Why Planning Center Admin is Actually Pastoral Care w/ Teel Merrick

Yeah, I love the idea of it really there has to be both.

So if you're more of an admin bent and you're in this role, you have to get better at the pastoring side.

And if you're like, I just want to be with people, I don't really care about.

Well, there is a pastoral side, from my perspective, to the admin side, because and maybe your people don't know this is what you're doing.

But I tend to approach the rhythms and the systems for a team in a pastoral mindset, thinking this is a way back to what you were saying when you were the person on the team who didn't get the songs or they changed.

It's a way to take care of your team.

It's a way to build trust with your team.

It's a way to love your team on a Monday to make sure they know what they're doing this coming week.

So can you talk about the importance of the systems? And whether somebody comes to you and asks for help or not, like for me, it still needs to be done, right? Can you talk about the importance of those systems and what that does for a team?

Yeah, so a little shameless plug.

If you want help with your systems, I have a free resource on my site, tealmeric.com. You can go there.

There's tons of free resources, but there's a resource in there that I developed called the Volunteer Triangle, and this was like the best way for me to try and like – Put it into words or put it on paper what it is that a volunteer needs.

Like there's a lot of things that a volunteer needs when it comes to relationships and their relationship with the Lord and all those kinds of things, community.

But when it comes to like the task of you've been scheduled on the weekend, what does somebody need? And there's three sides to the triangle.

There's resources, there's information, and there's expectations.

And providing all three of those things gives you a volunteer that is completely equipped and ready to walk in and do the exact thing that they need.

So information is like who, what, where, why, when.

It's basic stuff that for us, if we've been in the system, in the ecosystem of worship or at our church, these are all things that we sometimes assume that people understand.

But it's If I have questions, who do I talk to? What are you asking me to do this weekend? Who am I gonna be serving with? When do I need to be there? When can I leave? Why do you need me? And those are all things that like, if you will take the time and write down who, what, where, why, when, and again, you can go get the resource and it'll walk you through the entire process.

But if you answering those questions helps to provide information up front to volunteers, because clarity always creates confidence.

So if people know and they understand what they're supposed to do, who they're going to be with, why they're doing it, when all those kinds of things, they walk into service, they walk into any room that they're in, confident, ready to go.

So that's the that's the information component resources is like, all charts, MP3s, arrangements, files, rehearsal mix, all of that kind of stuff.

So that's that component where it's like, I need to make sure that whatever's going to be on Planning Center needs to be consistent across all songs.

So if they open up a four song set for the weekend and one song has two files and another song has 25 files, it just needs to be consistent.

Whatever it is, you lock in the thing that you want or really it's not what you want, it's what the volunteers need in order to do their job well.