Diary of a New Campus: Recruiting Wins and Challenges

Ten days ago we launched our third campus and a brand new Children’s Ministry along with it.  The first two weekends were a rush, and we were focused on the key essentials to providing a great first impression for our guests.

Now that the blur of the first two weekends has passed, it’s time to start living in a new reality.  A new three campus reality.   It's one thing to launch a new campus.  It's another thing to lead it.  As we approach our third weekend, we’re no longer launching a new ministry.   We’re nurturing a newborn ministry and helping it to take its first steps. 

First priority?  Leaders! 

This week we’re taking a hard look to evaluate our leader situation on all three campuses.  Where have we been?  Where are we at?  Where do we need to go?   Truthfully we have a lot to celebrate and a lot of work still ahead. 

If you haven't evaluated the state of your volunteers lately, I'd encourage you to sit down and honestly process where you're at.  

Proverbs 27:23 says, "Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds."  The writer of Proverbs knew the value of assessment and evaluation.  That's why we've been carefully tracking our numbers, including leader numbers, kid numbers, room ratios and the number of leaders we're adding to our team each week as well as reflecting on what those numbers mean. 

Here are the facts:

We have a strong core.

God has raised up an incredible core group of Children’s Ministry Jedi who are already committed and serving at the new campus.   They are phenomenal.  They get the vision and are “all in.” 

We need more.

We never want to position ourselves as a “needy” ministry.   We see volunteering with kids as a “get to” not a “have to.”  Ultimately, though, even as we keep our standards high, we still need to place about 30-40 new leaders to be fully staffed.

The launch team is on their way out.

We have a group of short-term temp leaders, called the launch team, who we recruited to buy us some time to identify those long-term committed leaders who will round out our core team.   We only have those leaders for a few more weeks.  These launch leaders are awesome and have been having a blast.  Hopefully God will call some of them to stay.

Our attendance is in flux.

It will be several weeks before we really know who is attending the new campus and which service they’ll choose to camp out in.  This means that kid numbers will continue to fluctuate as well as the pool of potential leaders. 

God is providing.

God is bringing us new leaders every week.  We placed 8-10 brand new leaders last week alone.  But not only is God bringing us new leaders, He’s bringing us new kids.  We registered 150 guests this past weekend.  No, that’s not a typo.  150!   

Oh yeah, we have more than one campus.

Even though we’ve had to focus a lot of attention on the Richmond Road campus for the launch, we are keeping the other two campuses high on the radar.  After all, we sent several leaders from our original campus to staff Richmond Road, which means that we need to identify new leaders to bulk up our teams at the original campus now that these guys are gone. 

You may think these sound like big problems, but our team chooses to see them as big opportunities to watch a big God at work.   In my next post, I’ll layout our plan for growing our leadership core over the coming months.  

In the mean time, what does your leadership reality look like today?  What do you have to celebrate?  What challenges are you facing?  Where are you expecting to see God show up?