How Your Church Can Quit the Moving Business without Guilt

Sharing is caring!

Over the years, I’ve often asked the men in my workshops how many of them have helped someone in their church move. Well over ninety percent raise their hands, often groaning and nodding as they do. Then I joke about how they didn’t know it, but when they joined their church, they were really joining a front for a moving company.

I worked for North American Van Lines moving households while I was in seminary. At the point of origin, we would pack an entire semi truck with a family’s furniture and all the rest of their earthly belongings and then unpack it at the destination. Every job was a massive workout. I probably had the best “six pack” of any seminary student in the country.

Then I became a pastor and guess what? It soon became clear that I was still in the moving business. My job description didn’t mention it, but it was an unspoken expectation that if someone in the congregation was moving, it was my responsibility to wrangle up some guys to do the move. It was time consuming, exhausting and very unrewarding. Why so unrewarding? Because almost inevitably the household we were helping was moving away. Often, we never saw them again.

Helping church members move was also unrewarding in another way. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by expending so much volunteer time and energy on moves, we were neglecting genuinely pressing needs in our congregation. I had made the mistake of confusing a need with a pressing need.

I realized later in my ministry that a pressing need is a situation where there is immediate danger to life or property. Someone needing help with a move has a genuine need, but not a pressing need. Church members who want other church members to come over and help them move are simply wanting to save money on labor. And while that might be a nice thing for the church to do, helping someone save money on labor is not a purpose of the church. Helping someone in distress is a purpose of the church.

In order to focus all of its volunteer resources on the genuinely pressing needs in its midst, the church needs to develop some backbone and learn to say no to non-pressing needs such as requests for help with moves. One way to do this politely is to refer the request out. I recommend the church use two resources for referring out requests for moves.

The first resource is a website called MovingHelp.com. It’s sponsored by U-Haul. I’ve used this service several times and I highly recommend it. On the website, you enter a few details about your move and receive several estimates from moving companies who provide two men working 4 hours. You choose the company. The site gives you a code. At the end of the move, you give the men the code and they go online and get paid.

The second resource is your church’s youth group. Ask your youth pastor if the youth group would be willing to help with moves as a way to raise funds for a youth project, say a youth missions trip. Then arrange for the youth in your church to help with a move when that type of request is made.

With these two simple resources you can free the men in your church to do the genuinely good work they were saved to do: bring the church to the point where it can say, “There is no needy person among us.”

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

_______________________________________________________________

Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

_______________________________________________________________