How To Care For Volunteers
... and Going With The Grain of God's Design. This week in podcasts.
Cross Formed Kidmin Podcast - How To Care For Volunteers
Hunter and I have spent the last two episodes considering how best to recruit and train volunteers in your Children’s Ministry. This week, we move to how we can best care for the team of volunteers who serve our youngest brothers and sisters.
From low-key relational moments to more structured times of appreciation and equipping, showing leaders that you notice their work and verbally affirming their ministry goes a long way toward helping them sustain ministry in the long term.
Top tip from Hunter: talk to your church elders and add a “leader appreciation” line to the church budget.
This might be a minimum cost potluck lunch, or gifting each member a book to read over their summer break. Whatever the scale of your ministry and budget, having some cost value goes some way to indicate the spiritual value that your leaders are bringing to the lives of the children they serve.
Listen to the full episode in the link below or on your favourite podcasting app.
Have you got a question about Children’s Ministry that you would like us to cover on the Cross Formed Kidmin podcast. Leave a comment below.
Shock Absorber Podcast - With Or Against the Grain
Should Christian influencers chase the algorithm? Is Christian influencer an oxymoron? Should Christians be using social media platforms at all?
Joel McMaster and I take at look at our thumbnails and tackle this topic head on on this week’s Shock Absorber.
We kick off with the history of Spanish football and the long-term rivalry between Real Madrid vs Barcelona, which (somehow 🤷♂️) ends up with a biblical framework for thinking about metrics of success in a world that rewards inflammatory, clickbaity and often dishonest content.
I attempt a brief biblical theology of communication, from the cultural mandate of Genesis 1-2, through the wisdom of Proverbs, and out the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, arguing that what is good, true and beautiful will *often* produce pro-social results, with an important caveat that the wisdom of God can also be seen as folly by the watching world.
Here’s the challenge I give myself: my intention may be to be creative and redemptive on social media, but how do I recognise when social media has evangelised me instead?
Listen to the full episode in the link below or on your favourite podcasting app.