At Safe Ministry Check, we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of having a safe culture; a community where safe church principles are valued by everyone. One of the reasons we have training for church members is because we think it’s so valuable that you have your whole church on your safe ministry team; not just us, but your insurer as well.
But trying to get everyone in your church to do their Member Awareness Training can be a difficult task to accomplish, especially when you might be trying to get them to do it as individuals.
But here are some ideas about how you could get your whole church to do their member awareness training.
A Big Sunday
Big Sundays are fantastic. Gathering your whole church together to sing, hear from the Bible, and enjoy each others company is a fantastic opportunity in and of itself. One of the ideas that we’ve seen attempted (with successful outcomes) was having the whole church do their Member Awareness training as part of their Big Sunday. They took our blog post on doing it as a small group and expanded it for their whole church.
Not only did it mean that their whole church had done the training, but it helped them set a culture of taking safe ministry seriously in their church. It sent a big message that they took 30 minutes of one of the biggest events in their calendar to make sure everyone was on the same page about safe ministry.
Small Group Ministry
As mentioned above, we have a blog post on how to run member awareness training as a small group. Having the member awareness training slotted in to your yearly schedules is a great way to make sure your whole church is getting on board.
Just like with Big Sundays, this is a great way to show your church the importance of Safe Ministry in your church and small groups. Taking the time out of something important to do something else always shows that you find it a priority. It will also mean that your groups can enjoy doing it as a smaller cohort of your overall church community.
Accountability
Sometimes we’d love to see things happen but don’t ever really do much about it. We might really want to see people doing their member awareness training, but never speak to them about it, or hope they’ll do it off their own back.
We know that for most churches, this isn’t the case, but if it is your situation, it might be worth thinking about ways you can hold people accountable to doing the training. Maybe having a rolling list of people to check in with each week, or sending an email when you’re working through the pending and error people on your trainee list.
The other thing you can do while you’re holding people accountable is remind them that the members awareness course will take less than half an hour.
Food
While this could fit into the categories mentioned above, putting on a meal or an afternoon tea to have people do the training together can always be an incentive. Mix that with the fact that training will take less than half an hour, and you’ve got a party. Running a Saturday BBQ for your church to do training might be the way to help your church community grow in their relationships with each other, as well as giving them an opportunity to finish their training. And when each video goes for less than 5 minutes, you might even try to break it up with different courses (entree, main, desert, supper, etc.)
Have an idea for how you’ll do your member awareness training? Let us know and we’ll see if we can offer you any support.