful things I get to witness in my role.

At physical Next Steps and at Next Steps Online, guests are given links to forms so a volunteer champ can set up an orientation, interviews, and training so they can be onboarded.

If this kind of approach to volunteering intrigues you, get my online course. Watch session 5 on volunteer placement processes and how to automate them for every department in your church through a volunteer champ system. You won’t regret acting on that concept.

In the mean time, try leading your team through the discussion below and land the plane on making disciples by creating volunteers out of people like Katie-people who are not sure what they believe yet.

Once they see God use them, the game could change forever.

1. What qualifications for serving do you think Jesus has for new people exploring faith at your church? List them.

2. What kind of volunteer roles are appropriate, even advantageous for people still exploring faith to serve in?

3. How will you make these easily available to this group of potential volunteers so they can jump in easily?

4. When will you have this new recruitment emphasis in place?

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Source: A way to add new volunteers to your teams this year that you are probably overlooking.

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by unSeminary: Your church moves forward largely on the backs of the volunteers you recruit.

The local church is a volunteer engagement organization. At the center of any church staff members’ role is the recruitment, reward, and retention of a great volunteer team.

Are you sharpening your skills when it comes to attracting new volunteers? Over the years, I’ve discovered several highly effective practices that have time and again served as powerful strategies for mobilizing volunteers.

Today we’re focusing on specific tactics and practical next steps that you can apply to any volunteer recruitment effort. Here are 5 overlooked volunteer recruiting tactics that you can start using at your church right away:

Thank-you postcards 

The next time you meet with a potential volunteer and ask them to join a team, pop a postcard into the mail immediately after the meeting.

The quick postcard follow-up is a terrific way to thank the potential volunteer for their time and reminds them of the conversation that you just had.

Pre-address and stamp the postcards before you even meet with people so that all you need to do is write follow-up steps or conversation reminders on the postcards and then pop them in the mail right away. (Send the postcards through the main post office in your town so that they arrive within a day or so of your meeting).

This tactic works great if you asked a potential volunteer to consider a role and then gave them a week or so to think about it. The postcard will remind them a few days after your meeting to think about the area that you’ve asked them to engage in.

Work the list

Most church leaders could do a better job at simply reviewing a list of potential volunteers, interacting with them one by one, and asking if they’d join a team.

Maybe you have a list of people who are currently in a small group at your church but aren’t volunteering. Start at the top of that list and work through it weekly to reach out to the next person and help them move closer to volunteering.

From a multisite point of view, this is a wise practice to follow particularly during campus expansion to ensure that no one is falling through the cracks. People are usually just waiting for someone to ask them to volunteer. If you methodically work through a list of potential volunteers, you’ll likely find new people through this simple form of outreach.

Promote the pipeline

The best people to recruit volunteers for your church are the people who already volunteer in your church. Encourage your current volunteers to consider who they could ask to step in and volunteer.

You could also approach some of the best people on your teams and let them know that in two or three months you’d like them to move into a leadership role but the first step of moving them into that role is to find a few other volunteers to replace them. Your conversations over the intermediate months would focus on who they think would be a good fit for those roles and how to approach potential replacements.

Make a ruckus and have fun

One of the most powerful volunteer recruiting tactics is for your existing volunteer teams to have fun. In fact, this might even be the best way! When your volunteer teams enjoy what they’re doing, they’ll attract others. Don’t be afraid of making a little noise or creating a bit of ruckus with your teams.

Here’s an idea that you can customize and implement affordably: make team t-shirts for your volunteers to wear while serving together or during social events. Then take photos of your team in their shirts and share the pictures on your social media channels. This may create just enough emphasis on fun and community that will encourage other people to join that team or other teams in your church.

Next-generation

Churches that have a growing volunteer culture have figured out that we need to open up volunteer opportunities to the next generation. Part of what we do as leaders is to find other, younger leaders to eventually replace us.

I think the healthiest student ministries in the country include volunteer service as a core part of their discipleship pathway. They articulate to students that developing their volunteer experience is a part of what it means to be involved in student ministry.

Ask yourself this: what are areas in your church where you can engage a younger leadership core? Don’t shy away from finding ways to include younger volunteers across all the ministries of your church. This is a great developmental experience for your church as well. It will inject all kinds of new life into your existing teams when younger leaders engage in a variety of your ministries.

Volunteer recruiting is a critical part of your role as a church leader. 

What ideas or tactics do you use when recruiting volunteers that you find particularly helpful in your context? We’d love to hear more in the comments below.

Thank You to This Article’s Sponsor: HarperCollins Publishers

Grab Liquid Church: 6 Powerful Currents to Saturate Your City for Christ and read it with your team. It’s an inspiring & practical guide for reaching people in a post-Christian culture.

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Source: 5 Overlooked Volunteer Recruiting Tactics for Your Church

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Source: Creating the Team & Establishing the Process

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Source: How to Empower People in Ministry

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by Rich Birch: I was struck by Tim Wu’s column in the New York Times called “The Tyranny of Convenience” a few months ago and it has stuck with me. Core to the thesis of this article is that convenience is at the center of what drives humans today. The author sites a lot of compelling arguments that organizations that are prevailing today are doing so because they are figuring out how to make life more convenient for people.

Amazon is on a constant quest to make it easier to purchase items that we “need” all the time. The “Amazon Dash” buttons are a great example of putting physical buttons around people’s homes they just need to click when they want Amazon to send them replacement items. Need some more toilet paper? Just click the button and that item will be added to your cart and sent your way!

Remember Napster? The file sharing service that millions of people used to get free music that they loved. What killed this industry disruption? It wasn’t the cease and desist letters or a wave of moral outrage over “file sharing”. Ultimately, the iTunes music store killed Napster because Apple figured out how to make purchasing music more convenient than Napster. Easy beat free. People want things convenient more than they want their money.

What difference does this make for us in the church? So many church leaders are bemoaning the decline of church attendance and engagement. What if we looked at that issue as a convenience issue? What if we took it upon ourselves to make what we do easier to fit into people’s lives? What if we made the main thing, the plain thing? What if we went out of our way to make it more simple and more straightforward to connect with our churches? Here are 5 actions at our churches I think we need to make more convenient with some suggestions on first steps towards making them easier!

Make it Simpler to Volunteer

Growing churches move people out of their seats and into service. They do this because they know that when people get engaged in the life of the church they are more likely to invite their friends. Churches grow because people invite their friends. In a very real way, getting people to volunteer at your church is a key leading indicator of growth. However, in far too many churches it’s just too hard to volunteer. Rather than creating simple ways for people to get plugged in, we create roadblocks to service.

3 Ways to Simplify Volunteering at Your Church

“Shallow End of the Pool” Opportunities // You can’t have people you don’t know very well serve in every role at the church but there are roles you could plug almost anyone into. Think about roles on your teams that you could (almost) take a first-time guest and have them try out. Have a few of these roles ready to plug people quickly into if they are showing interest.
Short-Term Asks // Give people a “taste” of serving with a one-time 2-hour opportunity like a community service project. People can get their head around a one-time service opportunity rather than needing to serve every week at the church. Use these “short-term” opportunities as an “on-ramp” to other opportunities. But beware if people just want to keep serving in these short-term opportunities – don’t punish them!
Orientation & Form Filling Out // Avoid sending people home with forms to fill out. Instead, take time within your orientation or “new here class” to actually fill out the paperwork that is needed. If people leave the building with the paperwork not filled out they are less likely to return with it done another time. Build “fill out the forms” time into your orientation or exploration process.

Remove Donation Friction

Have you tried to donate to your church? You’d be surprised at how hard this can be. Lots of churches have outdated and painful donation processes that feel more like a gauntlet than a smooth transaction. When people choose to give to your church they are literally choosing God over the things of this world so let’s make sure that process is as smooth as possible! Let’s ensure we do everything we can to remove the friction in this process!

5 Friction Points to Look for in Your Donation Process

Limited Options // If people can only give in the “bucket” during the service you are missing out … obviously! But are you only accepting one form of credit card online? Do you allow people to do bank transfers? What about stocks or securities? Give more options!
Login Required // A pet peeve of mine is needing to log on in order to make a donation through church websites. This practice is fading but surprisingly still common!
To Make “Funds” // Don’t make your people choose between half a dozen different “buckets” to give to your church. Making people choose means people will opt out.
Mobile Friendly // People are used to doing financial transactions on their phones. Can they donate from their phone?
Ask People // Email everyone who has donated to your church in the last three months and ask them how you can make the process easier for them. You’ll be amazed at the simple ideas people will give you.

Watch these videos to see smooth online giving processes: 36 Lessons We Learned from Donating Online to 10 Churches

Download this PDF as a discussion for your team: 5 Lessons from Amazon for Your Church’s Digital Giving Strategy

Help People Get Connected

People who stick and stay at your church will have friends at your church. They might come for the great teaching or great music or even fantastic kids programming but they will stay because they know some people. For people to stick long term they need to move church out of the category of a place they go to and into the category of the group of people they know. They need to transfer from thinking about the “leaders” of the church as the primary reason for attending and to the list of other “normal” people who are a part of the church. We all know this truth but we often stand in the way of making our church relational.

3 Things You Can Do THIS WEEKEND To Make Your Church More Relational

Name Tags // Seriously. Buy a bulk pack of those “Hello! My Name Is” name tags and have fun with it. Enlist a group of friendly people to ask people what name they’d like on their name tag. Slowing people down and asking them this simple question is the first step towards more relationships in your church.
Coffee // If your church isn’t serving coffee before or after the service you’re probably missing out on a simple way to build relationships. There is something about a cup of java in people’s hands to help them connect!
Groups & Teams Onboarding //  This weekend, ask 10 volunteers this question: “If someone wanted to get plugged into a group or onto a team, how would they do that?” If you don’t get the same (and simple) answer from people then your onboarding process is simply too complex.

Ease the Inviting Process

Only 2% of people who attend church will invite a friend to church this year. [ref] This is a problem because your church grows when people invite their friends. In my latest book, Church Growth Flywheel, we explore lots of ways to encourage your people to start talking to their friends about the church. I’m convinced that a key part of the reason that people don’t invite friends more is that we don’t make it convenient enough. It’s up to us to make it super easy for people to talk with their friends about the great things going on in our churches.

5 Ways to Make Inviting Easier at Your Church

Straightforward Series Titles // Put the cookies on the bottom shelf! If your people have to guess what the series is about then they won’t be inviting their friends. Stop trying to be so creative! A simple tip is to think about what people would be searching online to find the content that you’re talking about. Make it easy to understand at face value.
Invite Cards // These simple tools continue to be an effective way to help your people invite their friends. A blurb about what’s coming up at your church with some compelling graphics and all the “dates & times” details and you’re ready to go! People use these cards to pass along to people that might be interested in coming to their church plus they serve as a physical reminder to people when they take them home.
What to Expect // A best practice for inviting is to ensure that prominently on your website is a “what to expect” section where your potential guests can get a sense of what coming to your church is going to be like. We take for granted when we attend church all the time how anxious this experience can be. Imagine you were going to attend a synagogue or mosque and think about the questions you’d have about that experience. Pictures and videos are particularly great for these parts of your website.
Invite to Invite! // Don’t forget to ask people to invite their friends. Your people will need reminders of how important this aspect of their faith is. Ask them directly to invite friends and family to various things at the church. Model to your people who you are connecting with to come to church. Share stories of how people have invited friends and when people have been inviting and impacted by the church! Turn up the inviting culture in your teams and groups by having these smaller groups of people pray for people that they’re inviting.
Compelling Content // Generate great social media content that people will want to share with their friends. In fact, the content needs to start with what will be shared and be about the church as a secondary goal. Generate helpful content that answers the questions people are asking. (Hint: Ask your people what question they or their friends have that you should be answering!) Aim to be consistent and compelling in your social content and it will make it easier for people to invite their friends.

Show People a Leadership Pathway

How do people move from serving at your church to leading at your church? What’s the pathway they need to follow in order to grow in their leadership with the church?

One of the ironies of too many churches is that we complain that we don’t have enough leaders but at the same time the pathway to how people become leaders isn’t clear. Rather than being an obvious and clear process, it’s often shrouded in mystery and wonder. Make it easier for people to take their next steps in leadership and you’d be amazed at how many leaders will step up to lead!

3 Key Ways to Clarify Your Leadership Pathway

Make it Visual // A simple drawing helping people understand the visual framework of the process that someone follows is an important tool in your clarification tool belt. LifeWay Leadership has been doing some great work with their Leadership Pipeline to develop great language and understanding in this area. Find a compelling framework and continue to communicate it over and over until it sticks. (Or until your people start making fun of you for talking about it so much!)
Everyone Has An Apprentice // One of the simplest ways to drive leadership development is to ensure that every leader has an apprentice serving with them. This natural mentoring relationship is a big step towards passing leadership to the next level of people. Requiring that people have an apprentice if they want to lead is a great step towards developing a leadership development system. If people are interested in leading, their first step is to apprentice under someone else. A part of that conversation is who they can bring on to apprentice under them before they step up to lead.
Training … Training … Training // Churches that prevail in this area are finding ways to train at every phase of the leadership experience. They are taking it upon themselves to ensure that people are growing in their leadership regardless of where they are. Growing churches don’t leave this training piece up to “happenstance” but are looking for places to infuse it into everything they’re doing. From weekly huddles when people arrive to serve to full-on leadership conferences, prevailing churches are getting leadership development resources in front of their people. They’re not waiting for people to come to them looking for development, but going to them instead!

Source: 5 Actions Your Church Needs to Make Way More Convenient – unSeminary

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by Rich Birch: There is no doubt that the multisite church movement has blossomed, and has a massive impact on the church today. In fact, today in North America one in six people attend a multisite church campus. That fact astonishes me! Each one of those campuses has had a group of volunteers at the core of the opening process that we’re calling a launch team. This is a group of people who have committed to be a part of starting up the new location and ensuring that it’s healthy and ready to impact its community.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve had the honor of being at the forefront of fourteen campus launches. We’ve seen around 1,500 volunteers join our launch teams. Today, over 9,000 people attend the campuses that sprung from the combined efforts of all those people. It has been a privilege to have a front row seat to this amazing approach to reaching new people with the message of Jesus. Seeing the multisite revolution from the inside has given me a perspective that is second to no other! As I reflect on what I’ve seen in all those teams, I’ve attempted to boil down some common lessons about these critically important teams, which I have discussed below.

Stop trying to find people like you.

At the core of the challenge of recruiting healthy launch teams is a sociological fact that we tend to attract people like ourselves. We need to consciously push against this reality. You don’t want to find people like you because most people leading these endeavors are innovators and early adopters, which is a minority number among people in the world. While being an innovator is great for leading the launch of campuses, they don’t make great volunteers long term because those “early adopters” tend to get bored after the initial launch phase and just want to move onto something new.

5 Categories of the Adoption Curve:

Innovators // Eager to try new ideas, products, and services, almost as an obsession.
Early Adopters // Rely more on group norms and values, as opposed to Innovators who rely on their own values.
Early Majority // Collect more information about products and services to weigh the pros and cons before they make a decision.
Late Majority // Adopt the new mainly because their friends have all adopted it and they feel the need to conform.
Laggards // Do not rely on group norms and values, just like Innovators. Their past heavily influences their current decision process.

Your approach to finding volunteers needs to tread slowly with people and ideally be built around finding “early majority” people who will take some time convincing them to get plugged in. However, when these people make a decision to be a part of the campus they will be more likely to stick and stay. It’s only when this group starts to pile in en masse that the late majority will decide to be a part of the team!

You need more. A lot more.

Stop trying to find the minimum number of volunteers needed. There is evidence across the movement that campuses with larger launch teams have better initial campus launch sizes but then also tend to reach more people over time. Figure out how many people you “need” to make the launch happen and then stretch. Push to get more people lined up on the team than you need to make things better long term.

5 Benefits of Larger Multisite Launch Teams:

Trajectory Setting // Studies show that the first five years of a campus is when the majority of its growth happens. [ref] A larger launch team means the campus is set up to maximize its potential of reaching people because there are more social connections to people outside the campus.
Healthier Teams // One of the paradoxes of volunteer recruitment is that the more volunteers you have the easier it is to get volunteers. People want to feel like they are needed but they don’t want to feel like the whole thing rides on them. More team members mean it’s easier to get more team members.
Critical Mass // Typically, when you’re launching a new campus you are attempting to replicate the “look and feel” of a larger campus in a smaller setting. These approaches to doing ministry are usually robust and require a lot of volunteers.
More Friends // We need people to do work at the campus but our volunteers are looking for relational connections. When more people are serving on teams, it means there is a greater potential for people to make new relationships.
Expanded Donor Base // Usually, people who are volunteering at a church are more likely to be giving to the mission of the church as well. Starting a campus is a financially stretching experience and more volunteers mean more people to connect with regularly about the financial needs of the launch.

The best time to get volunteers is before you launch.

It becomes so much harder to get team members once the campus is up and running. There is the pressure of actually running the campus, and that means the team doesn’t have as much time. However, there is also the reality that sometimes it’s easier to ask people to commit to an idea rather than the reality. I would suggest building a process that doesn’t assume that you’ll recruit any volunteers in the first three months after the launch but work to try to do it because you’ll need people!

If your team is “banking” on volunteers signing up in droves once the campus launches, they are setting themselves up for some disappointment. There is a funny thing that happens in the human mind… we think things will be easier down the road than they are today. We are overly confident in our abilities to acquire volunteers after the launch when in reality it’s actually easier before the launch. This is also the case because typically the leaders involved in the leadership of the new campus haven’t been through a launch before and so they can only picture recruiting people when the campus is open. Their own personal process is reliant on tapping people on the shoulder in the foyer or catching people’s eyes across the main auditorium and the idea of building a system that doesn’t rely on that seems foreign.

Think long-term campus health.

Don’t make volunteer decisions in the first year that will hinder the longer term health of the campus. When thinking through how you’re going to build teams, think through a process from the point of view of what is best after 3-5 years of the campus development. Too many church leaders make short-term volunteer team decisions only to regret those decisions down the road. This is particularly fatal in a multisite church because you are actually multiplying these problems and instead of moving onto the next campus you will end up needing to loop back and solve unhealthy campus dynamics rather than launching new locations. Take your time to build healthy and strong long-term volunteer teams.

3 Short-term Team Building Decisions to Avoid in Campus Development:

“Missionary” Volunteers // Asking people to come from another region “just for a few months” when your launch is a short sighted strategy because those volunteers will step out after a few months and hinder the new campus’ ability to function. Take longer and find people who are within the region you are launching in.
Going Against Policies // There are good and sound reasons why your church has set up best practices and policies in place around volunteer engagement. Don’t skip the line on background checks and documentation just to get someone placed. The risks associated with this behavior aren’t worth the potential long term damage that could be done to the church.
Paying Volunteer Roles // There can be a temptation to pay certain roles in the new campus… even those roles that are volunteer roles in others (e.g. set up teams, audio/visual teams, etc.). Resist this temptation! It is nearly impossible to back out of this long term and tends to spread to other roles within the campus.

Face to face is the best, but …

Anyone who has done a lot of volunteer recruitment knows that the best way to do it is to sit across the table from someone and ask them. It’s a powerful strategy to get to know people personally and then match the perfect role to them. This would be the preferred approach to building up a launch team for the next campus but there typically isn’t the time to have that many one-on-one conversations during the launch process, so you need to build a process that approximates the relationship building process as closely as possible, but does it at scale.

5 Ways to Scale Relationships in a Launch Process:

Social Connection Events // It is important to take time to ensure that people from the region that you are launching are getting to know each other. More than “information meetings” these events need to drive people to talk with each other and make friends.
Home Meetings // There is something incredibly personal about meeting with a group of 15-25 people in someone’s home with great snacks and talking about the vision of the church. This scales up nicely because over a month or weeks, with 2-3 meetings you can end up getting hundreds of people connected.
Lots of Communication // It’s been said that leadership is 10% making decisions and 90% communicating about those decisions. Building a communication process that drips down information about the launch, and ensures that everyone feels like they are getting the most up–to-date information, draws in a community.
Do for One What You Wish You Could Do for All // Don’t be afraid to have a healthy dose of face-to-face interactions with people. Sprinkle this throughout your launch process and you will get a chance to talk with a lot of people.
Office Hours // Make it a point to keep a regular schedule in the new community that you are launching in and let people drop in on you in that location. I would often pick an afternoon every week and just work out of a coffee shop in town and let people know about it. People would either book time with me there or just drop in to connect.

The perfect time to join the team!

Typically we have formal times during a launch process when we are looking to “intake” volunteer onto the launch team (like Sunday services, house parties, information events, etc.). If you restrict people from joining the team just when you are ready to receive them you will miss out on lots of potential volunteers. Your team and process needs to be built around a concept of “this is a perfect time to join the team” because the reality is that the moment someone puts their hand up to say they are interested, is the perfect time … for them.

5 Times When You Need to Be Ready to Plug in Volunteers Even When You Are Not Prepared:

Announcement Sunday // The day you make the big vision pitch about the launch of the campus, there will be people who are so excited to jump onboard and help. They don’t want to wait for your process to begin but want something to do right away.
Random Tuesday Afternoon // You’ll bump into someone as you’re going about life and they will express a keen interest to move from just learning about the launch to actually helping.
Right after Your Sign Ups // There are people that will hold back and see how many people sign up to be a part of this thing. They will only be ready to jump onboard once they see some sort of critical mass. Communicate that people are signing up and you’ll see more people jump onboard.
The Week before Launch // It never fails … I always get a call the week we’re launching that basically says “Hey, do you still need volunteers for that new campus?” I want to ask them where they’ve been all this time but alas I attempt to get them plugged in.
Launch Sunday // People will be excited and amazed that your team pulled it off. They’ll drop in and ask one of those volunteers if they still need any help. (The answer is always yes!)

Always Be Launching!

Alec Baldwin’s sales guru character named Blake in the classic 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross has a famous speech where he implores the sales trainees to be “ABC – Always Be Closing!” If I have to give one piece of advice that I would leave with you, it would be “ABL – Always Be Launching!” Build your approach to finding and releasing a core team around the concept that you are going to be moving onto another campus after this location. Don’t find a launch team but build a system for finding launch teams. Pull together a repeatable process that will reinforce itself and point you toward finding more people to end up on more launch teams to send out more campuses!

I experienced this best when we had our launches just 12 months apart from each other. We would be starting the very early process of building the launch team for the next campus just as the current campus was opening. In fact, many times I had core team members together at the launch Sunday of a campus and got to cast vision by getting them to imagine what would happen if in just a year we were having a “grand opening” in their community. The energy was palpable in those meetings! It was like rocket fuel that got our launch team recruiting off in the right direction because a core part of that team got to see the vision being lived out first hand.

Source: 7 Realities of Recruiting Multisite Church Launch Teams – unSeminary

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