Keeping Lay Workers Fresh

Perhaps there would be less burnout if more churches could adopt some of the training and support techniques that volunteer organizations use.
—Virginia Vagt

“I don’t want to go to church tomorrow,” I moaned to myself Saturday after Saturday during my final months at Resurrection Church.

It wasn’t the pastor, his sermons, or a lack of warmth in the congregation that caused me to dread driving up the church’s gravel driveway every Sunday. I was twenty-six years old and trying to find my place in church life. My problem was that I was in over my head in a program called Women’s Outreach.

The founder of this program, Margaret Schiller, did lay mission work in Honduras every summer with her dentist husband. Her lifelong commitment to outreach was exciting. When she asked me to be one of her workers, to make weekly visits to a poverty-stricken young widow, I eagerly said yes. The extrovert in me and my need to find a meaningful ministry seemed to have found a good match.

Margaret put me in touch with Karen, who lived with her three-year-old son in a nearby low-income apartment building. What exactly was I supposed to do in my visits with Karen? Other than befriend her, I didn’t know, but I felt reassured; Margaret told me the Lord would lead me.

At first, the dreary apartment building with its dark halls didn’t deter me. Karen would open the thin, scuffed door each Saturday and offer me her warm smile. For several weeks we just sat and talked the way new friends do. Karen seemed grateful to see me, and I felt I was doing God’s work.

As I drove back and forth, however, I questioned myself: What is my purpose? Is Karen’s life supposed to turn around and improve because I visit her? Is Karen supposed to become a Christian through my friendship? Should I convince her to come to church? With no answers, I just waited to see what would happen.

As the weeks went by, Karen came up with all sorts of things she wanted me to do. One was baby-sitting for Tommy, her son, while she and her cousin went off for an hour—or most of the day! It was unsettling not knowing how long I’d be alone with Tommy in that apartment. On other occasions, Karen asked me to drive her places so she could shop and visit. I never knew how long we’d be gone or where exactly we’d be going.

On some Saturdays, five or six of Karen’s friends and cousins would come over. Men would sit together on the plasticupholstered couch while the women talked and laughed and looked at me as I played with Tommy. On those days I felt conspicuous, outnumbered, and filled with self-doubt.

In frustration I wanted to say, “I didn’t come here to babysit for you, drive you places, or be a specimen for your friends to look at.” Before the words could come out, however, I answered them myself: Then why did you come here? Since I didn’t know, how was Karen supposed to know?

On Sundays, in the church basement next to the coffee pot and Styrofoam cups, Margaret would ask me how my visits with Karen were going. I wanted to have a good report, to be able to say I was being helpful to Karen or “We’re making progress.”

I felt too guilty to say to Margaret, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m afraid of being in Karen’s apartment building. And I wish I never had to go back.” Instead I said, “Well, I don’t really know what to say or do specifically, and I feel a little lost.”

Margaret responded with suggestions. One was for me to teach Karen how to shop for values and not waste money on junk food. Theoretically, that was a good suggestion. Karen did need to learn things like that. But I never felt comfortable suggesting to Karen that I knew how to shop and she didn’t.

Margaret also suggested that I do a Bible study with Karen. A Bible study sounded good; that was the kind of thing I had imagined we’d do together. And yet, which one? How would I start? If I found a good one, would Karen think I was turning the tables on her, setting my own agenda? The Bible study never happened.

At the two-month point, I felt panicky about visiting Karen. Without any goals or guidelines, the program was always in her hands. I felt caught between the possibility of Karen’s rejecting me and Margaret’s feeling I could do more. I was also unhappy that my Saturdays were being eaten up by a rocky friendship in which I had no real sense that the Lord was leading me.

Looking back on it, there are many things I should have done differently. But it was early in my adulthood and early in my experience in church work. Back then, I thought that if someone was in need, God wanted me to “give till it hurt.” While I still believe there’s some truth to that, my problem wasn’t giving too much or too little but not knowing what I was doing and not having any hope that the situation would improve.

So, one Saturday, after sixteen weeks of visits, I said goodbye to Karen, and powered by the twin engines of guilt and fear, I never went back to Resurrection Church—and never said good-bye to Margaret, the pastor, or anyone else in the congregation. My guilt came from feeling I had failed. The fear was that Margaret would talk me into giving it another try.

The one thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to visit Karen anymore.

Immature of me? Yes. Cowardly? Yes. And I doubt the pastor at Resurrection Church ever knew or even guessed why I left.

Learning how to do church work

After my flight from Resurrection and several years of church hopping, my new husband, Peter, and I landed at a little stone church called Saint Mark’s. We attended for ten straight weeks and received a warm pastoral visit followed by a phone call. Would we like to team teach the high school Sunday school class?

Peter was a high school teacher, so that was a good fit, but I had never taught any kind of class. In spite of my lack of experience, however, panic didn’t result. Teaching together sounded like a good idea.

The “good idea” stretched into a four-year success experience. In addition to teaching, we took the kids on retreats and spent time with them after church. Peter and I grew spiritually. By having to prepare material for them, we learned more Bible ourselves than we ever would have on our own. The high school kids even christened us “the sunshine family.” It felt good to get that kind of affirmation from kids. We kept asking ourselves, “Why is this week-after-week, time-consuming commitment working so well?”

As I look back, these are some of the factors that made our teaching at Saint Mark’s work well, and that by their absence had made my involvement in Women’s Outreach a failure.

Someone as mentor. At Saint Mark’s, I wasn’t thrown into cold water without a life preserver. Peter already knew how to teach. He knew what he was doing and was there to help me week after week. I could observe him in action before I had to do the same thing myself.

Going slowly. That first Sunday morning when large and small teenagers began to walk into our classroom, I felt scared. But in those early days, Peter let me solo for just five minutes at a time. As the weeks went by, I took ten-minute segments, then fifteen, and so on until I was able to take half the class time.

Regular debriefing. Each week we’d go home and talk over how our teaching went. Skits didn’t work, but drawing posters on the spot to generate discussion did. With our weekly postmortems, failures became something to learn from and laugh about together. Successes made us glow.

The buddy system. For Peter, an experienced teacher, working with a novice had additional rewards. He wasn’t just given another group of kids to teach. Instead, he also gained the satisfaction of sharing what he knew about teaching. He saw someone else—me—start to succeed as a teacher as a result of his modeling.

A supervisor to help. When we both ran into problems, the Sunday school superintendent was available for consultation. Teaching Christian sexual ethics to teenagers on Sunday morning, for example, wasn’t something we felt confident about. Our superintendent spent several evenings on the phone helping us plan our approach. She kept in touch when she knew we were struggling or trying something different.

Avoiding a rut and passing the baton. Forgive the mixed metaphor, but after four years, it seemed time for a break. We could tell we had lost our freshness with high schoolers. Both of us were being asked to take on other church responsibilities, too. So we asked if we could train other adults to take our place.

The idea was accepted. Before packing up our Magic Markers and discussion-starter games, we met with other adults who wanted to begin working with high schoolers. At the close of our teaching years, we both had the satisfaction of training others the way Peter had trained me.

Preventing burnout

Eight years after leaving Women’s Outreach, I began ministry visits to another woman. But this time, our visits worked. As with the above Sunday school teaching, the secret was in training and ongoing support. Without that, I might have thrown up my hands with Sarah, a tired eighty-two-year-old caught in the crucible of old age.

The primary source of help to me in this instance was our local senior citizen center’s “friendly visitor” program. The program gave me guidelines and people to call when I wasn’t sure what to do, such as how to be helpful to Sarah during the week she moved from her duplex to a nursing home.

As a result of monthly volunteer meetings and the program guidelines, I’ve been able to maintain my commitment, listen to and smile with a lonely person, and be a fresh face in the world of the elderly. This time, we do talk about God and Christ, and we pray for each other’s needs. It just took time.

Perhaps there would be less burnout if more churches could adopt some of the training and support techniques that volunteer organizations often use and that Peter and I unconsciously discovered at Saint Mark’s. Here are some of the important principles I saw in action at the friendly visitor program:

Screening. Before becoming a friendly visitor, I was interviewed. The director wanted to know why I wanted to minister in this way. Apparently most volunteers do want to help people, but they also need to feel the work is satisfying to them. If they don’t, they’ll quit.

My motives were wanting to improve my listening and empathic skills. Also, being without extended family in this state, I wanted a relationship with an older person. I saw it, too, as part of my Christian responsibility to visit those in need. The director thought my reasons were a good match to the purpose of the program, and I was accepted.

After that interview, I thought, No one at church has ever asked me why I want to teach or be on the Stewardship Commission. Perhaps if screening questions were asked at church, more people would end up in the right jobs and would last longer in those positions. At the very least, it would help clarify what we want and what we’ll need to do the task.

Purpose. It sounds so simple, but how often in church do we nail down our purpose? The friendly visitor director told us our purpose was not to do grocery shopping or to clean the kitchen for our seniors. Our purpose, rather, was to listen and be a bright spot in their week. There were other community services such as Meals on Wheels and Dial-a-Ride to provide daily necessities. If we spent our time cleaning kitchens, how could we be good listeners and empathizers?

In the high school ministry at church, we realized our purpose was not to become “overgrown high schoolers” ourselves, but to be adult role models for them, to help guide them in their spiritual and social growth.

Signing on the dotted line. All friendly visitors have to sign an ethical statement and promise to meet their commitment by not being a no-show and by arriving on time for their visits. Putting it on paper and signing your name brings home the importance of what may seem like a little volunteer job. It also forces those coordinating a program to distill the purpose and requirements into a paragraph.

Since then, I’ve discovered that many churches also ask ushers, Sunday school teachers, and coffee hour coordinators to sign an agreement to serve, usually for one-year renewable terms. It helps solidify the commitment.

Training. For six weeks, the senior center provided new volunteers with role-playing exercises, question-and-answer sessions, and insights into the typical problems of the elderly. It felt great to be prepared.

Again, many churches utilize the same approach. In training sessions, Sunday school teachers role-play how to handle the disruptive child. Ushers discuss how to handle late arrivers. Committee chairs role-play how to deal with the committee member who won’t stop talking.

Follow-up. It helps to discuss the challenges and questions that come up as we minister to others. Quarterly follow-up meetings came in handy, such as the time I told the group about my difficulties with leaving Sarah.

Just when it was time to say good-bye to Sarah each week, she would suddenly open up and talk about her problems, often with tears in her eyes. But until then, conversation would be very difficult. So, not wanting to leave during a meaningful moment, I’d end up feeling manipulated into staying longer than we had arranged.

In the follow-up sessions, the other volunteers told me I was being manipulated. From then on, when Sarah opened up as I was preparing to leave, I felt comfortable saying, “Sarah, I’d like to stay and talk, but I have to leave for another appointment.” And I left. After that, Sarah opened up before the end of my visit.

By implementing some of the principles I learned the hard way, we can do much to avoid burnout.