Today’s Mission
Day 7
Getting a Rhythm
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
ARISTOTLE
Maybe you’ve heard of the “Write a Novel in Thirty Days” challenge. We have friends who have actually done it. Maybe you’ve watched The Biggest Loser and observed the way that 100 percent of the contestants on that show lose weight. It happens every time. In each case, someone made a decision to do something differently and turned that decision into a habit they focus on daily.
You have decided that during this thirty-day challenge you will make a habit, a daily time priority, of tending to the building of your volunteer team. Whether it’s weight loss or writing or recruiting the best-ever volunteer team for a ministry, those who accomplish major change have two things in common: focus and persistence (coupled, of course, with the trump card of grace). Want to run a marathon? The formula is simple (not easy): time and persistence. Want your marriage to be better a year from now than it is today? Time and persistence. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell reminds us that it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something, whether it is our jobs, our parenting, our money management or our favorite sport. As you finish up the first week of your thirty-day focus on building a volunteer team, you’ve likely found more than a few reasons not to find time for working on building your team.
At one level, accomplishing this mission is simply about applying the right pressure consistently, about building time into the rhythm of your day. The reason we’ve made a priority of weekly “balcony time” in this process is that taking that time forces us to face the fact that nothing is likely to change in our ministries without a change first happening in us.
Let me be offensively candid: you don’t have the volunteer team in place that you would like because, well, because of you. This is not a statement of blame. It is actually a statement about the power you have to make things different.
Maybe you don’t have the volunteer team you’d like in place because you have never learned how to recruit a team. Maybe it’s because you’ve never learned how to recruit a team in a church context like your current one. Maybe there’s some other reason. But when you take time to work on your ministry, not just in it, you accept responsibility to try (and fail) and try (and fail) until you discover the alchemy that has been missing from your approach to building a volunteer team.
Today’s Mission
Today you’ll begin the rhythmic work that you’ll do most days throughout the rest of the 30-Day Change process.
- Move their names to the bottom of the pool list, under a new section called “No.”
- Beside each name, write what role each person has said no to.
- Remove their names from the needs list.