1. your church directory, ideally a pictorial one but definitely one with easily accessible contact information, including email addresses
2. a list of current volunteer leaders with their contact information
3. a list of all previous leaders from the past five to ten years, if possible
4. this book if you’ve got it in printed form

1. Which of my current leaders is exactly in the right role—not overwhelmed or under-challenged?
2. Is there anyone on the team who would be delighted to do more if asked?
3. Is there anyone on the team desperately in need of a break?
4. Which leader is in the “wrong seat on the bus”?

1. Look through your church’s directory to be prompted about people who might serve as volunteers.
2. Since it’s likely that you don’t know everyone in your church, reach out to ten or so folks who can serve as sources for you (see day 4 for a sample email). You’ll want to keep asking until you come up with as many names as your target potential volunteer number. Send an email to
   1. your colleagues on staff
   2. well-networked parents
   3. student leaders
   4. current volunteer leaders
   5. church leadership—elders, deacons, adult Sunday school teachers
   6. saints and pillars of your church

A—This person would be a great addition to your team.

B—This person would be a good addition to your team.

C—This person is a possible addition to your team.

W—This person would be great working with kids.

B—This person would be great working behind the scenes.

E—This person would be great working in either kind of role—with kids or behind the scenes.

1. Move their names to the bottom of the pool list, under a new section called “No.”
2. Beside each name, write what role each person has said no to.
3. Remove their names from the needs list.
4. Place new names in the blanks left by those who have said no.

1. What are you most excited about after having worked this process so far?
2. What has been your biggest point of discouragement?
3. As you look at the next week, what times have you set aside to focus on the assignments you’ve been given?
4. How can your prayer partners be praying for you this week, whether about this 30-Day Change process or about anything else that you’re experiencing as particularly pressing at this point in your life?

1. deliberate time with your family,
2. time for specific spiritual disciplines
3. and (of course) during these thirty days, two hours daily focused on building your volunteer team.

1. Corral your emails and phone calls into a specific time block for each day. If your week is packed, you simply don’t have time to be immediately available this week. Plan on taking a break from Facebook and Twitter as well.
2. Determine what will need to be cut from your schedule, being careful not to cut any of your top priorities (those things that have the potential to make your life and ministry different a year from now). You may need to reschedule a meeting or two, delegate or simply live with the possibility that there may be some part of your life that is less excellent this week. If this feels foreign to you, remember that this is something you actually do every week already. It’s just that you do it on the fly, later in the week, and (if you’re like most of us) you wind up sacrificing your most important priorities.
3. Keep working on the filtering process until you have a schedule for the week that allows time for your most important priorities, time for current appointments and a few hours of margin.

1. Bring the job description for the specific role for which you would like this person’s help.
2. Begin the conversation by listening to your potential recruit to learn what they are thinking and feeling about the opportunity and to learn any concerns they might have.
3. Address their concerns with joyful clarity, being sure to ask for what you really need. It may be that at this point you discover that you have someone willing to help but not willing to be a partner. If this is the case, do not slot this person into a partner role. Go back and find another person who might serve in the partner role, and celebrate that this person will be a helper.

1. Take out your master recruiting documents: your needs list and your ranked pool list.
2. Check your email to see if anyone has responded to your email invitation, and reply to those emails immediately.
3. For those who have said yes, send an email suggesting a meeting time and place for you to talk further about what you’re looking for.
4. For those who have said no,
   1. Move their names to the bottom of the pool list under the section called “No.”
   2. Beside each name, write what role each person has said no to.
   3. Remove their names from the needs list.
5. Place new names in the blanks left by those who have said no.
6. Send your standard invitation email to the people you have added to your master recruiting list.
7. Follow up with those who have not responded to your last message in three days or more.

1. Contact five people in your church whom you may not know very well, let them know that you are in the process of building your youth ministry team for the coming year and ask them if they have noticed anyone in the church who they think might have gifts for working with youth.
2. Contact five parents of some of your more enthusiastically involved youth and ask them for the names of anyone they would recommend as a potential leader.
3. Ask your colleagues on staff again for the names of any people they may not have thought of a couple weeks ago.
4. Scan through the church directory to see if there might be someone there you’ve missed.
5. Remember to look around on Sunday morning and see if there might be someone you want to ask others in the congregation about.
6. Add any new names to your master recruiting list and rank them (ABC, WEB) as you have the others.

1. Add to your master recruiting list any additional names of new potential volunteers that might have bubbled up in your sourcing process.
2. Make sure everyone on your pool list is appropriately categorized:
   1. Those who have said no are taken out of the master list and put at the bottom of the list, each with a note indicating what roles they said no to.
   2. Those you’re still waiting to hear back from are highlighted in some way, with indications for each of how many messages you have left.
   3. Those who have said yes are written into your master needs list in big, black marker.

1. How often do you want your leaders to be together, just as leaders, over the span of a year?
2. What would you like to do for an orientation for your leaders at the beginning of the year?
3. What would you like to do to celebrate the work the leaders have done at the end of the year?
4. What would you like to do to ensure that the leaders who can’t (or won’t) make the meetings have access to the training and to the sense of connection that will take place at the meetings?
5. Are there any other special times you’d like your team to be together—maybe a Christmas party, a commissioning service or a community training you’d like to promote?

At this point, don’t worry too much about what’s realistic. Start with what you’d love to see happen in terms of the rhythm of your leader gatherings.

1. A rank of 1 means that they are doing work that makes their heart sing, and they come away from their work in your ministry almost always grateful and delighted to have served.
2. A rank of 2 means that they feel their work is making a difference and they are committed to it, even if at times it feels like an obligation.
3. A rank of 3 means that they are willing to keep their commitment for this year but will probably quit at the end of the year. They have determined that the payoff is not worth their investment.
4. A rank of 4 means that they are unhappy in their roles and are likely to drop out soon if changes aren’t made.
5. A rank of 5 means that you have no idea how satisfied they are in their roles.

1. Review the daily assignments from past days.
2. Create a written list of all the items that remain incomplete. (If you are reading this book electronically, you can create the list through the highlighting feature on your reader.)
3. For each item on the “remaining items” list, estimate how much time the task will take.
4. Knowing that you really have six days left to complete these outstanding tasks, schedule time to complete each of them during the coming week. Once you have determined how much time each task will require, add 20 percent to that number of minutes and schedule those times in your calendar.
5. Repeat this process for these newly found items as part of Today’s Mission on days twenty-four through thirty.

1. Include a celebration of the new volunteer team in the church newsletter.
2. Report the names and roles of your new volunteer team to the church’s leadership.
3. Have a special program for the youth (and their parents) at which the new volunteers are celebrated and introduced.
4. Commission the volunteer team before the congregation.
5. Write an article for your church’s website about the new team of volunteers.
6. Introduce and celebrate your new team of volunteers on the youth ministry’s Facebook page.

1. What are you most excited about after having worked this process for a month?
2. What have you learned about yourself and your ministry through this process?
3. What might have made this process more effective or meaningful?

Do a little show and tell with your prayer partners, showing your (hopefully completed) master recruiting list, as well as your volunteer recruitment and development manual.

1. youth leader directory
2. major event calendar
3. youth directory
4. child protection and screening forms and policies
5. job descriptions
6. letters or emails you have sent out that can be templates for the recruiting process next year
7. “Improving Our Recruiting Process” document, with notes you have kept throughout this process of things you’d like to do differently in recruiting next year

1. the individual’s job description
2. their starting date for working with the youth
3. the date of the leader orientation

1. when you will publically commission your leaders
2. when articles about your leadership team will appear in the church newsletter, on the church website, in the youth ministry newsletter, on your Facebook page and so on.