Why Your Church Doesn’t Have Enough Volunteers
We’ve all felt it. The dreaded realization that in order to run our kids ministry, have greeters at every door, serve coffee, and staff the security team, we need to onboard 100 volunteers by Sunday.
Okay, maybe we don’t need quite that many, but when we’re trying to staff positions and don’t have enough people, the prospect of filling 10 empty spaces can certainly feel like we’re trying to fill 100.
So how do we recruit more volunteers? Well, a volunteer shortage isn’t always a recruiting problem. It may be an ownership, clarity, onboarding, or retention problem. In this article, we’ll explore five reasons that may be contributing to your church’s lack of volunteers.
1. People don’t feel responsible for the mission.
If your church attendance is growing but your volunteer teams aren’t, it’s possible that your church members don’t feel responsible for your church’s mission. They may think that executing the mission is for the pastors and the church staff.
However, in Ephesians 4:11-12, we learn that it’s the pastor’s job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Biblically, a “saint” means anyone who has been made righteous by putting their faith in Jesus Christ. This means that it’s the responsibility of our church members to do the work of the ministry, which happens in large part through volunteering, and it’s our job as church leaders to equip them!
Have you been communicating to your members this principle found in Ephesians? Regularly let your church know that kingdom growth isn’t just your job as the pastor, it’s everyone’s job!
2. People don’t know what they’re saying yes to.
As church leaders, when we desperately need volunteer positions filled, we can easily fall into the trap of asking people to serve without giving them a clear description of what they’re signing on to do. We may ask “Would you mind serving in our nursery? We don’t have anyone serving there today!” Or, “Can anyone help by serving coffee today?” Once these positions are filled, we feel good about it and then move onto our regularly scheduled responsibilities.
While asking this can help get bodies into roles, these requests leave expectations unclear. Once we walk away from our new volunteers, they’re left asking, “What am I supposed to do now?” “Am I a member of this team, or just serving today?” “What’s expected of me?”
When we ask people to serve on our teams, we need to let people know what they’re saying “yes” to. What role will they be filling? Are you asking them to fill a role for the day, or to join the team? What are their expectations? What time do they need to arrive? What time are they dismissed from their role? How many weeks each month will they be serving?
If we neglect to clarify this information, we may technically have enough volunteers, but they’ll be misguided (or not guided at all). Unclear recruitment produces unreliable teams.
3. You’re recruiting without onboarding.
This is where many people fall through the cracks. You ask them to join a volunteer team, and they say “yes,” and you’re excited because you have a new volunteer! However, you need to have a clear onboarding process for your volunteers so that they can actually start serving on your teams.
Oftentimes, volunteers need to meet certain requirements in order to serve on specific teams. For example, at my church, we require background checks for volunteers in many roles, and we require all of our new volunteers to attend a class to make sure they’re aligned with our mission.
We use “workflows” to ensure each new volunteer goes through every step of the process. Each time someone signs up to serve, we put them into the workflow, and then we track their progress as they complete each step. If someone stalls on a step, we can easily reach out to help them progress again. Our entire process takes about a week, because we’re able to easily track where everyone is in that process.
Proper onboarding was one of the main factors that helped me to increase our church’s volunteer base by 38% year over year for two consecutive years. We currently use Planning Center as our church management software, but this can be done with something as simple as Google Sheets if your budget doesn’t allow for a more robust software package.
The key question to ask yourself is this: Do I have a clear onboarding process for my volunteers, and is someone faithfully managing this process?
4. You’re losing volunteers too quickly.
Maybe you’ve looked at your stats, and you’re recruiting a large number of volunteers, you’re onboarding them properly, but you still have a shortage! If this is the case, it’s possible that you’re losing volunteers too quickly.
To see if this is the case, run a list of everyone who has volunteered for you over the past 12 months and compare it to a list of your current volunteers. For example: if you had 100 different people serving 12 months ago, but only 60 of the people on that list are still serving today, that’s likely your issue. Even if you had a great year of recruitment, your first 40 recruits would be making up for your attrition, and only once you onboarded your 41st volunteer would you actually have a net gain.
If you’re losing volunteers, talk to some of your former volunteers to ask why they left. Did they not feel appreciated? Was the work too difficult, or could they not make the connection between their service and the church’s mission? This will help you to identify which areas to work on.
5. You only think about volunteers when you need more of them.
Identifying attrition is important, but the better goal is to create a healthy culture before volunteers decide to leave.
Many leaders only think about volunteers when there’s a shortage. They notice that there’s no one to serve coffee, and go into emergency mode, thinking, “I need to recruit!” But, how often do you think about the volunteers you’ve recruited when you aren’t in emergency mode?
According to the same Ephesians 4:11-12 that we read earlier, the pastor’s job is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. This means that we need to spend time every single week thinking about our volunteers. How will we encourage them? How will we thank them for what they do? How will we train them? How will we evaluate them and help them to improve?
As a church leader, you’re likely being pulled in several different directions. If that’s the reality for you, taking time each week to spend with volunteers sounds impossible. However, I’ve found that the best investment you can make is taking the time to invest in people.
If you’re a church leader who is constantly wondering why you don’t have enough volunteers, I highly recommend evaluating your ministry in these five areas. Ask yourself these five questions:
Do our members understand that they share responsibility for the church’s mission?
Do prospective volunteers receive clear roles and expectations?
What percentage of interested volunteers complete onboarding and begin serving?
What percentage of new volunteers are still serving one year later?
How consistently are our current volunteers encouraged, trained, and developed?
Start by working on your weakest area, and then improve one area at a time. If you fill in these five gaps, you’ll be well equipped to grow your volunteer teams!
