I currently have a team of about 35 people who I have on a schedule for running the sound board and visual presentations for our 7 worship services each weekend. The fact that there are ~35 of them means that they are on a rotation. I simply have no need for 35 volunteers each weekend. Plus… we wouldn’t want to burn out a volunteer! This leaves me with a problem however… and goes back to a post I made recently (here) that says, “there’s an old business axiom that says you can hire unfriendly people and work hard to teach them to smile or you can hire smiling friendly people and turn them loose. The latter seems like a nice shortcut to us, which is why we think it’s important to specifically choose our greeters instead of simply taking the first volunteers for that position.”

Since my volunteers sometimes work the board only once a month in some cases… they often do not retain enough knowledge to properly mix a worship service. It is sometimes just easier for me to do it myself. We had our Christmas Cantata yesterday evening and I intentionally did not schedule a helper for myself because it is easier for me to just run the show myself than try and explain to someone else what it is I want to do.

I am, however, working on this problem. I am working with the tech team of a church near us and we are going to hold an intense AV training session for both of our teams in January. Hopefully our volunteers will be able to grow and learn something from it!

I must say however that I do have a handful of volunteers that are rock stars. They know what they’re doing and are willing to learn. They usually get schedule on weekends that I’m out of town. Some of them even have backgrounds in radio!