June 25, 2025 • 25 mins
Looking to level up volunteer engagement in your church? In this episode of The Church Revitalization Podcast, we break down the best times and strategies for recruiting volunteers, drawing from current trends and real-world ministry experience. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or new to church revitalization, these insights will help you build a strong, servant-hearted volunteer team.
Hosts Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu—church consultants and revitalization experts—unpack practical principles and share firsthand stories to help you effectively connect people to their calling in your church community.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
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The top 5 moments to recruit volunteers (and which one you’re probably missing)
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Why getting people serving early matters for church “stickiness”
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How to leverage membership classes and spiritual gifts for team-building
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The strengths and pitfalls of ministry fairs and seasonal “pushes”
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Why recruiting is everyone’s job, not just the staff’s
🔗 Resources & Links:
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Try the Healthy Churches Toolkit free: healthychurchestoolkit.com
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Free access for international listeners: healthychurchesglobal.com
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Read the full episode article: malphursgroup.com/296
Connect with us on social & discover more revitalization resources at malphursgroup.com.
Ready to transform your volunteer culture? Hit play and let’s get started!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Let's recruit more volunteers in the church now on the Church
Revitalization Podcast.
(00:25):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and co host, A.J. matthew.
Well, little behind the scenes action here.
It's been a little while since we've been sitting here recording
podcasts, so it's good to be back in the saddle. Feeling a little
rusty. Feeling a little rusty. But I'm sure we'll get the hang of
(00:48):
it here quickly. Listener, you may
have noticed a bit of a trend the last couple
of weeks in the podcast. Two weeks ago in
your time, we released an episode on temperament and
how that relates to volunteer recruitment. And last
week we were busting some myths about spiritual
(01:10):
gifts and kind of tying that also into volunteer recruitment.
Today we're talking about timing really, like when is the best time
for volunteer recruitment? There's a lot of volunteer recruitment themes
and that's all on purpose. And that's because coming up this week,
this Thursday, we have a workshop Inside the Healthy Churches
Toolkit on volunteer recruitment, about recruiting
(01:32):
volunteers and leveraging divine design to do that really well.
We have an incredible tool that is inside
the Healthy Churches Toolkit that takes people in your
church through divine design discovery,
that includes DISC and some spiritual gifts assessments and then it and it
helps match them to potential volunteer roles that align well with their
(01:55):
gifting. And that's a tool that exists in Inside the Healthy
Church's toolkit. And we're going to be talking about how to use that
tool, how you could deploy that tool in your church, how you could use it
in some different ways. And so if you would be interested
in attending that workshop and checking out this tool, you can do that for
free by going to Healthychurchestoolkit.com and signing up for
(02:17):
a seven day trial where you can test drive it, see
it, Join us for the workshop. It's going to be on
Thursday as this is being released Thursday, June
26th at
11am Eastern Time. So there you
go, there's your promo. You should join us for that. Definitely should join us
(02:39):
for that. If you are outside of North America, go to
HealthyChurchesGlobal.com because the toolkit is available for
you at no cost. You'll get to take advantage of this new tool that Scott
just described. And be on that workshop if you're able to make
that time zone work out. Because. Yeah,
Eastern time. US Love to have you over there.
(03:00):
Yeah, listen, we. I hear this. We. We designed this tool because
when we take churches through the leadership pipeline process,
one of the most constant refrains I was hearing from leaders
was, do you have a good online tool for spiritual gifts and disc?
And is there anything that helps people, like automatically
help people kind of figure out what would be a good fit for them?
(03:23):
Um, there's just not a lot out there. I'm not saying there's nothing, but there's
not a lot out there that does that. And so we saw an
opportunity to. To create a tool that lives alongside all the other
incredible tools inside the Healthy Churches toolkit. And it
works great. It's. It's. I'm really, really proud of that and
I think it can really bless your church. So please, definitely join us. There's a
(03:45):
lot of disc assessments out there that you could do for free. There's a lot
of spiritual gifts assessments you can do for free. There is not much, if
anything in the space that takes that information, puts it in the conte
of church volunteer spaces and severely
shortcuts the time. Because you could obviously do this manually,
but that would be really time consuming to go through that
(04:06):
and, and think about it or even to create like your own internal,
like chart or something like this equates to that. So, yeah,
yeah, we just saved you a ton of time and I think you're gonna love
it. Definitely try it out. Yep. All right, so today we're talking about
when is the best time for volunteer recruitment. And I mean, like,
I kind of mean season, I kind of mean timing.
(04:29):
Like, what are some best practices for volunteer recruitment as it relates to
when we should do this? And so we've got five, five things
for you to think about and we'll hop into them. Let's go. The first one
is when a person is new to your church. This is a conversation
that we have more and more. Scott. I think definitely in the last three or
four years, we used to talk a lot in, like, in
(04:51):
discipleship pathway, you was talking about like a. An engagement, a
gather, a worship step in a pathway. And then we would look at
a growth step, then we would look at a service step. And a lot of
churches have discovered it's way easier to have people
instead of trying to get them into a group or a class, to get them
engaged in serving. Depending on, of course, lots of factors here. You know, I mean,
(05:14):
their Maturity level, whether they're a believer or not even. And
so that's what we're talking about here. When they're new to the church, it may
be a great time to introduce them to areas that
they could serve in the church. And there are, you know, obviously tons
of spaces that people can fit into. And again, you know,
we don't do this just, you know, on a whim, like, ah, whatever. There's
(05:35):
just go, go do that. We don't know anything about you just go do that.
There's a lot more to that. But yeah, this is a great time when people
are new and, and this, I mean it's also, it's worth mentioning
there's Scott, I know both of us, we
engage with a lot of churches that have this, this
idea of, well, we don't want to rush people into that or we don't want
(05:56):
to push people into that or they need time to heal, they need time
to rest. Sure, that might be true of some people.
I would not suggest that as a blanket for all people
because some people are fired up and ready to go
and you just need to get to know their life circumstance. I mean, what has
brought into your church. But I would say the majority
(06:18):
of people probably coming to your church would be ready
to get engaged in a relatively short period of time
and you could find a place that they could begin building community and
express the gifts that they've been given, benefit others and
find blessing for themselves. Yeah, I mean we,
we, as you said, we kind of share this all the time. Now
(06:42):
that you really want to narrow that delta between
when someone first starts attending your church and when they get
connected into volunteering. One, because they're never
going to be more excited about your church than when they, when they're
new. And two, they've not had a chance
to build any bad habits of just sitting, you know, getting used to everything
(07:05):
done for them. And so they're still kind of willing to
pitch in. Three, they're interested in forming
relationships. And you can form relationships faster in that, that
volunteering environment than in, than in a small group environment. Often
because it's less intimidating. Is, would be the reason, the reason
why. And you know, like you
(07:27):
mentioned, we're not saying make someone a small group leader on day one because
you don't know them, but there are all kinds of low commitment
and low responsibility
type opportunities. Being a greeter, working on the tech team,
making coffee. There are all kinds of places where people can jump in
relatively quickly with minimal risk
(07:51):
to, to the church. And Going well what if they're not qualified? Well, the
qualifications are pretty low. Probably not. You're not going to throw them in children's ministry
or student ministry or something like that without running background checks and knowing them and
trusting them. But there are places where you can get people plugged in really quickly
and we, we have seen this be highly effective in
getting, you know, increasing the stickiness of a church
(08:13):
when you can get them connected to serving as quickly as possible.
So that would be definitely number one. When someone is new, you want to get
them serving as quickly as you can. Yeah. Kind of a good
dovetail to the second one. It is, yeah. The second one is probably, it's
happening more so in that early relationship stage with
somebody new. Some people might delay this, but we're talking about when
(08:35):
they go through your membership class could even be like a, a
newcomer's class wouldn't even have to be membership
necessarily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So but one of these
more formal introduction environments to the
church and if they are going for membership then yeah, you
know, having, integrating some divine
(08:57):
discovery, divine design, discovery elements to that is
a. Would be something we would highly recommend. You may for
example have them take the
assessment we've got a link for. You here out of our
Healthy Churches toolkit subscription. Healthy Churches toolkit.com But yeah,
membership class, great time to take to have that be
(09:19):
a step into then a place of serving in the church.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is really
important. In fact I would contend
that if you haven't caught them up into serving earlier,
then this would be the place where you would almost put a
requirement less on them. Although you maybe it is that
(09:41):
but as sort of a pushed outcome from the
leadership level or like where that's a metric that you're tracking what
percentage of people who take the newcomer class or the
new member class, what percentage of those people get connected into a
team as they come out of that class and
really put the pressure on your leadership and
(10:04):
the people who are running that class to make sure and facilitate that that
happens. And again, I hate to
keep plugging this but when you have a tool like what we have in the
toolkit that makes it so much easier because now the reason
why this, the this is kind of skipping to the third point here.
But the reason why churches will say well we've tried this,
(10:26):
we've tried having people take a spiritual gifts test, but then
they don't. That doesn't move the needle on volunteering. Well that's because there's
an extra step that's needed. It isn't just enough to go. Here are your gifts.
You have to then match that up with. And here are the specific
opportunities that match up to that gifts. That's that bridge that's often
missing when you equip someone with that information. But then you don't give them
(10:49):
something actionable to follow up on that. It's a problem.
So I'll stop there because that's kind of a bridge maybe to the next.
The next point. Yeah, yeah. Somewhat. Yeah. Our, our third
point is you could work on your engagement
after doing or during a divine design series. I would
also say, I mean, even a class because sometimes a membership class might
(11:12):
be separate from a divine design discovery class.
But specifically as. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.
In. Yeah. This particular point, we're kind of, we're labeling it more as divine
design series. So you could be preaching about this. I mean you could be doing
a series on spiritual gifts and have that culminate then into an
assessment that could. Honestly,
(11:34):
our one in the toolkit can be done in a
matter of minutes. I mean you, you literally can. Minutes have people do
this like at the end, you know. Yeah. End of the worship service, about
another 10 minutes. The worship service. Put a QR code on the screen and have
people. I wouldn't overload our system, but I. Yeah, I think probably. Good.
We'll get back to you on whether this is a good idea. We'll let you
(11:56):
know. We've never, we haven't stress test the thing to see if we loaded
it with 300 entries at once. If that would somehow crash it.
In general, it would be a good idea to have people do this
type of work when you're preaching through this and you know, I mean,
bringing this, bringing this to mind for them, showing them in
God's word, how he has equipped us and gifted
(12:18):
us and called us to be participating in the work of the
ministry. So fantastic. Time to go. You know what? Here's, here's the
way that we do this at our church and really encourage people to
take advantage of that opportunity. Totally. And,
and so the first two things we've talked about, really
people who are new, I mean those are. That is, the best pool of
(12:41):
potential volunteers in your church are people who are
new. They're. They're definitely the ones who are most likely to
say yes, but everyone else,
the people who are at your church now
but who aren't serving right now or not serving regularly. I
would push churches. Sometimes they go, oh no, we have really high volunteer engagement and
(13:03):
I go, well, take out the events. I'm not talking about they helped at VBS
or, you know, they made a. They decorated the. Their
trunk for Trunk or Treat. I'm talking about people who are volunteering at least once
a month in a particular ministry. And then they
go, okay, well, that number's a lot lower. All right, so you. You maybe have
60% of your people who aren't serving, 65% of your people who aren't
(13:25):
serving on. On that kind of regularity.
And so you got to get those people activated. You missed the boat
on them being new and activating them, then that would have been the
easiest one time to activate them. The second best
time would be pushing them through a small group training series
or a sermon series or something like that, where you're putting it back in their
(13:47):
mind or going, you know, spending time doing three weeks
on Ephesians 4, you know, or doing a series
on all of the places where the Bible talks about spiritual gifts.
So that's what. That's. First Corinthians 1, Corinthians 12
12, Ephesians 4. There's one more
(14:08):
not coming to my brain right now. Some pastor is yelling at me in his
vehicle. But, you know, when.
When you do a series like that, it gives an opportunity to. To try and
scoop up some of those folks that maybe fell through the cracks
in a poor assimilation process on the front end. And you can't do
it one time. That'd be the other mistake the churches make is they go, well,
(14:30):
we did a sermon series on this. I go, well, when did you do it?
Four years ago. Okay, well, you could do something like
this, some version of this every year, mix it up. Don't do the same thing
every year, but you could do something like this every
year and catch some people into the
volunteer recruitment process. So be thinking about
(14:50):
that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that could even pair in with
our fourth one. And that is during kind of this fall push, this
return, the one that. Everyone expected us to say first.
And for us, it's an, oh, by the way, fall push. Okay.
But, yeah, you know, I mean, if you did a series on this, you know,
(15:10):
leading up to, you know, like in. In August or something, and then.
And then have it pair up with getting people engaged
when everybody's, you know, kids are going back to school in the US
and kind of re. Engaging in church after the summer
slump, be it real or be it imaginary, it's
a good time to do that. Yeah. You know, I mean, almost. You could almost
(15:33):
carve out any time of year and just kind of make a big deal about
it. Like, hey, it's, you know, post church, we really want
to get everybody engaged. Or it's a new year in January, we want to get
everybody engaged. I think you can promote things
in a way that, you know, builds some excitement and people like the fall
because. It gives an opportunity for a whole school year's worth of
(15:55):
volunteer engagement. And I get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even saying it doesn't
work. I think it. I think it does work. I don't think it works as
well as churches want to think it will work, which is why
we're trying to talk about other places where you need to be thinking about volunteer
engagement. You know, I'm also not a massive, huge
fan of the, of the
(16:18):
ministry fair. It's so popular. People love to do.
People love to run a ministry fair. But what it does is it
puts all of those ministries in competition with one another.
Yeah. And it also,
I think, again, it kind of makes
(16:39):
the volunteers think, well, which one seems the most
cool? Or these people are really desperate, they need
the most help. Or I really like Jim,
so I guess I'll go serve on his team because I, you know, I
appreciate him and I appreciate the work that he's doing, which
are all okay. But those aren't the best reasons for a volunteer
(17:01):
to serve. The best reason would be they have a calling
towards something in particular and a gifting towards that thing. That's.
That's the best reason for them to volunteer in a particular
place because it's more predictive of their staying
long term in that role. You compare that up. I mean, if you
had them do a divine design discovery before the ministry fair.
(17:23):
Yeah. And then, you know, like, oh, if you're, if you got, you know,
blue. If you, you know, we got blue ministries over here,
might still be some competition between those that you would be maybe a good fit
for, but at least you could help narrow things down and take away
some of the art. Yeah. Take a twist on the ministry fair, ministry
affairs. Also good. Because it maybe brings an awareness
(17:45):
to ministries that are happening in your church that maybe people don't have an
awareness of. So I'm not totally, like, ragging on
ministry fairs, but I am suggesting that they're not as
effective for volunteer recruitment as many churches want them
to be. And so I don't think you should hang your hat on them
the way that churches often do.
(18:09):
They're very often disappointed. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. And finally, our Last one. The best time to
recruit volunteers all the time.
Yeah, continuously. This really,
we're talking culture shift in the church. And one of the ways that we,
that we talk about this beginning to happen is
(18:32):
sort of decentralizing recruitment
into ministry leaders. And so,
you know, and from a top down, most of the stuff happens top down. I
mean, we, we train people, we deploy people, we evaluate, you know,
but as a part of our process for leading people in the church,
recruitment should be part of it from down to actually fairly
(18:54):
low level serving spaces when people can be on the
lookout for people that they know within their sphere of influence.
Like, I'm looking for somebody and I've gotten to know some people that I think
could be a good fit for this. It doesn't, doesn't mean you don't still
maybe take them through a tool. Like we're, like we're, you know, promoting
through the toolkit. But, but move your recruitment down
(19:16):
to a broader group of people and not
ministry. You know, three ministry leaders that oversee all of, like all of our
discipleship ministries are led by one person. And that person has to do all the
recruiting. Just there's, there's no need to, you
know, to have it be that, that narrow.
And you can affect the culture of your church to be thinking,
(19:40):
get a lot of people thinking about, we want more people serving.
And, and I think over time and with some processes and good
communication, you can totally make that happen. Yeah. I think a
mistake that churches make, especially when they get bigger, is they think,
I can't wait until we have enough resources that we can hire
(20:00):
a volunteer coordinator. It's a position I see in a lot of
churches that have the money to have one. And
I'm okay with that kind of a position. If the position
is something like an assimilation coordinator, where they're
focusing on managing and overseeing the
systems for people who are new. Like when someone enters
(20:22):
the church, are we helping them get connected to a, you know,
into the new member class so that we can take them through divine design things
so they can get connected? I think there's a place for that kind of a
role for churches that can afford it. But when the volunteer
coordinator role becomes, well,
we don't have a system. We have Sheila, and
(20:43):
Sheila is the one who recruits all of our volunteers.
That's not good, because then if Sheila quits or Sheila's no good at her job,
then, then we're kind of back to square one. I like the way that
you said that. And it's something we say all the Time to churches. We need
to decentralize volunteer recruitment and normalize that
as an ongoing process. We need systems and not a
(21:05):
person. And so the best time to
recruit volunteers is all the time. And it's not
a one like there's no one silver bullet. You need all of these things.
You know, aggressively try to recruit people who are new. Integrate
divine design stuff into your new member class. Try to catch people
up through regular divine design discovery
(21:29):
opportunities, whether that be sermon series or small groups or one off
classes. Do the fall push. Just don't hang your hat
entirely on it. Do you know, do the ministry fair. But
just be thinking of this as volunteer recruitment and
leadership development is everyone's problem. It's everyone's
responsibility. Because we believe Ephesians 4,
(21:51):
where Paul teaches us that we are one
body. And maturity comes from the whole body working together,
building up one another towards spiritual maturity. So
I guess that would be my last point that I want to make is more
of a theological one. AJ it's that our motivations for
volunteer recruitment can't be. We need enough people to get the job done.
(22:13):
The motivation for volunteer recruitment needs to be people
are not fully mature in our. And our, in our
local body won't be as effective as it can be
until every person realizes
like actualizes their
calling. And because we want that for each person, we're not going
(22:36):
to give up until everybody is living out their calling. Yeah,
too often the attitude is, I mean really serving
and tithing or giving whatever, however you want to look at it
are too often looked at as the downside
to the faith. You know, I mean you get all these blessings from Jesus, but
I got to pay this back. I gotta. And that's not it at
(22:58):
all. Both aspects are a blessing to
the giver, to the one serving. And, and I think we need to
change our tone and I think we need to be excited about inviting
people into this aspect of church, Christianity,
faith, relationship with Christ, that there is a
benefit and a blessing to you, the one participating in the
(23:21):
work of the ministry. And scripture makes that abundantly clear.
It's never talked about as a burden or an
obligation. It is, it is an aspect of
blessing. And, and I think we need to.
That's how our tone needs to be. Totally. Yeah. My
encouragement to you today. Agreed. All right,
(23:44):
well, hey, that's it. This is episode
296 of the Church Revitalization Podcast. You'll see the
links to the article in the description below.
Whether you're listening on, on your favorite podcast app or
watching on YouTube. If you are watching on YouTube please hit that
like button. Hit that subscribe button. Let us know that you're there. Share it with
(24:05):
a friend and ministry. Hope this blesses and encourages you.
And I want to remind you, go to HealthyChurchestoolkit.com
and sign up for free for seven days. Join us for our workshop
this week and see if this
tool is a good fit for you. See if, see if it really blesses your
church. I believe that it will. We've made it to address a
(24:28):
need that we've seen again and again and again and it's a need that probably
exists in your church too. So we hope that it blesses you. Oh
and I mean I didn't know. Did you want to say anything? A.J.
It sound like you were. You were about done. I was just going to smile.
Bye. I'm leaving that in awkward silence. We love you
guys. We'll see you next week. Bye.
Let's recruit more volunteers in the church now on the Church
Revitalization Podcast.
(00:25):
Welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and co host, A.J. matthew.
Well, little behind the scenes action here.
It's been a little while since we've been sitting here recording
podcasts, so it's good to be back in the saddle. Feeling a little
rusty. Feeling a little rusty. But I'm sure we'll get the hang of
(00:48):
it here quickly. Listener, you may
have noticed a bit of a trend the last couple
of weeks in the podcast. Two weeks ago in
your time, we released an episode on temperament and
how that relates to volunteer recruitment. And last
week we were busting some myths about spiritual
(01:10):
gifts and kind of tying that also into volunteer recruitment.
Today we're talking about timing really, like when is the best time
for volunteer recruitment? There's a lot of volunteer recruitment themes
and that's all on purpose. And that's because coming up this week,
this Thursday, we have a workshop Inside the Healthy Churches
Toolkit on volunteer recruitment, about recruiting
(01:32):
volunteers and leveraging divine design to do that really well.
We have an incredible tool that is inside
the Healthy Churches Toolkit that takes people in your
church through divine design discovery,
that includes DISC and some spiritual gifts assessments and then it and it
helps match them to potential volunteer roles that align well with their
(01:55):
gifting. And that's a tool that exists in Inside the Healthy
Church's toolkit. And we're going to be talking about how to use that
tool, how you could deploy that tool in your church, how you could use it
in some different ways. And so if you would be interested
in attending that workshop and checking out this tool, you can do that for
free by going to Healthychurchestoolkit.com and signing up for
(02:17):
a seven day trial where you can test drive it, see
it, Join us for the workshop. It's going to be on
Thursday as this is being released Thursday, June
26th at
11am Eastern Time. So there you
go, there's your promo. You should join us for that. Definitely should join us
(02:39):
for that. If you are outside of North America, go to
HealthyChurchesGlobal.com because the toolkit is available for
you at no cost. You'll get to take advantage of this new tool that Scott
just described. And be on that workshop if you're able to make
that time zone work out. Because. Yeah,
Eastern time. US Love to have you over there.
(03:00):
Yeah, listen, we. I hear this. We. We designed this tool because
when we take churches through the leadership pipeline process,
one of the most constant refrains I was hearing from leaders
was, do you have a good online tool for spiritual gifts and disc?
And is there anything that helps people, like automatically
help people kind of figure out what would be a good fit for them?
(03:23):
Um, there's just not a lot out there. I'm not saying there's nothing, but there's
not a lot out there that does that. And so we saw an
opportunity to. To create a tool that lives alongside all the other
incredible tools inside the Healthy Churches toolkit. And it
works great. It's. It's. I'm really, really proud of that and
I think it can really bless your church. So please, definitely join us. There's a
(03:45):
lot of disc assessments out there that you could do for free. There's a lot
of spiritual gifts assessments you can do for free. There is not much, if
anything in the space that takes that information, puts it in the conte
of church volunteer spaces and severely
shortcuts the time. Because you could obviously do this manually,
but that would be really time consuming to go through that
(04:06):
and, and think about it or even to create like your own internal,
like chart or something like this equates to that. So, yeah,
yeah, we just saved you a ton of time and I think you're gonna love
it. Definitely try it out. Yep. All right, so today we're talking about
when is the best time for volunteer recruitment. And I mean, like,
I kind of mean season, I kind of mean timing.
(04:29):
Like, what are some best practices for volunteer recruitment as it relates to
when we should do this? And so we've got five, five things
for you to think about and we'll hop into them. Let's go. The first one
is when a person is new to your church. This is a conversation
that we have more and more. Scott. I think definitely in the last three or
four years, we used to talk a lot in, like, in
(04:51):
discipleship pathway, you was talking about like a. An engagement, a
gather, a worship step in a pathway. And then we would look at
a growth step, then we would look at a service step. And a lot of
churches have discovered it's way easier to have people
instead of trying to get them into a group or a class, to get them
engaged in serving. Depending on, of course, lots of factors here. You know, I mean,
(05:14):
their Maturity level, whether they're a believer or not even. And
so that's what we're talking about here. When they're new to the church, it may
be a great time to introduce them to areas that
they could serve in the church. And there are, you know, obviously tons
of spaces that people can fit into. And again, you know,
we don't do this just, you know, on a whim, like, ah, whatever. There's
(05:35):
just go, go do that. We don't know anything about you just go do that.
There's a lot more to that. But yeah, this is a great time when people
are new and, and this, I mean it's also, it's worth mentioning
there's Scott, I know both of us, we
engage with a lot of churches that have this, this
idea of, well, we don't want to rush people into that or we don't want
(05:56):
to push people into that or they need time to heal, they need time
to rest. Sure, that might be true of some people.
I would not suggest that as a blanket for all people
because some people are fired up and ready to go
and you just need to get to know their life circumstance. I mean, what has
brought into your church. But I would say the majority
(06:18):
of people probably coming to your church would be ready
to get engaged in a relatively short period of time
and you could find a place that they could begin building community and
express the gifts that they've been given, benefit others and
find blessing for themselves. Yeah, I mean we,
we, as you said, we kind of share this all the time. Now
(06:42):
that you really want to narrow that delta between
when someone first starts attending your church and when they get
connected into volunteering. One, because they're never
going to be more excited about your church than when they, when they're
new. And two, they've not had a chance
to build any bad habits of just sitting, you know, getting used to everything
(07:05):
done for them. And so they're still kind of willing to
pitch in. Three, they're interested in forming
relationships. And you can form relationships faster in that, that
volunteering environment than in, than in a small group environment. Often
because it's less intimidating. Is, would be the reason, the reason
why. And you know, like you
(07:27):
mentioned, we're not saying make someone a small group leader on day one because
you don't know them, but there are all kinds of low commitment
and low responsibility
type opportunities. Being a greeter, working on the tech team,
making coffee. There are all kinds of places where people can jump in
relatively quickly with minimal risk
(07:51):
to, to the church. And Going well what if they're not qualified? Well, the
qualifications are pretty low. Probably not. You're not going to throw them in children's ministry
or student ministry or something like that without running background checks and knowing them and
trusting them. But there are places where you can get people plugged in really quickly
and we, we have seen this be highly effective in
getting, you know, increasing the stickiness of a church
(08:13):
when you can get them connected to serving as quickly as possible.
So that would be definitely number one. When someone is new, you want to get
them serving as quickly as you can. Yeah. Kind of a good
dovetail to the second one. It is, yeah. The second one is probably, it's
happening more so in that early relationship stage with
somebody new. Some people might delay this, but we're talking about when
(08:35):
they go through your membership class could even be like a, a
newcomer's class wouldn't even have to be membership
necessarily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So but one of these
more formal introduction environments to the
church and if they are going for membership then yeah, you
know, having, integrating some divine
(08:57):
discovery, divine design, discovery elements to that is
a. Would be something we would highly recommend. You may for
example have them take the
assessment we've got a link for. You here out of our
Healthy Churches toolkit subscription. Healthy Churches toolkit.com But yeah,
membership class, great time to take to have that be
(09:19):
a step into then a place of serving in the church.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is really
important. In fact I would contend
that if you haven't caught them up into serving earlier,
then this would be the place where you would almost put a
requirement less on them. Although you maybe it is that
(09:41):
but as sort of a pushed outcome from the
leadership level or like where that's a metric that you're tracking what
percentage of people who take the newcomer class or the
new member class, what percentage of those people get connected into a
team as they come out of that class and
really put the pressure on your leadership and
(10:04):
the people who are running that class to make sure and facilitate that that
happens. And again, I hate to
keep plugging this but when you have a tool like what we have in the
toolkit that makes it so much easier because now the reason
why this, the this is kind of skipping to the third point here.
But the reason why churches will say well we've tried this,
(10:26):
we've tried having people take a spiritual gifts test, but then
they don't. That doesn't move the needle on volunteering. Well that's because there's
an extra step that's needed. It isn't just enough to go. Here are your gifts.
You have to then match that up with. And here are the specific
opportunities that match up to that gifts. That's that bridge that's often
missing when you equip someone with that information. But then you don't give them
(10:49):
something actionable to follow up on that. It's a problem.
So I'll stop there because that's kind of a bridge maybe to the next.
The next point. Yeah, yeah. Somewhat. Yeah. Our, our third
point is you could work on your engagement
after doing or during a divine design series. I would
also say, I mean, even a class because sometimes a membership class might
(11:12):
be separate from a divine design discovery class.
But specifically as. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.
In. Yeah. This particular point, we're kind of, we're labeling it more as divine
design series. So you could be preaching about this. I mean you could be doing
a series on spiritual gifts and have that culminate then into an
assessment that could. Honestly,
(11:34):
our one in the toolkit can be done in a
matter of minutes. I mean you, you literally can. Minutes have people do
this like at the end, you know. Yeah. End of the worship service, about
another 10 minutes. The worship service. Put a QR code on the screen and have
people. I wouldn't overload our system, but I. Yeah, I think probably. Good.
We'll get back to you on whether this is a good idea. We'll let you
(11:56):
know. We've never, we haven't stress test the thing to see if we loaded
it with 300 entries at once. If that would somehow crash it.
In general, it would be a good idea to have people do this
type of work when you're preaching through this and you know, I mean,
bringing this, bringing this to mind for them, showing them in
God's word, how he has equipped us and gifted
(12:18):
us and called us to be participating in the work of the
ministry. So fantastic. Time to go. You know what? Here's, here's the
way that we do this at our church and really encourage people to
take advantage of that opportunity. Totally. And,
and so the first two things we've talked about, really
people who are new, I mean those are. That is, the best pool of
(12:41):
potential volunteers in your church are people who are
new. They're. They're definitely the ones who are most likely to
say yes, but everyone else,
the people who are at your church now
but who aren't serving right now or not serving regularly. I
would push churches. Sometimes they go, oh no, we have really high volunteer engagement and
(13:03):
I go, well, take out the events. I'm not talking about they helped at VBS
or, you know, they made a. They decorated the. Their
trunk for Trunk or Treat. I'm talking about people who are volunteering at least once
a month in a particular ministry. And then they
go, okay, well, that number's a lot lower. All right, so you. You maybe have
60% of your people who aren't serving, 65% of your people who aren't
(13:25):
serving on. On that kind of regularity.
And so you got to get those people activated. You missed the boat
on them being new and activating them, then that would have been the
easiest one time to activate them. The second best
time would be pushing them through a small group training series
or a sermon series or something like that, where you're putting it back in their
(13:47):
mind or going, you know, spending time doing three weeks
on Ephesians 4, you know, or doing a series
on all of the places where the Bible talks about spiritual gifts.
So that's what. That's. First Corinthians 1, Corinthians 12
12, Ephesians 4. There's one more
(14:08):
not coming to my brain right now. Some pastor is yelling at me in his
vehicle. But, you know, when.
When you do a series like that, it gives an opportunity to. To try and
scoop up some of those folks that maybe fell through the cracks
in a poor assimilation process on the front end. And you can't do
it one time. That'd be the other mistake the churches make is they go, well,
(14:30):
we did a sermon series on this. I go, well, when did you do it?
Four years ago. Okay, well, you could do something like
this, some version of this every year, mix it up. Don't do the same thing
every year, but you could do something like this every
year and catch some people into the
volunteer recruitment process. So be thinking about
(14:50):
that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that could even pair in with
our fourth one. And that is during kind of this fall push, this
return, the one that. Everyone expected us to say first.
And for us, it's an, oh, by the way, fall push. Okay.
But, yeah, you know, I mean, if you did a series on this, you know,
(15:10):
leading up to, you know, like in. In August or something, and then.
And then have it pair up with getting people engaged
when everybody's, you know, kids are going back to school in the US
and kind of re. Engaging in church after the summer
slump, be it real or be it imaginary, it's
a good time to do that. Yeah. You know, I mean, almost. You could almost
(15:33):
carve out any time of year and just kind of make a big deal about
it. Like, hey, it's, you know, post church, we really want
to get everybody engaged. Or it's a new year in January, we want to get
everybody engaged. I think you can promote things
in a way that, you know, builds some excitement and people like the fall
because. It gives an opportunity for a whole school year's worth of
(15:55):
volunteer engagement. And I get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even saying it doesn't
work. I think it. I think it does work. I don't think it works as
well as churches want to think it will work, which is why
we're trying to talk about other places where you need to be thinking about volunteer
engagement. You know, I'm also not a massive, huge
fan of the, of the
(16:18):
ministry fair. It's so popular. People love to do.
People love to run a ministry fair. But what it does is it
puts all of those ministries in competition with one another.
Yeah. And it also,
I think, again, it kind of makes
(16:39):
the volunteers think, well, which one seems the most
cool? Or these people are really desperate, they need
the most help. Or I really like Jim,
so I guess I'll go serve on his team because I, you know, I
appreciate him and I appreciate the work that he's doing, which
are all okay. But those aren't the best reasons for a volunteer
(17:01):
to serve. The best reason would be they have a calling
towards something in particular and a gifting towards that thing. That's.
That's the best reason for them to volunteer in a particular
place because it's more predictive of their staying
long term in that role. You compare that up. I mean, if you
had them do a divine design discovery before the ministry fair.
(17:23):
Yeah. And then, you know, like, oh, if you're, if you got, you know,
blue. If you, you know, we got blue ministries over here,
might still be some competition between those that you would be maybe a good fit
for, but at least you could help narrow things down and take away
some of the art. Yeah. Take a twist on the ministry fair, ministry
affairs. Also good. Because it maybe brings an awareness
(17:45):
to ministries that are happening in your church that maybe people don't have an
awareness of. So I'm not totally, like, ragging on
ministry fairs, but I am suggesting that they're not as
effective for volunteer recruitment as many churches want them
to be. And so I don't think you should hang your hat on them
the way that churches often do.
(18:09):
They're very often disappointed. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. And finally, our Last one. The best time to
recruit volunteers all the time.
Yeah, continuously. This really,
we're talking culture shift in the church. And one of the ways that we,
that we talk about this beginning to happen is
(18:32):
sort of decentralizing recruitment
into ministry leaders. And so,
you know, and from a top down, most of the stuff happens top down. I
mean, we, we train people, we deploy people, we evaluate, you know,
but as a part of our process for leading people in the church,
recruitment should be part of it from down to actually fairly
(18:54):
low level serving spaces when people can be on the
lookout for people that they know within their sphere of influence.
Like, I'm looking for somebody and I've gotten to know some people that I think
could be a good fit for this. It doesn't, doesn't mean you don't still
maybe take them through a tool. Like we're, like we're, you know, promoting
through the toolkit. But, but move your recruitment down
(19:16):
to a broader group of people and not
ministry. You know, three ministry leaders that oversee all of, like all of our
discipleship ministries are led by one person. And that person has to do all the
recruiting. Just there's, there's no need to, you
know, to have it be that, that narrow.
And you can affect the culture of your church to be thinking,
(19:40):
get a lot of people thinking about, we want more people serving.
And, and I think over time and with some processes and good
communication, you can totally make that happen. Yeah. I think a
mistake that churches make, especially when they get bigger, is they think,
I can't wait until we have enough resources that we can hire
(20:00):
a volunteer coordinator. It's a position I see in a lot of
churches that have the money to have one. And
I'm okay with that kind of a position. If the position
is something like an assimilation coordinator, where they're
focusing on managing and overseeing the
systems for people who are new. Like when someone enters
(20:22):
the church, are we helping them get connected to a, you know,
into the new member class so that we can take them through divine design things
so they can get connected? I think there's a place for that kind of a
role for churches that can afford it. But when the volunteer
coordinator role becomes, well,
we don't have a system. We have Sheila, and
(20:43):
Sheila is the one who recruits all of our volunteers.
That's not good, because then if Sheila quits or Sheila's no good at her job,
then, then we're kind of back to square one. I like the way that
you said that. And it's something we say all the Time to churches. We need
to decentralize volunteer recruitment and normalize that
as an ongoing process. We need systems and not a
(21:05):
person. And so the best time to
recruit volunteers is all the time. And it's not
a one like there's no one silver bullet. You need all of these things.
You know, aggressively try to recruit people who are new. Integrate
divine design stuff into your new member class. Try to catch people
up through regular divine design discovery
(21:29):
opportunities, whether that be sermon series or small groups or one off
classes. Do the fall push. Just don't hang your hat
entirely on it. Do you know, do the ministry fair. But
just be thinking of this as volunteer recruitment and
leadership development is everyone's problem. It's everyone's
responsibility. Because we believe Ephesians 4,
(21:51):
where Paul teaches us that we are one
body. And maturity comes from the whole body working together,
building up one another towards spiritual maturity. So
I guess that would be my last point that I want to make is more
of a theological one. AJ it's that our motivations for
volunteer recruitment can't be. We need enough people to get the job done.
(22:13):
The motivation for volunteer recruitment needs to be people
are not fully mature in our. And our, in our
local body won't be as effective as it can be
until every person realizes
like actualizes their
calling. And because we want that for each person, we're not going
(22:36):
to give up until everybody is living out their calling. Yeah,
too often the attitude is, I mean really serving
and tithing or giving whatever, however you want to look at it
are too often looked at as the downside
to the faith. You know, I mean you get all these blessings from Jesus, but
I got to pay this back. I gotta. And that's not it at
(22:58):
all. Both aspects are a blessing to
the giver, to the one serving. And, and I think we need to
change our tone and I think we need to be excited about inviting
people into this aspect of church, Christianity,
faith, relationship with Christ, that there is a
benefit and a blessing to you, the one participating in the
(23:21):
work of the ministry. And scripture makes that abundantly clear.
It's never talked about as a burden or an
obligation. It is, it is an aspect of
blessing. And, and I think we need to.
That's how our tone needs to be. Totally. Yeah. My
encouragement to you today. Agreed. All right,
(23:44):
well, hey, that's it. This is episode
296 of the Church Revitalization Podcast. You'll see the
links to the article in the description below.
Whether you're listening on, on your favorite podcast app or
watching on YouTube. If you are watching on YouTube please hit that
like button. Hit that subscribe button. Let us know that you're there. Share it with
(24:05):
a friend and ministry. Hope this blesses and encourages you.
And I want to remind you, go to HealthyChurchestoolkit.com
and sign up for free for seven days. Join us for our workshop
this week and see if this
tool is a good fit for you. See if, see if it really blesses your
church. I believe that it will. We've made it to address a
(24:28):
need that we've seen again and again and again and it's a need that probably
exists in your church too. So we hope that it blesses you. Oh
and I mean I didn't know. Did you want to say anything? A.J.
It sound like you were. You were about done. I was just going to smile.
Bye. I'm leaving that in awkward silence. We love you
guys. We'll see you next week. Bye.
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