Boost Your Team with Pre-Service Meetings
What If I told you there was one thing you could do this Sunday that would improve your volunteer morale, orient everyone towards your vision, and make sure all your volunteers are cared for? Such a thing exists. It’s called a pre-service meeting.
A pre-service meeting is a short 5-15 minute meeting starting at least 30 minutes before the service. While you may already do something like this with your fellow pastoral staff, I think you should also do this with your volunteers. There can be a lot of complexity when it comes to these meetings so in this post, I’ll talk about why and when you should have them. You can read this post for what to talk about in the meetings
Why you should have a volunteer pre-service meeting
Having served at multiple churches of varying sizes, I’ve been part of no meetings, staff only, and volunteer pre-service meetings. In my opinion, the volunteer meeting is vital for three reasons.
Vision
The pre-service meeting is an excellent time to cast vision to your core constituency. These are the most bought in people in your ministry and have the widest influence in your church. If you can get them to catch the vision of the church in general and the vision for the day specifically, you’ll be that much further ahead.
You’ve been mulling over your ideas and processing your service for days. It’s what you’re paid to do. But most likely your volunteer hasn’t given it a second thought. They’ve been thinking about their work, their family, and what’s for lunch. Casting vision gets everyone on the same page and excited for what’s about to happen.
2. Team Building
When I’ve served at churches without a pre-service meeting, arriving at church seemed disjointed. You just…arrive. There’s no ceremony. There’s no chance to connect with others. You take up your post and hope you know what’s going on.
If you leverage those few minutes before service, your volunteers can see and connect with each other, get an idea of what’s to come, and make sure they know where to put their focus. A camaraderie develops because you’re volunteers are no longer island to themselves. They know there are other people doing the same thing all over the campus.
3. Prayer Time
Your volunteers are people, not cogs in a wheel. Each of those names in Planning Center Services is a person with a family, a job, wants and concerns. It’s important as their leader to acknowledge them and show that you care. A great way to do so is to pray. Take some time to not only pray for the service and lives changed, but for any requests in the room.
Granted, prayer request time can go too long if your team is large or just chatty. You’ll need to use wisdom to determine if you want to open the floor for requests or just mention a few needs. Just like with team building, praying for one another builds camaraderie. It’s also one of the things James encourages us to do.
When you should host your pre-service meeting
I already said that your meetings should start at least 30 minutes before your service, but if you’re in a larger or multiple service context, when you host the meeting can get tricky. While I don’t have any perfect answers, those rely on you and your context, I do have some suggestions.
1. Before your service
The pre-service meeting by definition needs to be held before your service. While some churches hold them as early as 45 minutes to an hour before the service, I think 30 minutes before is best. If you start an hour early, your worship team will be thankful because they need to practice, but your greeters will be bored out of their minds.
That 30 minute time-frame is a happy medium. The worship team may need to finish up earlier than that, but your greeters will be in place just in time. One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how big your church is everyone arrives in the final 15 minutes before service. You want to have everyone in place and ready to go by then. Having your meeting start 30 minutes before ensures everyone is ready.
2. Multiple Services
Hosting the meeting before service super easy if you only have one service. But what if you have 2 or 3 or more? It takes a little creativity, but it’s doable. At one church I served, we had a Saturday night and two Sunday morning services. We had two meetings on the weekend. One 30 minutes before the Saturday evening service, and the other before the 9am service on Sunday.
The thought behind the one pre-service meeting on Sunday is that every volunteer was going to worship one and work one. In other words, they were already going to be there for both services anyway, so we can have just one meeting and call it good. In practice, this wasn’t a perfect system. We only had 30 minutes turn around time between services, so trying to dismiss one service while simultaneously getting the volunteers in place for the next was nearly impossible.
I’ve never served in a place with 3 or more Sunday morning services, but if I did, I would suggest those meetings be held 30 minutes before, but only for every other service. If your church is that big, then you probably have a depth of leadership that can lead the meetings without direct oversight from the top leaders every time.
3. Split Teams
Whether you have multiple services or not, the volunteer teams for each ministry on Sunday morning can become a large gathering with worship team, hospitality, kids, tech ushers, and whatever else. You may not have space for everyone to meet except for sitting in the pews.
Once you get to this point, I suggest you split up the teams and let the leader/pastor of each ministry do their own meeting. To make this work, the pastors meet together before everyone else, and then those pastor disseminate the information to their teams.
At my church in Montgomery, we had to do this because the kids met in a completely different building. If I had all my kids’ team meet in the church lobby, it would have left the kids’ building unattended and unsafe. So, the lead pastor led the meeting with the worship team and greeters, while I lead it with the kids volunteers. It wasn’t ideal because the two teams didn’t see each other week to week, but it got the job done.
Having a pre-service meeting is vital to your volunteer ministry. It gets everyone on the same page, builds camaraderie among your volunteers, and offers ample opportunity to show you care for your people. It may take a little creativity on your part to figure out the best time and place, but it’s worth it to get started. Even if your leadership is against starting something like this, you can still do it with your team. There are several times when I used my kidmin team as “guinea pigs” for new ideas. When they worked, I had evidence to get the whole church to buy in, if they didn’t then we learned something and moved on. Give pre-service meetings a try. It’ll make your services so much better.
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