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On the way home from church this weekend, my son and I got into a conversation about people volunteering at church. I said, “The church can’t function without people like you and me getting involved. You need to find something you’re good at and enjoy and find a way to use that to help poeple in church. People serve and volunteer because they love God, love people, and want to help others learn to love God.” After realizing that most people don’t get paid for their service in the church, I think he understood that people must willingly give their time, energy, and talents for each church to operate each week. I could see a little bit of smoke billowing from his ears as he was thinking and talking about all the ways he can get involved in church when he’s ready.

Each community of believers relies on volunteers from within to keep their ministry running smoothly and as each church grows, the demand for volunteers increases because of additional people and new ministries. Have your recruiting efforts led to over-extending people already involved in other ministries, placing the right people in the wrong areas, or misjudging someone’s understanding and depth of commitment? Here are a few articles about recruiting volunteers that will help you evaluate and tweak your process and help you staff your ministries with the right people.

Do you have your own suggestions about recruiting volunteers? Share them in the tips below.

Please be patient with me as my brain is occupied with making some employment changes and, as a result, haven’t been able to devote the little mice on the exercise wheel to motoring their way to producing meaningful content for this site. Time is a minor issue right now but the main struggle is that my mind is consumed with other issues that should be resolved in the next couple weeks.

In the meantime, the topic is: where were you when Wham! broke up? Discuss.

Not much can happen in a worship service without the people in the sound booth making it happen. Sound engineers have, in most cases, complete control over delivering the stuff from the platform to the peeps in the pews. Unless you’ve dabbling in a new avant-garde form of worship and preaching using techniques from the silent movie era, you rely heavily on your amplification system. There are very few elements in your worship service that take place without being routed through your sound system. If you’ve ever participated in a church service where the power went out mid-service, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The “sound guys”, as we often refer to them, are important to the success of a worship gathering. In many ways, they can either make the service operate smoothly or crash with one slip of the finger. Following is a list of tips and ideas to help the sound engineers in their ministry of enhancing and supporting the worship experience and ensuring the delivery of biblical teaching.

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It’s January 1 and typically the time of year when people try to start new things or change old habits. To help you in your endeavor to read through the Bible, the ESV Bible Blog has posted some graphs on different reading plans “so you can see visually how they differ from one another.” The graphs won’t help you read the Scriptures - you need motivation, discipline, and a hunger for the Word of God for that - but they show you visually how you’ll be moving through the Bible based on which plan you choose. Since it’s January 1, pick a plan and start reading.

Visualizing One-Year Bible Reading Plans

May this be our prayer for 2007 and each day within.

St. Patrick’s Breastplate

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.

I bind this day to me forever,
by power of faith, Christ’s Incarnation;
his baptism in the Jordan river;
his death on cross for my salvation;
his bursting from the spiced tomb;
his riding up he heavenly way;
his coming at the day of doom:
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
of the great love of cherubim;
the sweet ‘Well done’ in judgement hour;
the service of the seraphim;
confessors’ faith, apostles’ word,
the patriarchs’ prayers, the prophets’ scrolls;
all good deeds done unto the Lord,
and purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
the power of God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, his might to stay,
his ear to hearken to my need;
the wisdom of my God to teach,
his hand to guide, his shield to ward;
the word of God to give me speech,
his heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
the vice that gives temptation force,
the natural lusts that war within,
the hostile men that mar my course;
of few or many, far or nigh,
in every place, and in all hours
against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
against false words of heresy,
against the knowledge that defiles
against the heart’s idolatry,
against the wizard’s evil craft,
against the death-wound and the burning
the choking wave and poisoned shaft,
protect me, Christ, till thy returning.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.
Of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Being out of town for training, extended work hours, and the demands of the holidays have hindered me from posting over the last month. Things are starting to settle down so I’ll be able to resume my routine next week. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Brian Calley, Michigan native, Republican, husband and father, church leader, Nertz champion, one of my best friends, and a heck of a nice guy, has recently been elected State Representative for the 87th District in the state of Michigan. In the midst of preparing for his upcoming term and adjusting to life with his newborn daughter, he graciously answered some questions about his background in politics, his upcoming term, and reconciling Christianity with politics. He also offers some suggestions about how Christians and churches can get involved in the political process and support God-honoring politicians.

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Matthew Cornell, from Matt’s Idea Blog, wrote a article entitled Best Practices for GTD and Administrative Assistants, a great GTD-flavored companion for my post, Tips for Working with a Secretary.

This is the first time I’ve introduced the term GTD on this site but it was bound to happen sooner or later. If you’ve never tasted GTD, Getting Things Done, put your bibs on because you’re in for a messy, filling course of productivity delight that you pastors will dive into like a potluck dinner after a 30 hour fast. In the meantime, learn how the system of Getting Things Done works with an administrative assistant so you can free up your time for people ministry and worship.

Best Practices for GTD and Administrative Assistants

My wife, kids, and I moved to my home state to live near and reconnect with family. Even before the move, we started looking for a church that was similar in beliefs and ministry philosophy to the church we had been involved in for the last several years. Being an Internet-savvy guy (ok, I’m a geek!), I decided to church shop in the comfort of my own home using the vast resources of the World Wide Web. Having spent many years as a full-time web site developer and using the Internet for most of my waking hours, I have an excellent understanding of how it all works and how to quickly and effectively search for what I’m looking for. In fact, I pride myself in being able to locate useless bits of trivia and legitimately useful information at a pace that would put my name in the Guinness Book of World Records.

However, this had me stumped. I spent 4-5 hours over a period of two days trying to find a church for us to attend. My various searches revealed several churches but none of them met our criteria. What was more perplexing than being unable to find a church that would fit us was that the search in itself was so difficult. A simple search for churches in our area didn’t provide us with any useful results. Finally, after throwing my hands in the air in frustration and shaking my fists at the heavens, I discovered a church listed in a small advertisement in our free, weekly newspaper… the most unlikely place to search for a church.

I concluded that either the Internet isn’t set up well for churches to be listed, the web is so populated with junk that it is crowding out legitimate sites relevant to your search, or churches aren’t using the Internet and its capabilities to their advantage. Since there is very little I can do to restructure the entire Internet, I decided to help churches by instructing them on how to use the web and their church web site to help church shoppers to find their church with minimal effort.

If you don’t have a church web site, much of this isn’t going to help you. The first step for you is to make haste and purchase a domain name and get a web site for your church. For those of you who do have a site, get with your resident web geek and consider making some of the following suggestions happen.

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Email: either you love it or you hate it; you control it or it controls you. ITSecurity.com has compiled a list of tips and hacks that will enable you to utilize email more effectively, securely, and politely. Since incoming and outgoing email is a probably a big part of your day and is an important method of communication with some of you, look through their list and see what tips you can implement to communicate better and free up your time for worship and people ministry.

When people read out a phone number, they use “phone rhythm.” No one has to explain “phone rhythm,” we all just seem to do it automatically, “…713…555…12…34″. Similarly, when we answer a phone call we all say, “Hello.” No one taught us to do that, but somehow we all seemed to pick it up.

So why is it that when it comes to emails, there are no accepted standards? Even though 6 billion emails are sent every day, almost no one agrees about simple things like email etiquette, how to organize a note, or whether emails are considered private or not.

The 99 tips in this article make up the best in email practices. From how to ethically use the ‘BCC:’ to what attachments will make your mobile emailing compatible with everyone else’s, this list covers everything you need to know about emailing.

Hack your email 99 different ways (via Lifehacker)