July 9, 2025 • 47 mins
This week on The Church Revitalization Podcast, Scott Ball and AJ Mathieu dive deep into one of church leadership’s most sensitive questions: Can you—should you—ever fire a volunteer? From ethical violations to mismatched roles, we break down why letting a volunteer go may be necessary (and how you can do it well, with grace and clarity). Discover proactive strategies to avoid these tough situations in the first place and learn how to create a thriving, healthy volunteer culture in your church.
Hosted by Scott Ball and AJ Mathieu of the Malphurs Group, The Church Revitalization Podcast tackles real-world leadership challenges to help churches grow stronger and healthier. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or new to ministry, Scott and AJ offer practical advice, proven tools, and plenty of encouragement for every church context.
In this episode, we cover:
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The ethical, spiritual, and practical reasons you might need to let a volunteer go
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How to prevent most firings with good systems and culture
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Steps for having hard conversations with struggling volunteers
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Healthy onboarding and offboarding practices to support your teams
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What to do in extreme cases, including legal and church discipline scenarios
Links & Resources:
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Get access to the Healthy Churches Toolkit: healthychurchestoolkit.com – Free 7-day trial!
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Connect with us: malphursgroup.com, Facebook, Twitter
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Dive into more episodes and resources on church volunteer management
Got stories or questions about managing volunteers? Comment below or message us—your wins and horror stories help us serve church leaders even better!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Can you really fire a volunteer at church? Let's get into that
now on the Church Revitalization Podcast. Hello and
welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast brought to you by
the Malphurs. Group team, where each week we tackle. Important
actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now
here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. matthew.
(00:25):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and co host, AJ AJ Mathieu.
AJ Today we're talking about a difficult
topic, and that is firing
volunteers. I think some people might even
react to that and go, they're volunteers.
(00:48):
You can't fire them. They're helping you out. They're pitching in. You
can't let them go. And the reality is that in fact,
you can. You, you can fire a volunteer and sometimes
you should. And we will eventually get to
the how on doing this. But before we do, we're going to
also explore why you might need to and how
(01:10):
you can prevent the problem in the first place.
But then I promise we will eventually get to how to do it
if you actually need to do that. But
before we dive into all of that, I want to mention the Healthy
Churches toolkit. Go to healthychurchestoolkit.com
Sign up free for seven days. There's all kinds of things in there to help
(01:32):
you manage your volunteer teams and get people aligned
and in the right spot. Because spoiler, spoiler alert. That's one of the
reasons why we have to let people go is because maybe they're not in the
right place in the first place. And you can prevent that by getting them
connected to something that aligns with their divine design. We, we went
through this in our most recent workshop. In the
(01:53):
Toolkit, we've created a divine design tool that helps
people understand how they are wired and giving,
gives them suggestions on positions that might align well with their
gifting. And you can play around with that and check it
out@healthychurchestoolkit.com free for seven days.
Yeah, do that. So we're taking this up a. Not Scott,
(02:15):
because we've mentioned, we've talked before about evaluating
volunteers and that already gets people like, oh, I
know that's that sounds like a bad idea. And now we're like,
we're taking that to the next level and actually talking
about removing a volunteer from a serving position.
So, and I know people, people aren't saying no. There's 100% of the
(02:38):
time never a way or a case for this. Everybody probably
agrees, yes, there are like these extreme
situations in which we would do that. Right. And we'll talk about that here in
just. Just here in a second as kind of set up our
first. First part of today's episode
on why you might need to let a volunteer go. So, yeah,
(02:59):
I think we all agree on the extreme situation, so
let's kind of dive into these. Scott, first of all, ethical violations.
Yeah, I think nobody's going to push back on that. Maybe.
Maybe one or two of you. Probably not.
But, yeah, if we're dealing with areas in which
breaches of trust have become a problem,
(03:22):
confidentiality, moral failures,
unfortunately happen too often in the church.
Some of these, you know, end up making news headlines. But.
Yeah, yeah, well, and also in this
category, I think, although, I don't know,
(03:42):
I. I want to be sensitive. Sensitive to the fact that there can
be situations, but if someone's in the middle of going through a
divorce, even if it's not their fault, like their spouse cheated on them
or something like that, you know, probably
serving is not the thing they need to be doing right now. Not even because
they're the one at fault, but because if there's a chance for them to
(04:04):
salvage their marriage or, you
know, that might be a better use of their time
than having them up singing on stage.
So that's some. Not. I wouldn't even call that firing as much as just giving
space for a pause and saying, hey, yeah, let's.
I wouldn't even call that a firing. But sometimes approaching someone and
(04:26):
going, hey, I don't want you to feel the pressure. You're going through this traumatic
event. Do not feel the pressure to
be volunteering right now when you need to navigate this difficult life
situation. So I wouldn't even put that in the category of firing. But
sometimes, I mean, I'd be. You'd be surprised. There are some churches that just plow
on through, letting people continue to volunteer even though
(04:48):
someone's going through the most traumatic experience
of their life. Now, if it is their fault,
they're the one who did something, then, then, then that maybe falls into the firing
category. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
That's. That's, that is something to keep in mind. How.
I mean, that. That kind of falls under just having good
(05:09):
relationships in the volunteer environment
and providing a level of care that
the Bible would suggest we do. So, I mean, yeah, that's. That's.
That's good fellowship. That's good relationships. But
yeah, okay. All right. So. But anyway, that's our first one. Ethical
(05:29):
violations certainly is cause for firing in
many circumstances. Yes. And, you know,
We've also talked before and we've seen examples of how
poorly church leadership teams sometimes handle
these things and you know,
sometimes benefit of the doubt, attempting maybe
(05:52):
a next level of grace that maybe is
too much instead of being honest and
transparent and taking care of things before they get out of hand.
So yeah, this is an area that
churches need to take extremely seriously and
do things in the right time frame before they get too bad.
(06:15):
Yeah. On that note, someone might say, well, this person repented.
Well, part of repentance might be voluntarily stepping
down from a particular leadership role.
That might not mean removal from the church entirely. It hopefully doesn't.
But part of repentance might be going, I need to take a season
(06:35):
away from visible
public facing, even volunteer ministry
because I recognize that I need to clearly
focus on, you know, my walk with the Lord and
do you know what I'm saying? So sometimes we go, well, they repented. That's why
we didn't remove them. But they should have
(06:59):
had enough self awareness to go, I probably shouldn't
be serving right now. I probably need to. It depends on what the
situation is. Yeah, you know, I mean, categorically,
I'll take it too sidetracked on this, but you know, repentance
would begin perhaps with a, you know,
verbalizing that, you know, I repent. It can't just be,
(07:21):
I'm saying sorry. Yeah, yeah. You know, I
think there's to, to, to see true
repentance takes time. You know, I mean we need to see
that the behavior actually has changed over a period of time.
Right. So what's not continue to put you platform you.
Yes. Let's give you an opportunity to show that there's been repentance and
(07:45):
then we can resume. Yeah, yeah. You
can't just yell I declare bankruptcy and have.
True. Yeah. It's hard to talk about these things because
we're speaking generically and you need to deal with people
individually. But yeah, I
mean, I, I recently talked about the situation
(08:08):
that, that we had at a church that my,
my went to a VBS at in which when I went to pick him
up, the volunteer that, you know, was bringing kids out
for pickup was wearing an ankle monitor, like a, you know, a,
a police courts system ankle monitor.
And I'm like, wow, did we talk about this? I don't, I, I missed this
(08:31):
conversation. Did I bring this up last week in some instance?
Because I know I just had this conversation with somebody. I don't think it was
with me. I don't remember. But yes. So, you know, best
Case scenario, that's just horrible optics for the church. I mean,
you know, that just looks really bad. Totally. But, you know, there
was obviously there was a legal situation that had happened
(08:53):
and the police wanted to keep an hour. The court system wanted to keep an
eye on where this person was. And them, you
know, bringing my 4 year old out from VBS probably
wasn't the best choice for the church to make. The
pastor didn't share my concern
and that, you know, led to
(09:16):
us not participating in their program anymore. But
yeah. So this is a situation in which, at least for a
time, perhaps this volunteer, I don't have any idea what their crime was,
but it was significant enough where they're like, until proven guilty. Maybe they hadn't
committed any crime, but maybe don't have them. They can
sit in the back and hit if they want to really volunteer.
(09:39):
Maybe change the slides. Yeah,
yeah. When you're sitting in the back and no one can see your ankle monitor.
So that was a bad, you know, that was a bad choice. And that's. This
is the kind of thing we're talking about. Exactly. But
we can also be talking about toxic behavior. This is something that
churches don't deal with. They leave unaddressed someone who is gossiping
(10:02):
or driving. Divisive attitudes.
I heard a very troubling story
recently in a church where
one of the volunteers, who is a
greeter, was having an interaction. And I know
(10:23):
the people from this church listen to the podcast, so I'm not, I won't out
you, I promise, guys. But, you know,
one of the volunteers who's a. Was a greeter, got
mad at another volunteer
for moving some chairs. And in the
ensuing sort of debate that happened between them, the
(10:44):
one volunteer spat on the other volunteer.
And. Yeah, like that. That can't
happen. No. And so
those kinds of things, you'd say, no, I'm sorry, Like this, this
kind of behavior is not acceptable. And
you're in, you're in timeout, so to speak. Yeah.
(11:08):
No. It doesn't even matter if the other person was wrong. That's irrelevant.
We don't spit on people in
disagreement. Right. Like that's. It doesn't. The rightness or
wrongness of the moving of the chairs is.
That doesn't matter. You, when you argue with someone or
debate with someone or you have a disagreement with someone. We don't spit on people.
(11:31):
Yeah. Yep. You know, I had a situation
once where I don't, I don't try to remember if this person was actually
a volunteer. I don't not sure they were formally a volunteer. It was
just a person in the church that was really into greeting people.
But had the story, had some creepy
behavior. You know, parents weren't excited.
(11:56):
You might. You probably ever. It wasn't even your story, Scott. You might remember better
than me. I. But I think it was a little too huggy with kids.
No, no, no, no, no. What it was is he. He had candy in
his pocket, and every week he would come up and hug kids and. Yeah.
Ask them if he wanted. They wanted candy. And it was, so far
as anyone could tell, totally innocent behavior. Yes.
(12:19):
But had not everybody about. Not all parents would be excited
about. No. Mo. I mean, yeah.
Yeah. Most people are not like, yeah, go get candy and a
hug from the candy and hug guy. Like, just not something you could do in
this day and age. Yeah. Yeah. Which is even. I don't
think it was a formal. Greed. I don't think it was formally. I know. I
(12:40):
think my recollection from. Because again, this is your story, not mine. Yeah, yeah. What
I seem to recall you saying is that there they were having
problems because he. He had been a
formal volunteer. They'd asked him to quit doing that.
He refused, so they removed him as a formal volunteer. But then he just
kept doing it on his own. And they were like, well, how do we handle
(13:02):
this? Because he's not even really a greeter anymore.
He's just a guy standing out in our lobby handing out hugs and candy
to kids. Yeah. I was like, I just saw
that Seinfeld clip last night when Kramer just starts volunteering.
Basically shows up in an office, and he's just working there. And then the guy,
the boss, calls him into fire. He's like, I'm gonna have to let you go.
(13:24):
I mean, your work is terrible. It's like, you don't even have any training. And
he's like, I don't even work here. He's like, that's what makes this so hard.
Yeah. Which. Which maybe leads to the next reason
why you might let someone go, which is chronic unreliability or
unwillingness to follow leadership. You know, you give them instructions and they don't do
what they're supposed. They don't show up on time. They just don't show
(13:46):
up at all. They totally
disrespecting other people's time.
You know, and that would be a
legitimate reason to say, I just don't think that. Well,
at least, at minimum, you have to deal with it. You have to go, how
are we going to handle this situation? Which we'll talk about here in a second.
And then last one real quick, because we've spent too long on this part is
(14:09):
just a mismatch of gifts. Sometimes you put someone in a role,
and you think it's going to be a fit. You. You may even have done
some divine design discovery with them or something,
or they might have thought that they had a passion for something, and then
you get them into that role and you go, like, this is not
a fit. I had this happen. I. I learned very quickly
(14:32):
I was not big on doing auditions for. For worship ministry,
like, formal ones, because I thought that it was.
I don't know. I. I was young when I was
starting that, and I thought, you know, that that's a lot of pressure, and that
seems kind of weird. But then I had one or two people get on
the team who were not. They weren't terrible,
(14:56):
but they weren't very good. And. And
so I regretted that. So I pretty much quickly
instituted a very informal auditioning system
where someone would come in and I would play my guitar and sing,
and they would sing along with me, or if they were playing an instrument, they
would play along with me. So it was less me sitting up there like Simon
(15:17):
Cowell judging them on American Idol, and more like, hey, let's play a
song together just so I can see you play. So it was less.
Less scary, but because someone might not do well in that environment
when they feel like they have to perform for one person. But
I still got to hear them. But sometimes you go, oh, this
is just. This is not a very good fit. And it's kind of. It is.
(15:40):
It's harder to get rid of that person when you've put them on the team
and then you find out that they're not a very good singer. You know, you're
like, I already told them they could sing. So then you're telling the sound
guy, like, turn their. Turn their mic way down. Turn them way up in their
own monitor so they can hear themselves. But tournament. You know, those are
not great situations. So. But if you find someone
(16:01):
who's not very good at their job, you. There might
be. That might be reason enough to. To. To move them somewhere else.
Yeah. Yeah. So not all this. Yeah. This piece
isn't like, you're fired. You know, you. You're. You can't do anything
here. Some of this is just like, they're not in the right place. They need
to be moved. But, you know, something just occurred to me. This. I think it'd
(16:22):
be pretty cool. You Know, smaller churches sometimes struggle with,
I want to say, quality music. Some, you know, the pool
of volunteers is smaller, and so the music sometimes isn't
as amazing as you would like it to be. But, you know, a couple hundred
bucks in the budget, we could provide some lessons, you know,
instrument lessons, even vocal lessons for
(16:45):
people. I don't. Not anything I've ever heard of a church doing. But
I mean, if you've got somebody that. With an interest, a desire, maybe at least
a hint of talent, that might be a good investment,
you know. You know, if you've got a few
decent players, you know, I really, I am a big
advocate of, of the shadowing. Like,
(17:06):
let. Let the less developed players
and singers come to practices, which
goes to practices, like a lot. I'm shocked at the number of churches that they
only. The only rehearsal they have is basically a
sound check before sun, before Sunday worship, which is no time to develop
a volunteer. You know, run a rehearsal during the week.
(17:28):
Let those people who are newer or less experienced come and
play with you during the. During the rehearsal.
You'd be surprised at how quickly they catch up.
You know, I think that when you have people who are
younger in particular, they maybe learn a certain style, they listen to
the radio or they have a particular style of music, and playing worship music is
(17:51):
different. So they may even have some skill or ability, but it just takes
them some time to learn how to play worship music. Yeah.
Or how to sing worship music. And I think the worship team could. Have
its own leadership pipeline sort of system. You know, I mean, under,
like an uneven understudies kind of thing. You know, where people
are. Are. Yeah, be able to hone their skills and improve
(18:15):
and. Yeah, it's a great way to go. Yeah, we've gotten
sidetracked on separate podcast topic. We'll you guys
remind us. Comment below. Hey, don't forget to do that one about
leaderships on a worship team. All right, so let's. Yeah, let's move
on to how to prevent most volunteer firings
so you don't have to have this happen in the first place. Yeah,
(18:37):
there you go. And we got some great tools for this kinds of stuff too.
But first of all, set clear expectations. So let's
have job descriptions for all of our volunteer
spaces in the church. And we've got. We have
some samples for this as well in the
toolkit@healthychurchestoolkit.com but
(18:57):
yeah, this is a key element to getting the
right people, hopefully the first time.
And. And I think this is important even for the Quantity
of people that will choose to engage in serving
in the church because when they have a better idea of what they're stepping into
and what's expected of them, I think people are more interested
(19:20):
in getting in that unknown of, like, what am I saying yes
to? Is a barrier, I think. But this
definitely helps getting the right person to the right place and
not have to fire them. So the prevention of having
to move people or let them go, and behavioral and
spiritual expectations as well. So, you know, as a part of
(19:42):
our leadership pipeline design, not only do we have job descriptions, but we have
character and capacity elements to volunteer
positions as well, so that we know the type of person, the behavior we'd be
looking for. I think these are really, really important to get in
the right people in the right place the first time, or having the
right information to evaluate them by,
(20:05):
if removal becomes necessary. Totally. I think
that people. People cannot live
up to a standard that is not articulated. And there's a huge
fear, I think, for a lot of churches that they don't want
to set a bunch of, you know,
expectations because they're just so happy that someone is
(20:28):
volunteering in the role. But. But someone is way more likely
to quit or to fail
in a role when the expectations are not clear and just to be
frustrated in general. Like, what are you expecting from me?
You know, how often. How often are you going to schedule me? Are you going
to schedule me every week? Are you going to schedule me once a month? Are
(20:50):
you going to schedule me twice a month? When am
I supposed to show up? You know, you keep telling me that I'm late, but
when. When is it that I'm supposed to be here? You know,
you have these trainings. Are those optional, or am I
supposed to plan them? If I'm supposed to be there,
why are you only giving me one week's notice when those things are
(21:12):
happening? You know, you're not giving me enough notice. So people thrive
when the expectations are clear and people really get
frustrated. And it can come out in toxic behaviors,
actually, when. When the expectations are unclear, people will
do what is right in their own eyes. And
that's what's meant in that. In that verse that says, where there is
(21:34):
no vision, the people perish. That word vision
isn't talking about sort of the way that we talk
about vision. It's meant. It's about direction.
Where there is no instruction, clear
instruction, people perish. And so if you're looking at
your volunteer teams and going, man, people are languishing, I would wonder
(21:57):
how clear Are your expectations around your volunteers? Because
that might be a key reason why they're not thriving. Yeah.
Yep. I'm going to move into point two and then connect
back to point one. But the second point on this is providing
feedback and coaching. Regular, like designed
feedback and coaching. It's another element of leadership pipeline design
(22:20):
because. Well, first of all, I mean, going back to number one, we, if we're,
if we have certain things, we have criteria and expectations, then we need to be
able to tell people how closely are you to that.
But I also want to say back on number one,
especially in a smaller church where we really, you know, I mean, we,
we just barely have what we're. What we need for volunteers right now.
(22:43):
We can set expectations above where people are and
then use this point too to help coach them up into
a higher level. And that's what coaching should be for
anyway. I mean, we don't want an environment in which it's
always negative. Like we're just constantly telling you that you're not doing
well, but it's okay to want
(23:04):
something greater out of a position. And maybe somebody is
pretty good. But we're, we're hoping that we can get them up to, to a
higher level in any one of these areas. You know, some from something
just concrete about how a job is done
to their spiritual maturity and these kinds of things that we should be
looking at in volunteer roles. So, yeah, this regular, I hear churches. Say
(23:27):
to me all the time, we, we don't. We can't have elders because we don't
have. We don't have enough men who would be qualified to be
elders. Okay, so, so then
why are we not. What are we doing about that? We're just going to wring
our hands and like. Okay, so the best time to have started that
was 10 years ago. And the next best
(23:48):
time is right, right now. You know, you can't
microwave a leader. So, you know,
set the expectations and grow people where they are so
that maybe, maybe in three years you would. Yeah, people
will. You'd be surprised at how people will rise to the occasion
and develop when you develop them
(24:10):
like you. They don't develop when you don't develop them. Yeah. You know, this is
a key area. I mean, for any of you listening that are outside the U.S.
i mean, I work with a lot of international churches that are very.
Have a lot of turnover. I don't know what word I was trying to find
there, but the congregations just turn over a lot. The expat community,
military community, student community is
(24:32):
just you know, people come and people go from cities and we, we see this
in the US as well in the, in the same situations, university
towns, military towns, people come and go. The church
needs to take the long view of this and be, and have a
system for building people up. Because when the,
when the big C church takes this view, we're always
(24:54):
equipping people for another church, but we become the
recipients of that. Some other church that developed people really well.
They hit the ground running in a shorter on ramp time in
your environment then. And so we've, we have to look at the,
the global church picture in this particular element
so that we rarely would come into a situation where we just
(25:17):
don't have anybody that would be at the level that we need.
So anyway, that's a little soapbox for me that we should all zoom out and
take a big picture view of this. Totally.
The next thing is something we've already touched on. So I'll, I'll just speak to
it briefly. But that's making sure that people are serving in a role that
(25:37):
aligns with their gifting. That, that is a huge barrier
to success for a lot of people as they're serving somewhere where they're not,
they're not gifted. So being sure that you put people through a divine design
discovery process. We already mentioned we have tools for this
in the Healthy Churches toolkit that really help,
really help people understand their gifting and what roles
(26:00):
might be good fits for them based on that gifting
as well as all the leadership pipeline training that we have in there
and mobilization training. There's all kinds of stuff in there to help you with this,
to make this easier for you because some churches look at that and go, well,
that would be great, but I don't even know where to start. We give you
everything you need to get started in doing that in the Healthy Churches toolkit. So
(26:23):
take advantage of that. But this does help prevent firings. When someone
is in a spot that is aligned with their gifting, they're
much less likely to have
a problem which leads to this next piece which is we want to
create healthy on ramps and off ramps.
This is one of those ironies of volunteer culture where we're so afraid
(26:46):
of losing a volunteer that we don't give natural rhythms for people to roll
on, roll off. But it becomes a negative self
perpetuating cycle where if people don't feel permission to roll
off of teams, then it creates this barrier where people
don't want to come onto teams either because they, they see,
wow, if I Start volunteering at this church, it's a life sentence.
(27:09):
And so then they don't want to step up, they don't want to volunteer and
that's not good. So kind of
normalize stepping down or transitioning
roles as part of the volunteer culture prevents
you having to force someone from rolling off of a position.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think this would freak out a
(27:31):
lot of pastors and leaders that there may
even be a built in rhythm in the year, kind of a recommitment
time that would feel like it makes it too
easy for people to quit. That is,
that is a barrier for sure, as you said, Scott, to people starting.
But you know, I mean, we do see this, we see sabbatical times, you
(27:55):
know, for pastors or elders. We also, though, Scott,
see churches that have lifetime appointments to elders
and even deacons. That becomes a problem
later. And you know, I mean there's, there's like theological
debates on this. I mean, I think it would be very easy to say
(28:15):
once you're an elder, you are always like a spiritual elder, though you
don't need to be actively serving on an elder board
constantly for the rest of your life. So. Right. Minor
differentiation between a ruling elder and a non
ruling elder. So. Yeah, yeah, actively ruling.
And then you could have this pool of people who don't have to be
(28:38):
re qualified. They only have to be, you know,
voted on to, to move back onto the board.
So that, how great would that be? Instead of having six men and it's the
only six men for 60 years, you know, you have this
pool of 25, you know, men who, who
are qualified and it's easier to form,
(29:01):
form a crew of six every, every time you
need. Wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't your church be healthier if you had
25 elders, qualified elders versus
only the six. I don't really
understand it. I understand the, I understand
the theological reasons. I, I also understand the needs for
(29:23):
preserving, preserving
continuity and sort of organizational
knowledge. So I'm not totally criticizing, but
finding some sort of a balance between those two is, that's really
important. Yeah, you don't, you don't drop your entire board,
you know, at one time and put six new people on. I mean, yeah,
(29:46):
you stagger, stagger that out. Well and even, I
mean, well, I don't want to get totally sidetracked here, but I would even maybe
argue against every year having a new
formulation of the board because you think
just you're only meeting twice a month maybe
anyway, you, you spend the first three months
(30:07):
Just kind of getting the team's vibes correct.
And then there's six months of you actually working and then someone's going
to be rolling off in a couple of months and that changes the vibe. So
you're. There's constant upheaval every year. I mean, I could, I could
argue against that being very healthy. So just getting the right
staggering rhythm correct is okay. You know,
(30:29):
going back to, I think last week's episode. This is
a policy issue versus maybe a bylaw issue.
Bylaws say how many people need to be on the elder board in the constitution
and how you approve people for it.
But jiggering around a little bit with,
with the terms and how long they are is
(30:52):
a policy issue. You know, figure out what, what, what's best for
continuity on the team and the culture of the church. But
at any rate, that's a, that's a tangential issue. We've had a lot of those
today. But normalize a culture of stepping down not just
from elder boards, but from any volunteer position.
People go through phases, man. Like they, their kids are graduating from college
(31:13):
or from high school and they're going to college next year. So they
want to scale back their, their commitments so that they
can kind of lean into that last year with their kid at home. Like, that's.
Make that okay. Yeah. Yep.
All right. Finally the point that you're all, you've all been waiting for.
(31:33):
How to actually fire. Yeah. It is in the title,
half an. Hour in how do we actually fire a
volunteer? This has been a good discussion though. I, I like, I like these points
today, but. All right. I do think that, I mean, half the job is preventing
the fact that it has to happen in the first place. I really think that
that's. So everybody would rather have an environment they
(31:54):
don't have to fire people than simply get good at firing
people. So I think, yeah, that's why we. Spent so much time here.
Okay. So the easiest way is sort of
a self. Self selected out.
That again, going back to some of our prevention points.
If the environment is one in which somebody self
(32:17):
recognizes, I don't think this is right for me.
And as we just said there, there is an off ramp
option, then that's, that's best. So I guess, you
know, think about fire then is let them fire themselves
totally. But think about this. This requires some groundwork.
You have to set clear expectations. Right. You have to create a culture where we
(32:40):
want people serving in alignment with their gifting. And we have to have a
culture where there's permission to roll off. When you do
those things, then you create the environment where you can have a
conversation with someone and they go, I just don't think that that's the right fit.
This is a good fit for me. And it's or I don't think that I'm
thriving in this role. Like the expectations are more than I expected. I don't think
(33:02):
I'm doing a very good job. And when you
have that kind of environment where that healthy kind of conversation can happen,
then a person can self can fire themselves
and save face. It's not an embarrassing
thing for them. It's just an honest conversation. Yeah, yeah,
(33:23):
yeah. I mean, I kind of experienced this personally, you know, I mean I, I
did some time with, I don't three year olds, I forget what, what age
they were. But, but our church was
designed where, you know, it sort of followed the school year. So on
ramped up, you know, at the beginning of the school year and at the end,
I mean that was like the completion of your term. You were not committed for
(33:44):
the next year and forever after. And so, you know, I mean,
I tried something, I did a, I did a time in it and at the
end I was able to say I don't think this is really, I'm not the
right person for this. And all of that was perfectly
okay. So it was just super. No one has to be
embarrassed. No one has to feel like I disappointed anybody else.
(34:05):
That's the best possible scenario. But you have to create the culture where that
can happen. And a lot of you guys listening, you don't have that culture.
And so that's why it makes you kind of leave. Leaves these other options
as your own options. Yeah, yeah. So the second way now
to remove somebody or I guess in this case more is maybe to change where
they are, is the guided transition. And so sort of building
(34:28):
off of the first one here in which maybe they would
recognize it's not a good fit, this one has a little bit of
intervention. And we're like, we think maybe this isn't the best fit.
But again, going back to things that we've established, like we have character
identities, we have job descriptions, we use these
tools that are already in place or policies in which we can say, I
(34:50):
think we have a misalignment here. And
so, you know, I mean, just from my example, yeah, if, if I was completely
clueless and I think this seems good or I don't mind doing this and you
know, maybe somebody at another level of leadership
is like, he looks really Awkward. I'm sure he's as
comfortable as we would like somebody to be or as excited as we
(35:13):
want somebody to be. Then they could have pulled me in, you know, at the
end and go, you know, I don't know. How do you think? I'm not
sure if this is the right, Right space for you, but we want to
frame it as we're. We want to help them thrive somewhere else, which we
do. I mean, are you. That's your honest feeling about it,
is we want everybody here to thrive in just the right spot.
(35:36):
And so I think when we approach it from that angle, this
doesn't have to be, you know, awkward or uncomfortable.
It can be like the Peter Principle is real, which is,
you know, where people tend to get promoted to the level of their incompetence
in leadership pipeline. We work really hard to make sure. That that doesn't happen.
(35:57):
But sometimes people get promoted to a particular role or a particular
ministry and then, you know, they, they don't
love it, but they don't feel the permission to say, I don't like this.
So sometimes coming up to them and going, and just saying,
are you loving this? And then they might go, I'm
really not, you know, but I don't. I didn't want to disappoint you. I didn't
(36:20):
want to feel like I wasn't doing what I committed to doing.
And that's so freeing for people sometimes. I
mean, like, can we. Let's. Let's move you back to where you were, you
know, or let's move you to this different ministry. Yeah, that really
can be helpful. I mean, one of the classic areas that we see in the
church for this is the. Is the
(36:42):
children's Sunday school teacher. That is amazing. And they're like,
they're so amazing. Let's make them the, the children's
ministry director so that they can schedule all of the teachers.
It's just, it's a totally different job. Just because you're great at
being, you know, in the ministry doesn't mean you're going to be great at leading
the ministry. Yeah.
(37:04):
Yep, that's right. All right, our next one,
the Direct conversation. So we're kind of ramping these up a bit.
And so we've, we've, we've. We've got somebody that it, maybe
it even goes beyond this is not just that they're in the wrong place, but
their behavior is not where we would want it to be.
How they handle people isn't good. Any number of things. But
(37:28):
we first have Got to. Or. Or it's not a good fit and they're not
recognizing it. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. After
the, the suggested guided transition,
then we might just have to. This could be the same conversation, by the way.
We could be at, you know, the, the number two option here, the
guided transition. Yeah. They're not really
(37:50):
agreeing with your assessment that it seems like it's not a good fit and
if we know for sure it's not a good fit now, maybe we escalate to
this. But we're clear, we're calm,
we're specific, we have hopefully. I don't
know if it sometimes sounds like over the top to say we have
documentation. If there's been. There's been some really
(38:13):
negative behavior, we need documentation on
that. I would also go back to what we talked about in this, in the
second part, AJ which is if there were infractions
of behavior and they weren't dealt with
at the time, it's totally fair for that. It doesn't
necessarily change the situation because you might need to let them go from that position
(38:34):
anyway. But they have a valid point. If you go, you said nothing about
this when it happened. You should, if
something happens, you should address it when it happens
and not, not hold it back. But you should definitely document.
Hey, you. We've, you know,
that we have chatted over the last six months. Every, you
(38:56):
know, four out of the seven times you've been scheduled,
you were late, you know, and every time we talked
about that and afterwards and you said that you were
going to improve, but things have not improved, you know, or we've
chatted every month and you were supposed to do X responsibility and you
haven't been doing those things. And the ministry is too
(39:19):
important. And we have a lot of people relying on this ministry. We have to
do it really effectively. And we've talked about this four times.
Here are the times we've talked about it. You don't want them to say, well,
when did that happen? You go, well, you know, no, no, you need to
be really specific. And it should never be a surprise.
They should go, you know, we have talked about that. You know, and
(39:40):
I think the final thing on this is that you also have got to be
firm in this decision. And
again, depending on the scenario, you don't want the person having the
conversation with this person. Perhaps you have already had conversations
with other leaders or people that you report to so that
there is a unified decision, a decision has been made, then you
(40:03):
have to be firm in that. And there has to Be closure for it,
you know, at the end of the conversation that they, they walk away knowing
that something has been finalized here today. And it's not
ambiguous because in, in our desire
to want to preserve feelings and relationships, sometimes we
lack the clarity and the decisiveness in a conversation.
(40:26):
And people might walk away and reflect on it for a minute and go, well,
am I, Am I, Is this done? Where do I
stand? And you can't have that. These
are the tough things that come sometimes in a leadership position.
Yeah. It actually isn't kind like when you, when you're not clear.
So, you know, letting people know this isn't gonna, this isn't gonna be a
(40:50):
fit for you. Now, it depends on the situation. And the reason for
may be that you could say, we would like to find somewhere else where you
can serve and thrive in that. So we'd love to work with you on
finding. Finding a spot. And you have to run the risk. There are gonna be
some times where things like that happen and people will be so mad that they
will leave your church or they will say bad things about you. But.
(41:13):
Okay, I mean, if you've done everything the way that you're supposed
to and you've got clear evidence of different things and you're.
You've gave opportunities and you coached up, then who cares
if someone comes up and says something? You, you have the truth on your side.
That's right. You know, the Lord honors that in the long term, so don't worry
about it. Yeah, exactly. Right. You can't, you can't let
(41:35):
people. A fear that someone might say something negative about you or the church
prevent you from doing what's right for that ministry. Yeah. So,
yeah, and we've seen some extreme cases of this. And you have to
just have to sometimes weather those storms and keep going.
The wrong move is to capitulate, to
(41:55):
turn back on a decision and enable
bad behavior to happen
or something that would be detrimental to the church. Even worse in the long term.
Kind of gets us into our last point here when things escalate. And
we mentioned some more extreme cases at the top of the show. But
ethical breaches sometimes might require, you know,
(42:18):
a very decisive removal from an environment
in which people have made some really poor choices. If we get into
legal issues, things that actually would involve, you know, criminal
activity, then we have to bring the appropriate
authorities in on this. And we've got huge
years and years of issues with this in the church across
(42:41):
denominations and. Yeah.
That, you know, have become very public on this stuff.
It's Not a win. That's right. It is not a win to, to try to
protect people that have engaged in what would
be criminal behavior. And
then, you know, but if we are talking about non criminal but sin
(43:03):
issues, then we sometimes have to begin
some church discipline things that we, you know, would
follow the model in, in Mathieu. Yeah. Church discipline
issues would be one other where you go, okay, this person
hasn't violated a law, but
they've, you know, they've,
(43:25):
they've done something that they're not repenting of. And
that, that'd be maybe a distinction, I think that maybe some churches
miss is the goal of church
discipline is repentance. Now again, I'm not talking about things that are illegal.
Illegal things. You got to bring in the authorities. And even if there's
church discipline involved, there's also legal issues that
(43:47):
have to be involved. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about things
that are not illegal. The goal of church discipline is repentance.
The goal is not removal. I think some people go, well, if church discipline
happens, we have to remove them. That's not what the Bible
teaches. The Bible teaches restoration.
We want restoration. And it's only if there's unrepentant sin
(44:10):
that we, that we remove. So even
something really awful, you know, and heinous again, but
not illegal. You don't need to remove them from the church. They would
need to be removed from positions of authority. And,
but we want them there because we,
(44:31):
we want to see them restored and we want to see them grow. We want
to see them healthy. Healing comes from repenting
and confessing. That's how healing comes.
Sending people out does not heal them.
The, the point of casting people out is so that they would
miss the healing power of the community and want to come back
(44:53):
and say, I've changed and I'm sorry, I want to live
differently. And then you accept them back and go, okay, great, we'd love to
help you. And the church discipline thing,
that could be a whole nother episode, but churches just get this so wrong. Like
they either don't do it or they do it wrong or they do it too
harshly or, or not enough or not harshly enough.
(45:13):
It's a mess. So, you know,
but that would be, that's the extreme case. If there are 10
people in your church who need to be fired, half of them, if we're just
given permission, would move themselves. You know, four of
them would maybe require more of a conversation. And one
person you might have to deal with pretty harshly. But
(45:36):
I Think to kind of sum this up from my perspective,
I would say most volunteer firings
don't have to happen at all and can be
prevented by having a healthy volunteer culture. Unfortunately, a lot of your
churches don't have a healthy volunteer culture. Therefore, you have a lot of
volunteers who actually need to be fired. So you maybe need to
(45:58):
deal with the issues that you have at hand and then work on developing a
healthier culture to prevent those issues moving forward. Yeah.
Yep. What's, what's this saying, Scott? An ounce of prevention
is worth what, something? Pound of cure. Pound of cure.
Okay. Yep. All right. If you're outside the US A gram of prevention is worth
a kilo of cure.
(46:19):
A milligram of prevention is worth a gram,
a kilogram of cure.
All right. Well, this is a long episode because it's really important.
And Scott, we had a lot to say about this because we do care about
it. We also had a lot of side tangents there, but it's okay.
Brought up a lot of things we had to get off our chest with some
(46:42):
situations that we've seen. But we're glad you stuck with us to
the very end. I hope this is helpful. Yeah. Get in the healthy churches toolkit
because we do have, as we mentioned, a lot of resources on the prevention
side for developing healthy systems in your church, for engaging
volunteers and making sure that they continue to be great and to improve.
So go to HealthyChurchestoolKit.com Sign up for a 7 day free trial,
(47:04):
and grab whatever you need out of there to help your church. That's what we
built it for. So thanks for being with us, everybody.
If you have any thoughts on this, love to hear your. Your
horror stories in the comments that you've had to deal with or
the super awesome wins that you had whenever you
handled things and things got better. Those are, those are even
(47:26):
the, the better ones we would love to read about. So, yeah, thanks for
being with us. We'll see you again next week.
Sam.
Can you really fire a volunteer at church? Let's get into that
now on the Church Revitalization Podcast. Hello and
welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast brought to you by
the Malphurs. Group team, where each week we tackle. Important
actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now
here's your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. matthew.
(00:25):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and co host, AJ AJ Mathieu.
AJ Today we're talking about a difficult
topic, and that is firing
volunteers. I think some people might even
react to that and go, they're volunteers.
(00:48):
You can't fire them. They're helping you out. They're pitching in. You
can't let them go. And the reality is that in fact,
you can. You, you can fire a volunteer and sometimes
you should. And we will eventually get to
the how on doing this. But before we do, we're going to
also explore why you might need to and how
(01:10):
you can prevent the problem in the first place.
But then I promise we will eventually get to how to do it
if you actually need to do that. But
before we dive into all of that, I want to mention the Healthy
Churches toolkit. Go to healthychurchestoolkit.com
Sign up free for seven days. There's all kinds of things in there to help
(01:32):
you manage your volunteer teams and get people aligned
and in the right spot. Because spoiler, spoiler alert. That's one of the
reasons why we have to let people go is because maybe they're not in the
right place in the first place. And you can prevent that by getting them
connected to something that aligns with their divine design. We, we went
through this in our most recent workshop. In the
(01:53):
Toolkit, we've created a divine design tool that helps
people understand how they are wired and giving,
gives them suggestions on positions that might align well with their
gifting. And you can play around with that and check it
out@healthychurchestoolkit.com free for seven days.
Yeah, do that. So we're taking this up a. Not Scott,
(02:15):
because we've mentioned, we've talked before about evaluating
volunteers and that already gets people like, oh, I
know that's that sounds like a bad idea. And now we're like,
we're taking that to the next level and actually talking
about removing a volunteer from a serving position.
So, and I know people, people aren't saying no. There's 100% of the
(02:38):
time never a way or a case for this. Everybody probably
agrees, yes, there are like these extreme
situations in which we would do that. Right. And we'll talk about that here in
just. Just here in a second as kind of set up our
first. First part of today's episode
on why you might need to let a volunteer go. So, yeah,
(02:59):
I think we all agree on the extreme situation, so
let's kind of dive into these. Scott, first of all, ethical violations.
Yeah, I think nobody's going to push back on that. Maybe.
Maybe one or two of you. Probably not.
But, yeah, if we're dealing with areas in which
breaches of trust have become a problem,
(03:22):
confidentiality, moral failures,
unfortunately happen too often in the church.
Some of these, you know, end up making news headlines. But.
Yeah, yeah, well, and also in this
category, I think, although, I don't know,
(03:42):
I. I want to be sensitive. Sensitive to the fact that there can
be situations, but if someone's in the middle of going through a
divorce, even if it's not their fault, like their spouse cheated on them
or something like that, you know, probably
serving is not the thing they need to be doing right now. Not even because
they're the one at fault, but because if there's a chance for them to
(04:04):
salvage their marriage or, you
know, that might be a better use of their time
than having them up singing on stage.
So that's some. Not. I wouldn't even call that firing as much as just giving
space for a pause and saying, hey, yeah, let's.
I wouldn't even call that a firing. But sometimes approaching someone and
(04:26):
going, hey, I don't want you to feel the pressure. You're going through this traumatic
event. Do not feel the pressure to
be volunteering right now when you need to navigate this difficult life
situation. So I wouldn't even put that in the category of firing. But
sometimes, I mean, I'd be. You'd be surprised. There are some churches that just plow
on through, letting people continue to volunteer even though
(04:48):
someone's going through the most traumatic experience
of their life. Now, if it is their fault,
they're the one who did something, then, then, then that maybe falls into the firing
category. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
That's. That's, that is something to keep in mind. How.
I mean, that. That kind of falls under just having good
(05:09):
relationships in the volunteer environment
and providing a level of care that
the Bible would suggest we do. So, I mean, yeah, that's. That's.
That's good fellowship. That's good relationships. But
yeah, okay. All right. So. But anyway, that's our first one. Ethical
(05:29):
violations certainly is cause for firing in
many circumstances. Yes. And, you know,
We've also talked before and we've seen examples of how
poorly church leadership teams sometimes handle
these things and you know,
sometimes benefit of the doubt, attempting maybe
(05:52):
a next level of grace that maybe is
too much instead of being honest and
transparent and taking care of things before they get out of hand.
So yeah, this is an area that
churches need to take extremely seriously and
do things in the right time frame before they get too bad.
(06:15):
Yeah. On that note, someone might say, well, this person repented.
Well, part of repentance might be voluntarily stepping
down from a particular leadership role.
That might not mean removal from the church entirely. It hopefully doesn't.
But part of repentance might be going, I need to take a season
(06:35):
away from visible
public facing, even volunteer ministry
because I recognize that I need to clearly
focus on, you know, my walk with the Lord and
do you know what I'm saying? So sometimes we go, well, they repented. That's why
we didn't remove them. But they should have
(06:59):
had enough self awareness to go, I probably shouldn't
be serving right now. I probably need to. It depends on what the
situation is. Yeah, you know, I mean, categorically,
I'll take it too sidetracked on this, but you know, repentance
would begin perhaps with a, you know,
verbalizing that, you know, I repent. It can't just be,
(07:21):
I'm saying sorry. Yeah, yeah. You know, I
think there's to, to, to see true
repentance takes time. You know, I mean we need to see
that the behavior actually has changed over a period of time.
Right. So what's not continue to put you platform you.
Yes. Let's give you an opportunity to show that there's been repentance and
(07:45):
then we can resume. Yeah, yeah. You
can't just yell I declare bankruptcy and have.
True. Yeah. It's hard to talk about these things because
we're speaking generically and you need to deal with people
individually. But yeah, I
mean, I, I recently talked about the situation
(08:08):
that, that we had at a church that my,
my went to a VBS at in which when I went to pick him
up, the volunteer that, you know, was bringing kids out
for pickup was wearing an ankle monitor, like a, you know, a,
a police courts system ankle monitor.
And I'm like, wow, did we talk about this? I don't, I, I missed this
(08:31):
conversation. Did I bring this up last week in some instance?
Because I know I just had this conversation with somebody. I don't think it was
with me. I don't remember. But yes. So, you know, best
Case scenario, that's just horrible optics for the church. I mean,
you know, that just looks really bad. Totally. But, you know, there
was obviously there was a legal situation that had happened
(08:53):
and the police wanted to keep an hour. The court system wanted to keep an
eye on where this person was. And them, you
know, bringing my 4 year old out from VBS probably
wasn't the best choice for the church to make. The
pastor didn't share my concern
and that, you know, led to
(09:16):
us not participating in their program anymore. But
yeah. So this is a situation in which, at least for a
time, perhaps this volunteer, I don't have any idea what their crime was,
but it was significant enough where they're like, until proven guilty. Maybe they hadn't
committed any crime, but maybe don't have them. They can
sit in the back and hit if they want to really volunteer.
(09:39):
Maybe change the slides. Yeah,
yeah. When you're sitting in the back and no one can see your ankle monitor.
So that was a bad, you know, that was a bad choice. And that's. This
is the kind of thing we're talking about. Exactly. But
we can also be talking about toxic behavior. This is something that
churches don't deal with. They leave unaddressed someone who is gossiping
(10:02):
or driving. Divisive attitudes.
I heard a very troubling story
recently in a church where
one of the volunteers, who is a
greeter, was having an interaction. And I know
(10:23):
the people from this church listen to the podcast, so I'm not, I won't out
you, I promise, guys. But, you know,
one of the volunteers who's a. Was a greeter, got
mad at another volunteer
for moving some chairs. And in the
ensuing sort of debate that happened between them, the
(10:44):
one volunteer spat on the other volunteer.
And. Yeah, like that. That can't
happen. No. And so
those kinds of things, you'd say, no, I'm sorry, Like this, this
kind of behavior is not acceptable. And
you're in, you're in timeout, so to speak. Yeah.
(11:08):
No. It doesn't even matter if the other person was wrong. That's irrelevant.
We don't spit on people in
disagreement. Right. Like that's. It doesn't. The rightness or
wrongness of the moving of the chairs is.
That doesn't matter. You, when you argue with someone or
debate with someone or you have a disagreement with someone. We don't spit on people.
(11:31):
Yeah. Yep. You know, I had a situation
once where I don't, I don't try to remember if this person was actually
a volunteer. I don't not sure they were formally a volunteer. It was
just a person in the church that was really into greeting people.
But had the story, had some creepy
behavior. You know, parents weren't excited.
(11:56):
You might. You probably ever. It wasn't even your story, Scott. You might remember better
than me. I. But I think it was a little too huggy with kids.
No, no, no, no, no. What it was is he. He had candy in
his pocket, and every week he would come up and hug kids and. Yeah.
Ask them if he wanted. They wanted candy. And it was, so far
as anyone could tell, totally innocent behavior. Yes.
(12:19):
But had not everybody about. Not all parents would be excited
about. No. Mo. I mean, yeah.
Yeah. Most people are not like, yeah, go get candy and a
hug from the candy and hug guy. Like, just not something you could do in
this day and age. Yeah. Yeah. Which is even. I don't
think it was a formal. Greed. I don't think it was formally. I know. I
(12:40):
think my recollection from. Because again, this is your story, not mine. Yeah, yeah. What
I seem to recall you saying is that there they were having
problems because he. He had been a
formal volunteer. They'd asked him to quit doing that.
He refused, so they removed him as a formal volunteer. But then he just
kept doing it on his own. And they were like, well, how do we handle
(13:02):
this? Because he's not even really a greeter anymore.
He's just a guy standing out in our lobby handing out hugs and candy
to kids. Yeah. I was like, I just saw
that Seinfeld clip last night when Kramer just starts volunteering.
Basically shows up in an office, and he's just working there. And then the guy,
the boss, calls him into fire. He's like, I'm gonna have to let you go.
(13:24):
I mean, your work is terrible. It's like, you don't even have any training. And
he's like, I don't even work here. He's like, that's what makes this so hard.
Yeah. Which. Which maybe leads to the next reason
why you might let someone go, which is chronic unreliability or
unwillingness to follow leadership. You know, you give them instructions and they don't do
what they're supposed. They don't show up on time. They just don't show
(13:46):
up at all. They totally
disrespecting other people's time.
You know, and that would be a
legitimate reason to say, I just don't think that. Well,
at least, at minimum, you have to deal with it. You have to go, how
are we going to handle this situation? Which we'll talk about here in a second.
And then last one real quick, because we've spent too long on this part is
(14:09):
just a mismatch of gifts. Sometimes you put someone in a role,
and you think it's going to be a fit. You. You may even have done
some divine design discovery with them or something,
or they might have thought that they had a passion for something, and then
you get them into that role and you go, like, this is not
a fit. I had this happen. I. I learned very quickly
(14:32):
I was not big on doing auditions for. For worship ministry,
like, formal ones, because I thought that it was.
I don't know. I. I was young when I was
starting that, and I thought, you know, that that's a lot of pressure, and that
seems kind of weird. But then I had one or two people get on
the team who were not. They weren't terrible,
(14:56):
but they weren't very good. And. And
so I regretted that. So I pretty much quickly
instituted a very informal auditioning system
where someone would come in and I would play my guitar and sing,
and they would sing along with me, or if they were playing an instrument, they
would play along with me. So it was less me sitting up there like Simon
(15:17):
Cowell judging them on American Idol, and more like, hey, let's play a
song together just so I can see you play. So it was less.
Less scary, but because someone might not do well in that environment
when they feel like they have to perform for one person. But
I still got to hear them. But sometimes you go, oh, this
is just. This is not a very good fit. And it's kind of. It is.
(15:40):
It's harder to get rid of that person when you've put them on the team
and then you find out that they're not a very good singer. You know, you're
like, I already told them they could sing. So then you're telling the sound
guy, like, turn their. Turn their mic way down. Turn them way up in their
own monitor so they can hear themselves. But tournament. You know, those are
not great situations. So. But if you find someone
(16:01):
who's not very good at their job, you. There might
be. That might be reason enough to. To. To move them somewhere else.
Yeah. Yeah. So not all this. Yeah. This piece
isn't like, you're fired. You know, you. You're. You can't do anything
here. Some of this is just like, they're not in the right place. They need
to be moved. But, you know, something just occurred to me. This. I think it'd
(16:22):
be pretty cool. You Know, smaller churches sometimes struggle with,
I want to say, quality music. Some, you know, the pool
of volunteers is smaller, and so the music sometimes isn't
as amazing as you would like it to be. But, you know, a couple hundred
bucks in the budget, we could provide some lessons, you know,
instrument lessons, even vocal lessons for
(16:45):
people. I don't. Not anything I've ever heard of a church doing. But
I mean, if you've got somebody that. With an interest, a desire, maybe at least
a hint of talent, that might be a good investment,
you know. You know, if you've got a few
decent players, you know, I really, I am a big
advocate of, of the shadowing. Like,
(17:06):
let. Let the less developed players
and singers come to practices, which
goes to practices, like a lot. I'm shocked at the number of churches that they
only. The only rehearsal they have is basically a
sound check before sun, before Sunday worship, which is no time to develop
a volunteer. You know, run a rehearsal during the week.
(17:28):
Let those people who are newer or less experienced come and
play with you during the. During the rehearsal.
You'd be surprised at how quickly they catch up.
You know, I think that when you have people who are
younger in particular, they maybe learn a certain style, they listen to
the radio or they have a particular style of music, and playing worship music is
(17:51):
different. So they may even have some skill or ability, but it just takes
them some time to learn how to play worship music. Yeah.
Or how to sing worship music. And I think the worship team could. Have
its own leadership pipeline sort of system. You know, I mean, under,
like an uneven understudies kind of thing. You know, where people
are. Are. Yeah, be able to hone their skills and improve
(18:15):
and. Yeah, it's a great way to go. Yeah, we've gotten
sidetracked on separate podcast topic. We'll you guys
remind us. Comment below. Hey, don't forget to do that one about
leaderships on a worship team. All right, so let's. Yeah, let's move
on to how to prevent most volunteer firings
so you don't have to have this happen in the first place. Yeah,
(18:37):
there you go. And we got some great tools for this kinds of stuff too.
But first of all, set clear expectations. So let's
have job descriptions for all of our volunteer
spaces in the church. And we've got. We have
some samples for this as well in the
toolkit@healthychurchestoolkit.com but
(18:57):
yeah, this is a key element to getting the
right people, hopefully the first time.
And. And I think this is important even for the Quantity
of people that will choose to engage in serving
in the church because when they have a better idea of what they're stepping into
and what's expected of them, I think people are more interested
(19:20):
in getting in that unknown of, like, what am I saying yes
to? Is a barrier, I think. But this
definitely helps getting the right person to the right place and
not have to fire them. So the prevention of having
to move people or let them go, and behavioral and
spiritual expectations as well. So, you know, as a part of
(19:42):
our leadership pipeline design, not only do we have job descriptions, but we have
character and capacity elements to volunteer
positions as well, so that we know the type of person, the behavior we'd be
looking for. I think these are really, really important to get in
the right people in the right place the first time, or having the
right information to evaluate them by,
(20:05):
if removal becomes necessary. Totally. I think
that people. People cannot live
up to a standard that is not articulated. And there's a huge
fear, I think, for a lot of churches that they don't want
to set a bunch of, you know,
expectations because they're just so happy that someone is
(20:28):
volunteering in the role. But. But someone is way more likely
to quit or to fail
in a role when the expectations are not clear and just to be
frustrated in general. Like, what are you expecting from me?
You know, how often. How often are you going to schedule me? Are you going
to schedule me every week? Are you going to schedule me once a month? Are
(20:50):
you going to schedule me twice a month? When am
I supposed to show up? You know, you keep telling me that I'm late, but
when. When is it that I'm supposed to be here? You know,
you have these trainings. Are those optional, or am I
supposed to plan them? If I'm supposed to be there,
why are you only giving me one week's notice when those things are
(21:12):
happening? You know, you're not giving me enough notice. So people thrive
when the expectations are clear and people really get
frustrated. And it can come out in toxic behaviors,
actually, when. When the expectations are unclear, people will
do what is right in their own eyes. And
that's what's meant in that. In that verse that says, where there is
(21:34):
no vision, the people perish. That word vision
isn't talking about sort of the way that we talk
about vision. It's meant. It's about direction.
Where there is no instruction, clear
instruction, people perish. And so if you're looking at
your volunteer teams and going, man, people are languishing, I would wonder
(21:57):
how clear Are your expectations around your volunteers? Because
that might be a key reason why they're not thriving. Yeah.
Yep. I'm going to move into point two and then connect
back to point one. But the second point on this is providing
feedback and coaching. Regular, like designed
feedback and coaching. It's another element of leadership pipeline design
(22:20):
because. Well, first of all, I mean, going back to number one, we, if we're,
if we have certain things, we have criteria and expectations, then we need to be
able to tell people how closely are you to that.
But I also want to say back on number one,
especially in a smaller church where we really, you know, I mean, we,
we just barely have what we're. What we need for volunteers right now.
(22:43):
We can set expectations above where people are and
then use this point too to help coach them up into
a higher level. And that's what coaching should be for
anyway. I mean, we don't want an environment in which it's
always negative. Like we're just constantly telling you that you're not doing
well, but it's okay to want
(23:04):
something greater out of a position. And maybe somebody is
pretty good. But we're, we're hoping that we can get them up to, to a
higher level in any one of these areas. You know, some from something
just concrete about how a job is done
to their spiritual maturity and these kinds of things that we should be
looking at in volunteer roles. So, yeah, this regular, I hear churches. Say
(23:27):
to me all the time, we, we don't. We can't have elders because we don't
have. We don't have enough men who would be qualified to be
elders. Okay, so, so then
why are we not. What are we doing about that? We're just going to wring
our hands and like. Okay, so the best time to have started that
was 10 years ago. And the next best
(23:48):
time is right, right now. You know, you can't
microwave a leader. So, you know,
set the expectations and grow people where they are so
that maybe, maybe in three years you would. Yeah, people
will. You'd be surprised at how people will rise to the occasion
and develop when you develop them
(24:10):
like you. They don't develop when you don't develop them. Yeah. You know, this is
a key area. I mean, for any of you listening that are outside the U.S.
i mean, I work with a lot of international churches that are very.
Have a lot of turnover. I don't know what word I was trying to find
there, but the congregations just turn over a lot. The expat community,
military community, student community is
(24:32):
just you know, people come and people go from cities and we, we see this
in the US as well in the, in the same situations, university
towns, military towns, people come and go. The church
needs to take the long view of this and be, and have a
system for building people up. Because when the,
when the big C church takes this view, we're always
(24:54):
equipping people for another church, but we become the
recipients of that. Some other church that developed people really well.
They hit the ground running in a shorter on ramp time in
your environment then. And so we've, we have to look at the,
the global church picture in this particular element
so that we rarely would come into a situation where we just
(25:17):
don't have anybody that would be at the level that we need.
So anyway, that's a little soapbox for me that we should all zoom out and
take a big picture view of this. Totally.
The next thing is something we've already touched on. So I'll, I'll just speak to
it briefly. But that's making sure that people are serving in a role that
(25:37):
aligns with their gifting. That, that is a huge barrier
to success for a lot of people as they're serving somewhere where they're not,
they're not gifted. So being sure that you put people through a divine design
discovery process. We already mentioned we have tools for this
in the Healthy Churches toolkit that really help,
really help people understand their gifting and what roles
(26:00):
might be good fits for them based on that gifting
as well as all the leadership pipeline training that we have in there
and mobilization training. There's all kinds of stuff in there to help you with this,
to make this easier for you because some churches look at that and go, well,
that would be great, but I don't even know where to start. We give you
everything you need to get started in doing that in the Healthy Churches toolkit. So
(26:23):
take advantage of that. But this does help prevent firings. When someone
is in a spot that is aligned with their gifting, they're
much less likely to have
a problem which leads to this next piece which is we want to
create healthy on ramps and off ramps.
This is one of those ironies of volunteer culture where we're so afraid
(26:46):
of losing a volunteer that we don't give natural rhythms for people to roll
on, roll off. But it becomes a negative self
perpetuating cycle where if people don't feel permission to roll
off of teams, then it creates this barrier where people
don't want to come onto teams either because they, they see,
wow, if I Start volunteering at this church, it's a life sentence.
(27:09):
And so then they don't want to step up, they don't want to volunteer and
that's not good. So kind of
normalize stepping down or transitioning
roles as part of the volunteer culture prevents
you having to force someone from rolling off of a position.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think this would freak out a
(27:31):
lot of pastors and leaders that there may
even be a built in rhythm in the year, kind of a recommitment
time that would feel like it makes it too
easy for people to quit. That is,
that is a barrier for sure, as you said, Scott, to people starting.
But you know, I mean, we do see this, we see sabbatical times, you
(27:55):
know, for pastors or elders. We also, though, Scott,
see churches that have lifetime appointments to elders
and even deacons. That becomes a problem
later. And you know, I mean there's, there's like theological
debates on this. I mean, I think it would be very easy to say
(28:15):
once you're an elder, you are always like a spiritual elder, though you
don't need to be actively serving on an elder board
constantly for the rest of your life. So. Right. Minor
differentiation between a ruling elder and a non
ruling elder. So. Yeah, yeah, actively ruling.
And then you could have this pool of people who don't have to be
(28:38):
re qualified. They only have to be, you know,
voted on to, to move back onto the board.
So that, how great would that be? Instead of having six men and it's the
only six men for 60 years, you know, you have this
pool of 25, you know, men who, who
are qualified and it's easier to form,
(29:01):
form a crew of six every, every time you
need. Wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't your church be healthier if you had
25 elders, qualified elders versus
only the six. I don't really
understand it. I understand the, I understand
the theological reasons. I, I also understand the needs for
(29:23):
preserving, preserving
continuity and sort of organizational
knowledge. So I'm not totally criticizing, but
finding some sort of a balance between those two is, that's really
important. Yeah, you don't, you don't drop your entire board,
you know, at one time and put six new people on. I mean, yeah,
(29:46):
you stagger, stagger that out. Well and even, I
mean, well, I don't want to get totally sidetracked here, but I would even maybe
argue against every year having a new
formulation of the board because you think
just you're only meeting twice a month maybe
anyway, you, you spend the first three months
(30:07):
Just kind of getting the team's vibes correct.
And then there's six months of you actually working and then someone's going
to be rolling off in a couple of months and that changes the vibe. So
you're. There's constant upheaval every year. I mean, I could, I could
argue against that being very healthy. So just getting the right
staggering rhythm correct is okay. You know,
(30:29):
going back to, I think last week's episode. This is
a policy issue versus maybe a bylaw issue.
Bylaws say how many people need to be on the elder board in the constitution
and how you approve people for it.
But jiggering around a little bit with,
with the terms and how long they are is
(30:52):
a policy issue. You know, figure out what, what, what's best for
continuity on the team and the culture of the church. But
at any rate, that's a, that's a tangential issue. We've had a lot of those
today. But normalize a culture of stepping down not just
from elder boards, but from any volunteer position.
People go through phases, man. Like they, their kids are graduating from college
(31:13):
or from high school and they're going to college next year. So they
want to scale back their, their commitments so that they
can kind of lean into that last year with their kid at home. Like, that's.
Make that okay. Yeah. Yep.
All right. Finally the point that you're all, you've all been waiting for.
(31:33):
How to actually fire. Yeah. It is in the title,
half an. Hour in how do we actually fire a
volunteer? This has been a good discussion though. I, I like, I like these points
today, but. All right. I do think that, I mean, half the job is preventing
the fact that it has to happen in the first place. I really think that
that's. So everybody would rather have an environment they
(31:54):
don't have to fire people than simply get good at firing
people. So I think, yeah, that's why we. Spent so much time here.
Okay. So the easiest way is sort of
a self. Self selected out.
That again, going back to some of our prevention points.
If the environment is one in which somebody self
(32:17):
recognizes, I don't think this is right for me.
And as we just said there, there is an off ramp
option, then that's, that's best. So I guess, you
know, think about fire then is let them fire themselves
totally. But think about this. This requires some groundwork.
You have to set clear expectations. Right. You have to create a culture where we
(32:40):
want people serving in alignment with their gifting. And we have to have a
culture where there's permission to roll off. When you do
those things, then you create the environment where you can have a
conversation with someone and they go, I just don't think that that's the right fit.
This is a good fit for me. And it's or I don't think that I'm
thriving in this role. Like the expectations are more than I expected. I don't think
(33:02):
I'm doing a very good job. And when you
have that kind of environment where that healthy kind of conversation can happen,
then a person can self can fire themselves
and save face. It's not an embarrassing
thing for them. It's just an honest conversation. Yeah, yeah,
(33:23):
yeah. I mean, I kind of experienced this personally, you know, I mean I, I
did some time with, I don't three year olds, I forget what, what age
they were. But, but our church was
designed where, you know, it sort of followed the school year. So on
ramped up, you know, at the beginning of the school year and at the end,
I mean that was like the completion of your term. You were not committed for
(33:44):
the next year and forever after. And so, you know, I mean,
I tried something, I did a, I did a time in it and at the
end I was able to say I don't think this is really, I'm not the
right person for this. And all of that was perfectly
okay. So it was just super. No one has to be
embarrassed. No one has to feel like I disappointed anybody else.
(34:05):
That's the best possible scenario. But you have to create the culture where that
can happen. And a lot of you guys listening, you don't have that culture.
And so that's why it makes you kind of leave. Leaves these other options
as your own options. Yeah, yeah. So the second way now
to remove somebody or I guess in this case more is maybe to change where
they are, is the guided transition. And so sort of building
(34:28):
off of the first one here in which maybe they would
recognize it's not a good fit, this one has a little bit of
intervention. And we're like, we think maybe this isn't the best fit.
But again, going back to things that we've established, like we have character
identities, we have job descriptions, we use these
tools that are already in place or policies in which we can say, I
(34:50):
think we have a misalignment here. And
so, you know, I mean, just from my example, yeah, if, if I was completely
clueless and I think this seems good or I don't mind doing this and you
know, maybe somebody at another level of leadership
is like, he looks really Awkward. I'm sure he's as
comfortable as we would like somebody to be or as excited as we
(35:13):
want somebody to be. Then they could have pulled me in, you know, at the
end and go, you know, I don't know. How do you think? I'm not
sure if this is the right, Right space for you, but we want to
frame it as we're. We want to help them thrive somewhere else, which we
do. I mean, are you. That's your honest feeling about it,
is we want everybody here to thrive in just the right spot.
(35:36):
And so I think when we approach it from that angle, this
doesn't have to be, you know, awkward or uncomfortable.
It can be like the Peter Principle is real, which is,
you know, where people tend to get promoted to the level of their incompetence
in leadership pipeline. We work really hard to make sure. That that doesn't happen.
(35:57):
But sometimes people get promoted to a particular role or a particular
ministry and then, you know, they, they don't
love it, but they don't feel the permission to say, I don't like this.
So sometimes coming up to them and going, and just saying,
are you loving this? And then they might go, I'm
really not, you know, but I don't. I didn't want to disappoint you. I didn't
(36:20):
want to feel like I wasn't doing what I committed to doing.
And that's so freeing for people sometimes. I
mean, like, can we. Let's. Let's move you back to where you were, you
know, or let's move you to this different ministry. Yeah, that really
can be helpful. I mean, one of the classic areas that we see in the
church for this is the. Is the
(36:42):
children's Sunday school teacher. That is amazing. And they're like,
they're so amazing. Let's make them the, the children's
ministry director so that they can schedule all of the teachers.
It's just, it's a totally different job. Just because you're great at
being, you know, in the ministry doesn't mean you're going to be great at leading
the ministry. Yeah.
(37:04):
Yep, that's right. All right, our next one,
the Direct conversation. So we're kind of ramping these up a bit.
And so we've, we've, we've. We've got somebody that it, maybe
it even goes beyond this is not just that they're in the wrong place, but
their behavior is not where we would want it to be.
How they handle people isn't good. Any number of things. But
(37:28):
we first have Got to. Or. Or it's not a good fit and they're not
recognizing it. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. After
the, the suggested guided transition,
then we might just have to. This could be the same conversation, by the way.
We could be at, you know, the, the number two option here, the
guided transition. Yeah. They're not really
(37:50):
agreeing with your assessment that it seems like it's not a good fit and
if we know for sure it's not a good fit now, maybe we escalate to
this. But we're clear, we're calm,
we're specific, we have hopefully. I don't
know if it sometimes sounds like over the top to say we have
documentation. If there's been. There's been some really
(38:13):
negative behavior, we need documentation on
that. I would also go back to what we talked about in this, in the
second part, AJ which is if there were infractions
of behavior and they weren't dealt with
at the time, it's totally fair for that. It doesn't
necessarily change the situation because you might need to let them go from that position
(38:34):
anyway. But they have a valid point. If you go, you said nothing about
this when it happened. You should, if
something happens, you should address it when it happens
and not, not hold it back. But you should definitely document.
Hey, you. We've, you know,
that we have chatted over the last six months. Every, you
(38:56):
know, four out of the seven times you've been scheduled,
you were late, you know, and every time we talked
about that and afterwards and you said that you were
going to improve, but things have not improved, you know, or we've
chatted every month and you were supposed to do X responsibility and you
haven't been doing those things. And the ministry is too
(39:19):
important. And we have a lot of people relying on this ministry. We have to
do it really effectively. And we've talked about this four times.
Here are the times we've talked about it. You don't want them to say, well,
when did that happen? You go, well, you know, no, no, you need to
be really specific. And it should never be a surprise.
They should go, you know, we have talked about that. You know, and
(39:40):
I think the final thing on this is that you also have got to be
firm in this decision. And
again, depending on the scenario, you don't want the person having the
conversation with this person. Perhaps you have already had conversations
with other leaders or people that you report to so that
there is a unified decision, a decision has been made, then you
(40:03):
have to be firm in that. And there has to Be closure for it,
you know, at the end of the conversation that they, they walk away knowing
that something has been finalized here today. And it's not
ambiguous because in, in our desire
to want to preserve feelings and relationships, sometimes we
lack the clarity and the decisiveness in a conversation.
(40:26):
And people might walk away and reflect on it for a minute and go, well,
am I, Am I, Is this done? Where do I
stand? And you can't have that. These
are the tough things that come sometimes in a leadership position.
Yeah. It actually isn't kind like when you, when you're not clear.
So, you know, letting people know this isn't gonna, this isn't gonna be a
(40:50):
fit for you. Now, it depends on the situation. And the reason for
may be that you could say, we would like to find somewhere else where you
can serve and thrive in that. So we'd love to work with you on
finding. Finding a spot. And you have to run the risk. There are gonna be
some times where things like that happen and people will be so mad that they
will leave your church or they will say bad things about you. But.
(41:13):
Okay, I mean, if you've done everything the way that you're supposed
to and you've got clear evidence of different things and you're.
You've gave opportunities and you coached up, then who cares
if someone comes up and says something? You, you have the truth on your side.
That's right. You know, the Lord honors that in the long term, so don't worry
about it. Yeah, exactly. Right. You can't, you can't let
(41:35):
people. A fear that someone might say something negative about you or the church
prevent you from doing what's right for that ministry. Yeah. So,
yeah, and we've seen some extreme cases of this. And you have to
just have to sometimes weather those storms and keep going.
The wrong move is to capitulate, to
(41:55):
turn back on a decision and enable
bad behavior to happen
or something that would be detrimental to the church. Even worse in the long term.
Kind of gets us into our last point here when things escalate. And
we mentioned some more extreme cases at the top of the show. But
ethical breaches sometimes might require, you know,
(42:18):
a very decisive removal from an environment
in which people have made some really poor choices. If we get into
legal issues, things that actually would involve, you know, criminal
activity, then we have to bring the appropriate
authorities in on this. And we've got huge
years and years of issues with this in the church across
(42:41):
denominations and. Yeah.
That, you know, have become very public on this stuff.
It's Not a win. That's right. It is not a win to, to try to
protect people that have engaged in what would
be criminal behavior. And
then, you know, but if we are talking about non criminal but sin
(43:03):
issues, then we sometimes have to begin
some church discipline things that we, you know, would
follow the model in, in Mathieu. Yeah. Church discipline
issues would be one other where you go, okay, this person
hasn't violated a law, but
they've, you know, they've,
(43:25):
they've done something that they're not repenting of. And
that, that'd be maybe a distinction, I think that maybe some churches
miss is the goal of church
discipline is repentance. Now again, I'm not talking about things that are illegal.
Illegal things. You got to bring in the authorities. And even if there's
church discipline involved, there's also legal issues that
(43:47):
have to be involved. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about things
that are not illegal. The goal of church discipline is repentance.
The goal is not removal. I think some people go, well, if church discipline
happens, we have to remove them. That's not what the Bible
teaches. The Bible teaches restoration.
We want restoration. And it's only if there's unrepentant sin
(44:10):
that we, that we remove. So even
something really awful, you know, and heinous again, but
not illegal. You don't need to remove them from the church. They would
need to be removed from positions of authority. And,
but we want them there because we,
(44:31):
we want to see them restored and we want to see them grow. We want
to see them healthy. Healing comes from repenting
and confessing. That's how healing comes.
Sending people out does not heal them.
The, the point of casting people out is so that they would
miss the healing power of the community and want to come back
(44:53):
and say, I've changed and I'm sorry, I want to live
differently. And then you accept them back and go, okay, great, we'd love to
help you. And the church discipline thing,
that could be a whole nother episode, but churches just get this so wrong. Like
they either don't do it or they do it wrong or they do it too
harshly or, or not enough or not harshly enough.
(45:13):
It's a mess. So, you know,
but that would be, that's the extreme case. If there are 10
people in your church who need to be fired, half of them, if we're just
given permission, would move themselves. You know, four of
them would maybe require more of a conversation. And one
person you might have to deal with pretty harshly. But
(45:36):
I Think to kind of sum this up from my perspective,
I would say most volunteer firings
don't have to happen at all and can be
prevented by having a healthy volunteer culture. Unfortunately, a lot of your
churches don't have a healthy volunteer culture. Therefore, you have a lot of
volunteers who actually need to be fired. So you maybe need to
(45:58):
deal with the issues that you have at hand and then work on developing a
healthier culture to prevent those issues moving forward. Yeah.
Yep. What's, what's this saying, Scott? An ounce of prevention
is worth what, something? Pound of cure. Pound of cure.
Okay. Yep. All right. If you're outside the US A gram of prevention is worth
a kilo of cure.
(46:19):
A milligram of prevention is worth a gram,
a kilogram of cure.
All right. Well, this is a long episode because it's really important.
And Scott, we had a lot to say about this because we do care about
it. We also had a lot of side tangents there, but it's okay.
Brought up a lot of things we had to get off our chest with some
(46:42):
situations that we've seen. But we're glad you stuck with us to
the very end. I hope this is helpful. Yeah. Get in the healthy churches toolkit
because we do have, as we mentioned, a lot of resources on the prevention
side for developing healthy systems in your church, for engaging
volunteers and making sure that they continue to be great and to improve.
So go to HealthyChurchestoolKit.com Sign up for a 7 day free trial,
(47:04):
and grab whatever you need out of there to help your church. That's what we
built it for. So thanks for being with us, everybody.
If you have any thoughts on this, love to hear your. Your
horror stories in the comments that you've had to deal with or
the super awesome wins that you had whenever you
handled things and things got better. Those are, those are even
(47:26):
the, the better ones we would love to read about. So, yeah, thanks for
being with us. We'll see you again next week.
Sam.
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