New Volunteer Training Portal
One of the most dynamic and fluid areas of the ministry is all we are doing to train and prepare volunteers for sharing the Gospel online. When the ministry first started over two decades ago, the focus was phone calls and different ways to share the Gospel. As technology and culture have changed, we now talk with seekers through phone calls, online chats and text messages. We also see a much greater percentage of people wanting to discuss their life issues before wanting to hear or talk about how Jesus fits into their life.
Today a single volunteer spending a few hours online can easily encounter conversations with people from different religions or with no belief in God. Additionally, they may speak with people struggling with pornography, addiction, divorce, homosexuality, gender/sexuality and self-harm issues. This rapidly changing landscape means we have to continually offer volunteers more training, resources and tools to prepare for these conversations and put them into a place where we can faithfully share the Gospel.
In recent years, the ministry has seen the Volunteer Training Manual more than double in size and the number of topical articles, videos and other resources grow at a similar rate. We realized that we needed a single place where volunteers could easily access all this information in an organized manner. We now have such a place in the new Volunteer Training Portal. This web site contains the volunteer manual along with training articles and videos and links to all our church databases. It also has an outline of all the ministry reading plans with live links to each one along with a list of the referral organizations (such as the National Suicide Prevention Line) where we may need to send special cases.
Our goal was to have a single place for all training materials so no one would have to hunt through old emails and different files on their computer to find the right resource. Now volunteers have everything they need simply organized and always available to them in one main location. We would love to help you overcome those fears of sharing with others and become one of the many valuable volunteers that partner with us and allow this ministry to bring the Good News to the world. You can find more information about how to volunteer on needhim.org.
