Rota and Ministry Updates - RED version

I’ve had a quick look at our rotas and ministries:

The current naming convention is well-established and works, but a few rotas have strayed from it.

The naming convention for ministries and rotas needs to be: [Service Name or mid-week ministry name] [Area of service] [Time Period that the rota covers]

for example: 09.30 Refreshments Jan-Apr 2019 (or Spring 2019) or Storehouse - Thursday Jan to Apr 2019 or Alpha Catering Spring 2019

We generally run our rotas 3 times a year - Jan to Apr / May to Aug / Sep to Dec - if you have a rota that isn’t going to change for an entire year, feel free to run it once a year for the whole year.

I know you’ve immediately thought of a simpler way that will work - I’ve thought about it longer and how it ties into all of our other ministries and the system itself, but happy to chat if you have a compelling reason to change all of them (I LIKE change! ;-).

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Rota and Ministry Updates - YELLOW and GREEN version

I’ve been looking at our rotas from a housekeeping point-of-view. It’s pretty amazing that it’s mostly in tact and you’ve been doing a great job in keeping rotas and ministries running.

We use great systems like ChurchSuite because we love the people we work with and the Kingdom we’re extending and of course, the King we serve and we want to spend more time doing people-stuff and less time doing admin stuff if we don’t have to.

As you hopefully know, we’re on an exciting journey into the world of multi-site. The biggest change for us is the way we think about structure and systems.

The good news is that the way we set up our rotas on ChurchSuite seems to be a good fit for it’s continued use when we switch to Multi-site administration. The thing we need to do is to more intentionally tighten up the way we use it, so that we all use it in the same way and it continues to be scalable (meaning that you don’t need to re-invent a new system every time we grow - which sounds like a pretty awesome way to do things if you’re asking me).

A few of our rotas have broken with our (admittedly loosely-formed) naming convention for ministries and rotas. This is not necessarily your fault, but rather that we’ve not all clearly set this stone together, hence this little write-up.

I really don’t want to see your abounding creativity stifled when setting up your rotas (the “Green Turtles Loss of Habitat Healing Ministry on Tuesdays” sounds like a tragically fun thing to be part of, but will make finding it amongst our 6 other sites-with-equally-whacky-rota-names a lot less fun.

SO …

May I propose that we formalise our ministry and rota naming convention to something like this (minor changes allowable, but not to the order or sections):
[Name of Service or Mid-week and none-service-related ministry name] - for example: 09.15 or Alpha or Vibe by Night (Youth - Vibe by Night may be better) or The Gathering (or 18.30 would be even better)

Followed by:
[Area of service or Day] - for example: Refreshments or Car Parking or Storehouse - Thursday or Alpha

Followed by:
[Time period covered by Rota] - for example: Jan-Apr 2019 or Spring 2019 or January to April 2019 or something clearly indicating the time period of the rota.

The full rota may have a name like:
11.15am Refreshments (Jan to Apr 2019)
or
Storehouse - Saturday (Spring 2019)
or
Youth - Vibe by Night (January - April 2019)
or
09.30 Youth - Vibe (Jan-Apr 2019)

We generally run our rotas 3 times a year - Jan to Apr / May to Aug / Sep to Dec - if you have a rota that isn’t going to change for an entire year, feel free to run it once a year for the whole year. If you let your rota run to the very end without running the next one, your team will only appear in report as being on a rota up to the last time they appear on an active rota and they will cease to see any rota information for their rota once their last “shift” has passed on the active rota.

{Blues - feel free to jump back to here to continue reading

If you’re not sure or basically think this is all over-the-top and want someone to just tell you the answer, please talk to me and I would be DELIGHTED to help!

Rota and Ministry Updates - BLUE version

We’re on a journey into multi-site - I know you want a full breakdown of what exactly that means, but sadly that is beyond the scope of this little piece. You may talk at length about it another time as it’s fairly important to understand. I’m pointing out what I think is best practice when setting up rotas and ministries on ChurchSuite in a way that liberates us from having to “re-invent the wheel” each time we grow or plant a new site etc.

Start by reading above from here.

The most critical element of the name is the first bit - it should be the primary thing that the rota has to do with - either a Service name, a Ministry name (not a Sunday serving team ministry name, which would come second).

Why am I even mentioning this? Well, a few rotas are not in line with our loosely defined naming convention, so we’re formalising it now to keep it scalable.

There is plenty of great info on the practicalities of setting up a ministry and managing rotas on ChurchSuite here, but it won’t necessarily give the detail on how we will name things - just the detail on how to create and run rotas. It is very helpful though, as are all their support articles.

You may have questions - let me know and I can try answer them for you. You may have suggestions on improving - I welcome it! Let me know and we can implement any improvements.