January is one of the key seasons in the church’s life – especially for the administrative and planning calendars. Second to September, January is also a great time to invite people to get involved and spruce up your ministry’s current volunteers and team leaders.
First, the Christmas season is over, and you can take a deep breath.
Now, it’s time to get back to work.
In my world, I start thinking about January through August, but we definitely want to lock in January to Easter. I know it’s not equal lengths of time, but the Fall is so busy that I usually break down the year from January through August and September through December. Somewhere in the Spring, I fine-tune the summer schedule.
Here are some simple steps you can take as a new year comes around:
Fill In Your Calendar
Write down the things you need to firm up on your calendar that are personal or big blocks for the church, such as family vacation, family events, a conference, a major weekend event, Easter, Sunday, or something similar. Just sprucing up your calendar can help you get some clarity.
Connect With Your People
Second, you want to connect with your people. This can be a printed letter mailed to each person, a group text, an email to the whole group, or a combination. Sometimes, I will craft a hardcopy letter, upload it, and then attach a link to a group email or text that says, “Please take a moment to look at this letter.”
In this letter, thank everyone involved over the last year and invite your team to send you their re-up commitment and preferences for serving this year. Are they thinking of being in the group every week, or is once a month or any other interval better for them? This depends on how your church does volunteer roles and schedules, but you can get the idea.
One reason for inviting people to share their commitment level for this next semester or year is that you are intentionally and repeatedly building a culture of inviting people to realize that their commitment isn’t forever and ever. They have a sense of when their commitment is done so that it becomes easy to shift or change if the seasons of life for schedule or whatever changes. We don’t want to be afraid of that. We want to allow people to take a breather and let the opportunity be known. Most people in our culture are sprinters, not marathoners. It’s not that they won’t stay committed for the long haul; it’s just that they do it in spurts. I’ve had people who served with me for twenty years who did it one semester or year at a time.
Another component of this note is that you want people to block off any dates they know about for the next 2 to 4 months so that you can easily schedule them.
Finally, we want to encourage our people to keep following Jesus, grow in faith, lead the church, and serve well. You may also include great comments you heard from church members about Christmas music or worship music in general.
Plan A Community Night
Now is also the time to set up a community meeting night with your leaders and volunteers. If you don’t do this regularly, then it might seem daunting. Don’t worry about picking a night everyone can be there (that may never happen!). You choose the best night and work with who shows up. You can add this to the calendar for February. If you can build at least three of these meetings for the year, if not more, you won’t feel like you have to get it all in at one shot; there will be other times to meet. This will make it easier for your people than the big once-a-year meeting/community event.
In this meeting, it would be helpful to inspire people with devotional scripture and teach a little about the vision and purpose of ministry. You can use these four questions to gather their thoughts and ideas about how things are going and what they think might be great for your ministry together.
Additionally, at this meeting, you want some time to hang out, have food or dessert, sing a song, and maybe do a quick team-building activity. The worship team is often in go mode: a scheduled rehearsal, Sunday soundcheck, or the actual worship time. Thankfully, the worship team is together weekly. So, there’s a lot of camaraderie and connection during those times, but an intentional effort during a community night would be significant.
Meet With The Pastor
And the last thing for kicking off the new year well without feeling overwhelmed is to set up a time to meet with the pastor. Don’t stress your pastor out the first week of January with a request for scriptures and titles for the next six months (some pastors have this, others don’t). Instead, ask a couple of questions and take an opportunity to see how you think things are going. How did you feel Christmas went? How do you feel the church is doing overall? What kind of things are you thinking about in terms of worship? What has been something you’ve noticed that I/we can work on?
Plan For Some Great Moments
If you have the same worship order for the last four or five Sundays in a row, it’s probably time to tweak it so people can experience a new and fresh expression. Instead of the same thing going on, they would have an opportunity to do one thing that might be great for them to worship Jesus in a slightly new way. This is called creating moments. Here’s a blog post on the topic.
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