You’re not in ministry if you haven’t had last-minute volunteer call-offs and difficult conversations. I feel like problems usually pop up right before or right after I preach. Isn’t that funny? I find that when things are going well in ministry, I start wondering, “All right, what’s coming? Where’s the shoe going to drop?” It’s like you can get that little bit of that hesitation or anticipation because that’s just how life is. The tension, the goal of every leader is we want to get people to a certain place, and leadership is managing the gap in between where we are and where we need to go. Today, I want to talk about practical ways that you can get your volunteers on board with change in your church, your ministry, and maybe even your business. I hope it will be helpful to you.
I want to start by saying even if, when you look at your team or staff, it feels like a hot mess sometimes, remember that without oxen, the stall is clean. Some of the mess that’s in your ministry is proof positive that you’re doing the work. So, way to go! Congratulations! Today’s problems are the answer to yesterday’s prayers. I tell young married couples, “You prayed for some of these problems. That crying baby next to you, you need to remind yourself, ‘I prayed for that problem. There were many sleepless nights I prayed for God to bless us with a baby, and now I’m being blessed with crying and colic, and it’s beautiful.” There’s a lot of spiritual babies on our teams, and we prayed for those problems. What an honor that God would trust us to help develop and mature people.
- Growing teams have growing leaders. I’ve learned that God will trust me with great people as I continue to grow. If I’m being honest, I’ve had some great volunteers over the last 20 years that are no longer with us, not because they were bad people or because they didn’t love Jesus but because they outgrew me.
I was pretty good with recruiting and getting people to give me a yes to volunteering because persuasion is a strength for most visionaries, but I was recruiting them to a low-capacity team. If you could recruit a high-capacity volunteer to a low-capacity leader or team, or into an unhealthy culture or system, it creates a ticking time bomb. Their willingness quickly expires. My mission had to become continually increasing my capacity so that I didn’t become the lid to in our church or teams.
I want you to ask yourself: How do I increase my capacity? Every time God has increased my capacity, He’s expanded my circle with new people that are leading the way I want to lead. Their ministry, their personal habits, all of those practices are where I want to be. If, as a leader, I can commit to being a lifelong learner, I will grow my capacity.
- Shift the way you view your volunteers. Most leaders, especially pastors, know where they’re headed. But what tripped me up the most was how I viewed my volunteers. I would never say this out loud, but maybe for the first decade and a half of my ministry I viewed my volunteers as a means to an end. I didn’t use them and chew them up and spit them out. I cared about them, but I was very concerned about filling the Planning Center roster. I was very concerned about our needs as a ministry being met, and a lot of times I wasn’t asking my volunteers, “What do you need? How can I help you?” I wasn’t thinking how we could grow big people and love them to a better place. Now, that’s one of our core values: leaving people and things better than we found them.
- We cannot coach where we haven’t cultivated. This is just an encouragement, if your volunteers aren’t a means to an end, then how can you better invest in them? If the only time they’re hearing from you is when you send them the Planning Center dates, that’s probably not going to be a great relationship. With any relationship, if the only time you hear from someone is when they need something, it won’t go well. So be intentional about communicating outside the need and finding out where they are and what they need to thrive in their personal lives and in their volunteer capacities.
- We cannot make withdrawals from an account where we haven’t deposited. Have you ever had to give a corrective conversation or redirect a volunteer or staff member and you didn’t have relationship with them? I mean, it’s almost destined to fail. We can’t make withdrawals from an account we haven’t deposited in. Your ministry can only move at the speed of your relationships. So where are some strategic moments weekly, monthly, and annually that you’re using to connect with your volunteers relationally, with no other agenda? The cool thing is that if we’ll begin to build relationship like this, in the moments when we do have to correct or redirect or have tough conversations, we’ll have a relational equity to work with, and they’ll be more willing to go where I’m inviting them to go.
- Our team isn’t worth joining if we don’t have a vision worth following. People don’t respond to need alone; they respond to vision. Imagine that I’m a children’s pastor at a growing church. There’s a ton of new families. We need to add people to our kids teams. What if I got up on stage and said, “You know, the kids are winning back there. There’s more kids than there are adults. And I know you guys are really busy, and I know you’re with kids all week long, and it’s a lot to ask, but I would love if you could just pray about giving us one day a month…” That’s one way I could try to recruit volunteers. But what if instead I got up there and said, “When I was a kid, there was a lady named Sue who served in our nursery. Actually, Sue still serves there 40 years later. Every time Sue sees me, she tells me she loves me and reminds me she used to change my diapers, which is a little awkward. But Sue is on a list of the people that have impacted my life. She’s in the top 10 with my parents. I’m inviting you to be a part of someone else’s story like Sue is in mine because you’re not just changing diapers; you’re changing lives.” Which method do you think people will respond to? Needs alone don’t move the needle. But vision is a great motivator.
There’s a book by Michael LeBoeuf called How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life. It offers some parallels for volunteering in the church, but it’s a list of why customers quit by the percentages. 1% die. You can’t buy if you’re not among the living. 3% move away. People move away because of military or because they have family or a job opportunity somewhere else. 5% have other friendships. In other words, a relationship pulls them somewhere else, even out of your church. 9% go with the competition. So in this case, we’ll just say 9% choose another church in town to serve. 14% are dissatisfied with the product. They had a bad experience with you or your team. But get this: 68% of customers quit because of an attitude of indifference toward the product. In other words, it really just didn’t even make a difference in their lives. Wow!
You know, no one was ever indifferent to Jesus. You know how He recruited people? It was pretty straightforward. He just said, “Come, follow Me.” So how can we invite people to follow us in a similar manner?
Be Intentional: If we’re going to call people to follow us as we follow Jesus, if we’re going to build growing teams, we’ve got to be intentional. There’s so much less face-to face interaction in relationships nowadays. I have made the mistake of trying to recruit people through text, and I got what I asked for. If it’s easy to say yes, I’ll still send a text. But I’m making it easy for them to quit someday because it was a pretty low entry and there was little vision attached to it. Today, I challenge my leaders to take people out for coffee or lunch. If you’re going to find someone you want to find someone who will invest the next several years of their life into your ministry, it’s worth a half-hour or hour meeting.
Be Clear: Some of my biggest ministry mistakes came from my lack of clarity. I thought I was so clear, and then we end up running into problems on these teams, and I realized, “Wow. I never wrote anything down. I was counting on them getting all of it verbally.” Or I wrote it down, but I never explained it, and they thought I meant this when I meant that. Clarity is charity. Ask yourself: am I being clear with the people that I’m leading?
Make No Apologies: Don’t ask small or you’ll get small commitments. A lot of times we talk people out of volunteering in our invitation to volunteer. We might say, “I know you’re really busy and life is crazy. I’d love if you’d just pray about this once-a-month volunteer opportunity, but I know life’s busy.” So we get a once-a-month volunteer, and then they get sick one month, and then they aren’t at church the next time, and before you know it, three months have gone by and they haven’t served yet. What if we ask instead, “Hey, come give your life to this thing.” That’s what Jesus said. Jesus was really clear on the cost of following Him.
Define Expectations: Don’t cut deals. Don’t allow certain volunteers to live by one standard and other volunteers to live by another because they’re all watching. That’s not to say we can’t have shallow and deep ends to the pool. For instance, our worship team is swimming in the deep. We want them to live holy lives in public and private. But a door greeter or guest service volunteer is our shallow end, where the newly saved can put their faith floaties on and hang out with more mature believers while making a difference.
- Once you have volunteers, you have to empower them. Take a look at John 4:1-2. Jesus was in the early part of His ministry at this time, and He was already giving His ministry away. Jesus knew that ministry is too important not to multiply it. Now, there will be moments of tension. Your volunteers are going to make mistakes. They’re trying to figure things out. But you have to trust that even if your volunteers don’t do it as well as you do, it’s worth empowering them and giving them the space to learn and grow.
The reason most leaders never graduate from addition to multiplication is because they fear trusting other people and empowering them. John Maxwell says if someone else can do the task 80% as well as you can, delegate it. It’s a little bit scary, but I’ve noticed a lot of growth in our teams when I delegate. I could do it all by myself, and sometimes it would be done even a little bit better, but by empowering my volunteers, I can help them grow. If they’re a 6 out of 10 naturally, I can probably help them grow to a 9 out of 10 with some reps and consistency, and then it will multiply our impact!
Pastor, the greatest catalyst to multiplication in your ministry is you praying for your ministry. Put the faces of the people who are on your team and who you’re considering asking to join your team on a board in your office. Cover them in prayer. Ask them, “How can I pray for you this week? What do you need? How can I serve you better?” And then follow through. Move as the Holy Spirit leads you. Invite those you feel a connection growing with to serve, and have confidence that your team and your ministry will grow.
This blog was created using content from the webinar Increasing Volunteer Teams: How to Build, Empower, and Inspire Your Teams.
