I’ve expended a lot of my blog energy, over my more than a year as a blogger, on the topic of Infrastructure Development.  I’ve written about what it is, how to do it, and why it’s important.  Developing infrastructure boils down to deciding how to do something, committing it to writing (the Management System), and continuously improving the method through revising policies, procedures, work instructions, forms, etc.  That’s it.

But, why is this so critical to church growth and the accomplishment of the mission?  In order to grow, the church must be very good at connecting people to ministry teams that “run the business.”  In all areas of the church people must easily get connected and deployed in one service area or another.  If deploying a new volunteer takes a significant amount of effort, either by the staff member or key volunteer leader, the number of volunteers that are connected over time will be fewer.  And, the lack of ability to rapidly grow the volunteer base will ultimately slow the growth of the church overall.

Last Sunday I had a real example of this that I thought I would share.  In our operations area we have several teams that take care of everything from parking cars to changing light bulbs.  One of those teams is responsible for putting directional signs out to help new comers find our site.  Not that our site is hard to find necessarily; we have just found over the years that having signs out raises the awareness of people that we are having services and that new comers are always welcome.

Anyway, the guy scheduled to put the signs out that morning called me to let me know, due to some back trouble, he wouldn’t be able to take care of it.  I said, “No problem.  We’ll take care of it.  You take care of your back.”  I’m thinking this isn’t a problem because this is one “task” that has been documented in the form of a Work Instruction.  All I need is to find someone that is willing, give them the procedure and keys to the church truck and off they go.  It didn’t turn out to be that simple, though.

The volunteer came back 5 minutes later and asked if he could borrow my cell phone.  I said no problem … why do you need it?  He said that he needed to stay on the phone (his battery was dead) with the guy scheduled to get the job done that morning because the procedure was “nowhere near accurate.”

Nice.

I loaned him my phone which allowed him to be verbally walked through the route and the placement of signs.  I thought to myself, “Nice try man.”  How simple it could have been had our “documented procedure” just been accurate.