Relational Nature of Church?

This is becoming one of those posts that is gaining a life of its own. In the comments I made this observation – the double edged sword of working with non-profits.

Volunteers are the life blood of any non-profit. A good volunteer can be worth two paid workers. They are there because they believe in the mission (ideally) of the organization. It’s impossible to put a price tag on that kind of dedication.

The flip side of this is that you can’t fire a volunteer. Not without some heavy consequences. Why would you want to get rid of a volunteer? Same reasons companies fire workers – unproductive, cancer on the team, personality conflicts, can’t get on board with vision, whatever. To remove a volunteer comes at a high cost in terms of relational equity and emotional energy

What makes this situation even more dicier is this – most leaders in non-profits lead with benefits, not mission. What I mean is we ‘manipulate/recruit people to serve by extolling all of the benefits of serving, not the mission itself.

When this happens – we set ourselves up for failure because at some point, everything changes. A program or trip that once was the greatest thing in the world is no longer needed or useful. Or has to be drastically overhauled. Now we are ‘taking away’ in their minds the core of why they volunteered. They never saw the program as a tool to accomplish the mission. They saw it AS THE MISSION. And some of that confusion has to fall on us – we cast it in that light to start with.

Don’t get me wrong – the relational aspect of ministry is one of the richest, deepest experiences ever. It’s awesome and I have friends all over the country that are close to prove it. But it’s not THE MISSION of ministry. It’s an awesome benefit and at times it IS why we keep doing what we’re doing, especially in those dark times.

But the ultimate point of what we do is to connect people to Jesus and as leaders our biggest contribution to this is keeping this in front of our people, all the time in ways they get it and has meaning.