If you have been following the ministry for a while, you know that our heart is to extend the gospel, our outreach and the ministry as far as we can while uniting the church together in service. Last year’s strategy was built around providing a toolkit and resources for churches to launch their own ministries. This year, we are making an adjustment and adding an element we lacked last year - one that we believe will help more churches start teams and more projects get done.

We have been blessed with some very gifted volunteers but until now, have not organized them to act together. We are convinced that we can use volunteers more effectively for leadership roles on projects and in assisting in all aspects of running the ministry. The last couple months, we have been meeting with some faithful people that have been involved and committed to the vision of HRM and are now stepping up to use their time and expertise in critical focus areas. These areas include project site visits & leadership, networking to professional resources, fundraising, planning, supporting existing church teams, and ministry expansion into other areas of Metro Atlanta. We are currently calling the group The Core Team. It will act both as an advisory board and an implementation team.

If you're in Atlanta and you, or someone you know, have a heart for this kind of thing, please let me know. We think this is an excellent strategy to increase our impact and number of projects in 2013 from around 50 to 75 and the number of churches participating from 15 to 23.

The short version of our ministry's Mission Statement is "Repairing Homes and Hearts as Churches Serve Together". The second part of that statement is very important to us because we believe serving together (assuming common essential core beliefs) is a strategic way to advance the Kingdom. Why?

• Church teams begin to see each other serving in the community and realize they are not alone in their concerns. Relationships are established between teams.
• Church teams become “iron sharpening iron” (Proverbs 27:17), recognizing that each church has individual gifts that contribute to the whole Body.
• The community has the opportunity to observe what the followers of Jesus are doing to bless them, leading them to realize that the Church is an indispensible part of the community.
• Movements similar to Unite! are strengthened at a grass roots ministry level. Pastors and leaders pray and plan together to address other common concerns.
• Pastors are encouraged to connect with other pastors as they realize their Home Repair Teams are serving together.
• Combined church efforts reflect Christ more visibly than smaller, single church efforts.
• Working together reflects the unity we read about in Ephesians 4.

What about you? Do you have experience working across multiple churches and/or denominations? What has been your experience? If you've had some good successes, let us know and we'll share your story, if appropriate.

Today we finish the blog series on guidelines for a home repair ministry. While this is probably not an exhaustive list, it should help you understand the questions you will want to consider as you start or grow your team. It may also help you to understand the best size and scope of your ministry.

Did we miss anything or leave anything out? Want to add a question or issue we missed? Send us an email with additional questions that home repair ministries should consider.

To access to the full article (including information not present in the blog), you can get it at no cost by registering for the site.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Ogilvie - http://www.eyebrightdesign.co.uk/

XV) What tools should you have on hand?

Depending on the size and complexity of your ministry, you may want to maintain either a set of tools or rely upon the volunteers to bring their own. See blog for recommended tools to have available

XVI) How will you determine repair priorities?

The ministry should establish a protocol determining who is served first when there is a waiting list.

XVII) How will you evaluate the work performed by volunteers?

It is very helpful to consider what criteria you will use to evaluate the work done by your volunteers. How will you communicate with the homeowner to determine if their needs were met? See the document “Success indicators” under the Project Completion section for suggestions on how to evaluate your team’s work.

XVIII) What procedures will you have in place to respond to project emergencies?

Although most repair efforts involve limited risk, even using a ladder or fixing an element in a hot water heater can pose potential threats of harm or injury to volunteers or homeowners. By having emergency procedures in place, ministries can have a rapid response in the event of problems. At a minimum, ministries should maintain emergency contact telephone lists for all volunteers. Because some homes may not have working telephones, volunteers should be encouraged to carry a cell phone with them.

XIX) What will be your confidentiality standard?

Home repairs ministries should take special care to protect the confidentiality of homeowners. Regardless of the state of the home, gossip should never be tolerated in a Christian ministry. It is best to develop a written statement reminding volunteers of their obligation not to share private information about homeowners with others who do not have a need to know.

XX) How do you handle cases of suspected abuse or neglect?

Unfortunately, it may become apparent to volunteers that abuse or neglect is present in a home being repaired. Volunteers should be trained to spot signs of abuse and report their suspicions to the appropriate authorities.

See Part One    See Part Two

Today's blog continues the discussion on what questions your team should be asking when considering or starting a home repair team in your church. See Part One

We'll continue our look at some practical questions you and your team will want to consider to help you increase your ministry impact and avoid potential unpleasant surprises. To get access to the full article, you can get it at no cost by registering for the site.

IX) How will you find homeowners to serve?

Once you have identified who qualifies for services offered by the ministry (e.g. by age, income etc.), you will need to connect with homeowners in need.

X) How will the homeowner be screened?

Defining a process and methodology will help you ensure that each applicant is qualified and that your team can handle the scope of the job.

XI) Who will assess the home repair request?

It is helpful, when a request comes in, to have a preliminary assessment done by a member of your team. This will help guide your decision and next action steps.

XII) How will you track requests and their resolution?

Having a process or plan will help you to make sure requests are finished and also allow you to show your team's impact on the church and/or community.

XIII) Who will pay for the cost of repairs?

Generally, volunteers should not be expected to pay for the cost of repairs. That being the case, who and how will these projects be paid for? We have a blog article focused on this topic - So, how exactly do we pay for this? The website also has additional information on this topic for registrants.

XIV) What building professionals are available if needed for help and/or advice?

It is a good idea to create and maintain a list of building professionals who are available to provide free or reduced price advice on particular home repair requests.

The third and final blog in this series will be released next Monday, December 17.

Made a decision to start a home repair ministry in your church? Investigating what it takes to start one? Whichever phase you are in, here are some questions that you need to be asking as you prepare to get started.

I) Who will you serve?

For example, will you focus on your congregation? Senior citizens? Single mothers? Those with disabilities? The economically poor? Anyone who asks for assistance?

What types of minor home repairs will you perform?

II) When and how often will home repair work be done?

Home repair ministries use a variety of work models, ranging from one weekend per year, once a month, every weekend, to whenever it is convenient for the volunteers and homeowner.

III) Who will lead the program and what organizational structure will you use?

Your ministry will need to determine the leadership and organization of your home repairs team, including how you will report and work with your church’s staff and ministry structure.

IV) How will you recruit volunteers?

You will need to have a plan and process to recruit your ministry’s volunteers.

V) How will you screen volunteers?

To ensure that volunteers have the level of skill required for particular tasks and to protect your ministry, church and the homeowner, you should have a process for volunteers to be screened.

VI) How will volunteers be oriented to the ministry?

Although volunteers will typically come with a certain set of skills, training them is an important part of developing an Outreach ministry.

VII) How will you keep track of your volunteers and their skills?

To best use your resource and know what projects to take, you need to know how many volunteers you have, their skills and their availabilities.

VIII) How will you communicate to volunteers the liability attached to their service?

If your church is not covering personal injuries resulting from someone’s participation in a home repairs ministry, you will need to have a clear policy and communicate that policy with your home repairs ministries volunteers.

For more questions and guidelines to ask when forming or considering your home repair ministry, stay tuned for part two next Monday 12/10. For more detail on these guidelines, please sign up for our ministry resources (no charge).

Once your home repair team is taking projects it is important to have criteria by which you can make a "go/no go" decision.

It is generally good practice not to make a snap decision on helping if there is any doubt. Get back to the team and talk about it. Make a visit or even multiple visits to the site with more people, if questions remain. It is easy to tell the homeowner that you need to present the information to the team so that they can make a decision.

Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. It could be as simple as sending a father and son to change the flush mechanism of a leaky toilet. It may not even be necessary to make a pre-project site visit. Let the person visiting the site evaluate and complete a project if possible.

What criteria will be used to evaluate a project and Go/No Go?

Projects should be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Size: Is it feasible for the team to tackle the project in terms of time and people needed?

• Safety: Can you do the project without putting the homeowner, ministry, or volunteers at risk?

• Skills Required: Does the team have the skills required to complete the project? You can run off your volunteers if you give them projects that they don't know how to handle.

• Repair or Improvement: If the project is deemed a repair, it is eligible for volunteer assistance. If an improvement, unless it is absolutely necessary, it automatically becomes a referral to a professional. The exception to this is when an improvement is necessary because of a specific, critical situation (i.e. handicapped ramps). Sometimes special projects (playgrounds, fences) are considered if they make the home more “livable” for adults or children.

• Financial Situation: While the ministry does not have rigid income requirements for assistance, the financial situation of the homeowner is considered. If the homeowner is struggling financially, then help may be offered based on assistance from a financial ministry.

Let's take a look at some of your possible success indicators to help you measure both Project work and your overall Ministry effectiveness.

Here are some key areas to review to gauge project success and identify areas for ministry improvement. Remember to follow-up with the client for their input:

• The quality and completion of the work
• The appropriate clean up was completed
• The client was personally satisfied with the work
• The client’s spiritual needs were addressed
• The client’s desire for prayer and contact with a local church were addressed
• The project documentation was complete and filed for historical reference

What are the success indicators for your Ministry?

• Number of projects completed by the team per month/year
• Number of volunteers involved in the course of a month/year
• Client's connected with local churches through the ministry experience. (This can be hard to quantify.)
• Number of clients that were followed up within a month/six months to determine additional needs
• Number of joint projects that occurred with other church teams or ministries.

If someone were to ask you about the most critical resources that you need to carry out your ministry (or if you are considering starting a ministry), what would you answer? Would it be:

• A place to meet and organize
• A strong, engaged leader
• Money to carry out your mission
• Time

We know that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the heart of any Christian ministry. But did you ever think about your volunteers being the life-giving blood cells carrying the oxygen (i.e. your ministry service) to where it needs to go? Are you pouring time and effort into your ministries' volunteers?

Whatever your particular ministry is (our is home repairs ministry), volunteer management and relationship building will be one of the key factors in your ministries' success and longevity. It is difficult to succeed if you are not recruiting, engaging, training and following-up with your volunteers in a systematic way.  Here are six suggestions for managing and growing your volunteers and improving your ministry impact.

1)      Screen your volunteers – This may seem like a strange thing to feature in a section on volunteer management, but it is a critical step for ministries focused on outreach and interacting with clients. Perform a background check and protect your clients AND the volunteer. Screen for potential problems on the up-front and save yourself and your volunteers from potential trouble.

2)      Keep track of your volunteers' skills in a database – For a ministry that is very multi-faceted like ours it is important to know what your volunteers' skills are and what kinds of jobs they can and cannot do. The church presents a wonderful diversity of giftedness. As Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians (4:16) - From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (NIV – emphasis mine). Knowing the skills of your volunteers gives you a chance to put them in projects where they can succeed. Remember to have your volunteers give you their schedule for service (when and how often) and honor it. By the way, we have a volunteer spreadsheet that we have used that your welcome to use if you sign up as a Ministry Partner .

Photo courtesy of Cristian Galletti (http://about.me/cgalletti)

3)      Train your volunteers and onboard them – Whatever your volunteer's skills are, they should be familiarized with how your ministry operates, what support they can expect from leadership, your program history, etc. Give them the information that they need to be productive and to determine if your ministry is the right one for them. Better to find these things out early and get the right people involved and not just warm bodies (although with creativity you can have unskilled laborers – of which I include myself - involved in cleaning up, setting up and feeding the other volunteers). If your ministry is not a fit then there certainly is another ministry home for the volunteer. Regardless of your volunteer's skill set, leave jobs with a significant potential for injury (i.e. the use of high ladders) to professionals.

4)      Recommend liability insurance if your ministry carries injury risk – Just like at home, injuries can occur when volunteering with a home repair ministry. Falling off ladders, tripping over cords and wires, and other injuries do happen to volunteers. If your volunteers are not covered for personal injuries, it is strongly advised that you clearly explain the necessity of carrying personal liability insurance prior to engaging in any home repair efforts. It is the obligation of a home repairs ministry to notify volunteers of the lack of personal liability coverage. To protect your ministry you should also have your volunteers sign a legal waiver form.

5)      Do not take on jobs that you lack the volunteer skills for (or lack the manpower to do the job quickly) – We try to never take on a project that takes more than one or two days. Long projects tend to sap the strength and morale of your team.

6)      Follow-up with your volunteers – Ask them if their skills are being utilized correctly. See if there are other roles that the volunteer might want to take on or learn. Look for opportunities to move volunteers into a leadership position (as appropriate). As with paying jobs the potential for leadership and/or growth can motivate your volunteers to stick with you.

By taking the time to help your volunteers thrive and succeed you will ultimately encourage them to stick with you for the long haul and help your ministry serve with excellence.

A great way to multiply your impact, whether you are an Outreach Ministry, Mercy Ministry, or other Non-Profit organization, is to build service networks with other community service non-profits. Find logical synergies with other organizations or find needs that they have to help more people in the area. You can take several approaches, such as directly partnering with the other agency or using your organization's skills or services to supplement their offerings. The Foundation Center's National Collaboration Database - collaboration.foundationcenter.org/ - is a good resource for additional ideas for partnering opportunities. Some of these include sharing space, combining marketing efforts and sharing staff.

Here are potential scenarios to illustrate some of the opportunities you might want to pursue. Say, for example, you have a home repairs ministry like ours. If you poke around enough, you can probably find a co-op or food pantry that needs help with repairs. Or maybe you can make a strategic investment and help them convert some unused space into a thrift store. That helps the co-op raise more money and provides low-income homeowners, some of whom may also be your clients, necessary and affordable goods. Another options is to help a non-profit with storage space. Giving an organization a way to store more supplies (such as cans of food for a food pantry or clothing storage for a homeless services organization) is a terrific way to help them serve more people.

What if you have a car repair ministry or non-profit organization? How about providing oil changes for those driving to the food bank to pick up food for the week? Now your partnership is adding to the service value chain for your constituency. You'd be surprised at how valuable even a small non-profit can be when they are strategic about extending their reach. Are you starting to see the potential here?

In addition to the satisfaction of helping more people and living out your organization's vision, there are some practical benefits to partnering with community non-profits as well. While you're growing your service footprint in the community, you are also building trust with a valuable network of community partners. If a client comes into their establishment or they get a referral with a need that your ministry can provide, guess who they are going to call? And that works both ways. If someone you are helping needs additional help that one of your partners can provide, you just built a deeper relationship with and provided more help for your client.

Before you undertake any projects, make sure to check with your Board of Directors to make sure that they are in alignment with your vision for extending your non-profit. Despite the best of intentions, it may turn out that it doesn't make sense for you to take up some or all of the partnerships that are described here. But if there is a strategic fit, your only limit on multiplying your impact is your imagination and the time you have to apply to the endeavor.

In the first blog in this series we looked at some scriptural bases for mercy and generosity. Today we'll look at some practical applications.

So what does open-handedness mean look like? Its certainly a call to radical generosity. Does it mean dumping an emergency fund and selling my house to put it all into the offering plate or hand it out to the poor, trusting that someone else will provide for my kids? Or could it mean that I adopt an attitude that says, “Why wouldn’t I help this person if I can?”. I have tried to stop when I come face-to-face with an opportunity and in my heart ask, “Lord, what do you want me to do here?”.  When I throw up little “arrow prayers” and just be quiet for a moment, it amazes me how often I’m sure of what to do next.  And it isn’t always to help, because that is not always going to be ultimately beneficial to the recipient.  Just don’t be, as Dr. John Perkins tells it, like the rich man who got tired of running into Lazarus all of the time (blocking his driveway?), so he moved to the suburbs to avoid the problem.

One way to pass along the love of Jesus is to serve someone who needs you and can give nothing back in return.  Give a gift of one of the most precious assets God gives us - time.  If you’re a tool guy (or gal) and serve someone by fixing their house, you feel the smile of God.  So be intentional.  Find someone who needs you, and take others along with you.

When you initiate a project like that, what you’ve just done, whether you realize it or not, is start a ministry. Specifically, a rudimentary Home Repairs Team. Did you know that starting a ministry could be that simple?  Maybe God is calling you to lead a team when you’d rather strap on your tool belt. Your greater service may be to sacrifice the satisfaction of doing the actual work and organize and multiply your ministry to help even more people.

That is what Home Repairs Ministries is all about - being intentional about using what God gave you.