Technology Volunteers Volume 3

Last time I talked about the types of tech volunteers that have really frustrated us over the past several years, and I have to admit that I was rather harsh, but none the less truthful. However, I certainly do NOT want to give the impression that we have had nothing but frustration, as nothing could be farther from the truth. We currently have (and have had in the past) many great volunteers who are extremely giving and serve very humbly. In part one of the series I listed four qualities we look for in volunteers, let’s take a look at how those play out practically in our tech volunteers.

Mark 12:28-31 (ESV)
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

1. Loves Jesus
   Again, this seems obvious for anyone who has a desire to volunteer with the Church, but as Pastor Mark is fond of saying let’s not miss the big E on the eye chart. Its the first part of what Jesus said was the greatest commandment. We see this in our volunteers by seeing the fruit of their life outside the boundaries of serving in the tech ministry. We listen to their testimony and we look for life transformation. We are not legalists who want to see a bunch of rules followed, but testimony and behavior are the indicators of the heart, and your heart needs to be with Jesus before it’s with the computer.

   I have personally seen this in the lives of our volunteers, heard many stories of how God saved them, changed the way they thought, changed their behavior to be more like him. A volunteer must be willing to share this as a good relationship with Jesus is our first priority for someone, we don’t simply write code, we worship Jesus.

2. Loves the Church (global and local)
   This is part of the second commandment Jesus talks about, loving people. Loving the church is loving other Christians ( and loving non Christians, as part of the mission of the Church). Practically the idea here is being on mission with our particular Church (Mars Hill Church) to love people in a way that glorifies God. Our volunteers need to either be members or pursuing membership, to ensure that we are all on the same mission. They need to be involved with a community group, to ensure that they are participating in the community, being discipled, and loving our brother and sisters in Christ in a real physical community. We consider this to be very important to a successful volunteer. On a couple of occasions, we’ve had people who didn’t think these were important, they just wanted to work. It is NEVER NEVER NEVER just work, that’s a mistake in thinking.
3. Humbleness
   I have found in my corporate career that technology people are very prideful people, having very strong opinions on technologies and methodologies. I’ve seen many “Holy Wars” over stuff that in the end really don’t matter that much (PC vs Mac vs Linux, Programming Language #1 vs Programming Language #2, my framework can beat up your framework, etc). A volunteer on mission for Jesus needs to push that stuff to the bottom of their priority list. They need to recognize that there is an existing mission strategy with leadership in place, and they need to start by just helping where help is needed. We value creativity and expertise , certainly. We are always developing leaders who can move into roles of responsibility, but those opportunities are for faithful humble servants who follow Jesus who set our example for humbleness.

   I’ve seen humbleness exemplified with our great current set of volunteers. This is a group of extremely smart and technologically gifted individuals, who simply asked where they could help out with they first got here. Over the course of time, as they have served faithfully, they have made suggestions and had ideas that have changed the course of our technology strategy and influenced our thinking for the better. We need good faithful people to help us be better at what we do, but having influence is all in the approach.

4. Called to serve in this area
   This can be the trickiest quality to identify as many people have the desire but not necessarily the time to devote to something that can require a decent amount of time. This is something that requires prayer and very serious consideration. A good volunteer needs to be prepared to serve in the technology area faithfully for a longer period of time (think a couple hours a week for 6 months at least, preferably longer). Now, we aren’t going to give a volunteer so much work that it overwhelms them, we understand that people have very demanding day jobs and family commitments, and that is perfectly fine, we understand. A good volunteer though needs to understand that we (staff and other volunteers) will be making an investment in them that is time consuming for us, and they need to be considerate of that. We just ask that if we are going to make an investment in you, please be faithful to honor that investment. Don’t get me wrong, people do serve for a while and then transition to other ministries, this isn’t a life long commitment, but the key words are: “for a while”.

   Looking at our current set of volunteers, again, these guys took this to heart. They have a history of faithfully serving over a longer period of time, faithfully doing the tasks they agreed to take on, understanding that we are investing in them and trusting that they will do what they agreed they wanted to do. The have earned that trust with their actions.

In summary, let me say that volunteers have worked out nicely for us. I have seen our volunteers have a huge impact on our technology and direction, because they love Jesus, they love the Church, and they humbly serve in a difficult area that they are called to serve in. The entire tech department, and indeed the entire church, owe them a great deal of thanks, and we thank God for them.

Next volume, I will finish up by outlining some of our needs and how people can get plugged in.

Good technology volunteers have been and will continue to be an absolute must for our department as the Church continues to minister to tens of thousands of people locally and hundred of thousands (if not millions) across the world, bringing Jesus to people by using technology. We simply cannot efficiently function without them, as the current work load and the far reaching vision of what we want to do in the future is far too high for the available staff. I’ve discussed the kinds of traits we look for in good volunteers, and I want to examine what a good volunteer looks like practically, but before I do that, I need to show what a good volunteer does NOT look like.

Before coming on staff, I volunteered in the software development here for about 6 years as our church grew from around a hundred or so to the 5000 range. As I’ve said I’ve seen many volunteers come and go, and I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with people who had either incorrect attitudes or intentions.
As I’ve reflected on some volunteers who haven’t work out, I can generally classify them into two basic groups.

1. The first group I call Super Software Consultants. These are people who generally aren’t interested in doing any actual work but more interested in telling us what we are doing wrong and what direction we should be going (which inevitably is not the direction we are currently going). They normally have a pet technology that far exceeds other pet technologies and usually instruct us that we should re-create everything we’ve already done using that technology, this apparently has the effect of making us a world class development shop (since we are primarily an open source shop, the most common type of pet technology that has been pushed on us like this have the words “dot” and “net” in the name). In the past, I’ve normally suggested that if we would be better off with their pet technology then by all means they should go ahead and implement that and let us know when they are done. I usually get a less then excited look on their face, followed by reasons why they are too busy to do that (usually because work is too crazy) but that we should definitely implement those changes ourselves. Normally, they didn’t come back, I guess work got crazy.
2. The second group of people (I don’t have a formal name for this group) are people who really have a desire to help, but underestimate the amount of time it requires to effectively do so. My frustration with someone like this has been the time it takes away from myself and other staff/volunteers to bring them up to speed on our software systems, only to have them never come back after the second meeting because other things in life got too busy. I admit that this frustration was partially my fault, as I was almost always very optimistic when I saw somebody come in who was excited to help and I didn’t take the time to really determine if this person had the time and the skills to do what was needed. I even had a period of time a while back that I became jaded with other volunteers as this happened to me several times, but with the arrival of several volunteers who have worked out great, I’m not nearly as jaded, but I am definitely far more cautious.

So these two types of “volunteers” have definitely caused us some headaches over the years, and we’ve made some changes in how we approach integrating volunteers into our development process to avoid the frustrations that come with dealing with these situations.

I do want to stress thought, that more importantly, we have some awesome volunteers that definitely do NOT fall into these categories and who are great examples of an awesome tech development volunteer.

I will take a look at what makes a great volunteer in the next volume.

In the last six months or so the technology department of Mars Hill has seen an upswing in volunteers seeking to help us in our development efforts. First of all let me say that we LOVE volunteers.

They have become an essential part of our development team that has a number of complicated web applications with only a few full time staff working on them. The recent upswing in volunteers has caused us to reflect a bit and attempt to communicate to those who might also be interested in volunteering what a good tech volunteer looks like (base on our past experiences) and how one gets involved.

Before coming on staff last year, I spent several years as a volunteer doing software development projects for Mars Hill Church. My adventures are are more fully chronicled in some recent blog postings. As I’ve volunteered fairly consistently for a number of years, I’ve seen other volunteers come and go, and seen several really great volunteers do great work for us. I’ve also seen some people come in with incorrect attitudes and intentions that has resulted in them not lasting very long.

So based on previous experiences, when somebody identifies themselves as a potential volunteer we look for several identifying qualities. These qualities are:

1. Loves Jesus - this seems like an obvious one for a church volunteer, but you should never assume anything. The way we look for this quality is to look for the fruit in their life, do they have a testimony, how has their life been transformed, etc.
2. Loves the Church (global and local)- again, seems obvious, but are they in Christian community, are they in agreement with the church by being or pursuing membership, etc.
3. Humbleness - in order to serve effectively you have to be humble. Technology can be a very prideful activity as people base their entire professional careers and devote much of their “free” time to various camps/philosopies of technology. We need people to make those values secondary to serving Jesus (See #1).
4. Called to serve in this area - everybody is called to serve somewhere, just not everybody is called to serve in technology, including people who are technology professionals. Serving in the technology area can be a fairly time consuming activity depending on the project given to the volunteer, we want to make sure people are going to actually complete such a project, as the entire staff and/or church body may be waiting for that project to be completed. This has everything to do with calling, and should be carefully considered by a potential volunteer as there are only so many hours in the day and lots of areas of the church to serve in.

There’s nothing ground breaking about these four qualities, but we have definitely experienced some heartache over the years by not intentionally looking for them in technology volunteers. In the next post in this series we will take a look at what a good tech volunteer does NOT look like, which will be followed by a post on what a good technology volunteer does look like, then finally more specifics on what the process to get involved looks like practically.