Years ago I required my volunteers to attend monthly training meetings on Sunday nights. This worked well, but eventually less and less people attended the Sunday night training meetings.

If I am doing something that is having less success than it used to have, it may be a signal that I need to change. One thing that has changed is that volunteers do not have as much free time as they used to have. I don’t want to throw untrained people in a room, so I had to figure out a shorter more efficient way to train people.

I found the answer at a business seminar. I overheard a conversation where a colleague was talking about the Ten Minute Huddle. I asked her “What is the Ten Minute Huddle”?

The Ten Minute Huddle is an opportunity for all employees to meet for ten minutes before the doors open to discuss what is happening that day. I did the quick math. Ten minutes of training for three weeks equals 30 minutes of training. The best part is that my volunteers do not need to come back to church for an extra meeting.

The Ten Minute Huddle transformed our KidMin. Volunteers started looked forward to the Ten-Minute Huddles because they knew they were going to be short meetings and it gave them time to connect with each other before ministering to the kids.

Many people have a false idea that if it’s spiritual it needs to be long but that is not necessary the truth. We have all sat through long boring sermons that didn’t do anything for us. Some preachers forget that the scriptures say, “Blessed are the short winded for they shall be heard again.”

One thing I have noticed about growing churches today is that they have short services. If we want to have more volunteers we need to keep our meetings short and make it convenient for them to attend. The bottom line is we need to think of things from the point of view of our volunteers

The same thing is true with blogs. I find if I keep my blogs short more people read them.

What types of things do you do to train volunteers in a busy world?