Top Church Volunteer Recruitment Hacks

The Church Revitalization Podcast – Episode 276

Every church leader knows the challenge: you need volunteers to run effective ministries, but finding and keeping those volunteers feels like an endless uphill battle. Whether you’re trying to staff your children’s ministry, build a worship team, or find greeters for Sunday morning, recruitment can feel like a constant pressure point that never fully resolves.

But what if the traditional approaches to volunteer recruitment aren’t serving us well? What if, instead of just trying harder with the same old methods, we need to think differently about how we approach volunteer ministry altogether? These four recruiting hacks represent a fundamental shift in how we think about volunteering in the church—moving from desperation-driven recruiting to strategic, sustainable volunteer development.

Apple PodcastsSpotifyOvercastRSS

Hack 1: Optimize for Calling, Not Urgency

Our most important hack for volunteer recruitment is focusing on connecting the right person with the right role based on their calling and giftedness. Admittedly, this takes more planning and intentionality from church leadership. It’s much easier to say from the pulpit, “We need nursery help!” than to take the time helping people understand their giftedness and providing opportunities that align with their calling. However, this upfront investment pays off significantly—you’ll find both an eagerness to serve and greater “stickiness,” meaning volunteers are more likely to stay committed to their ministry long-term.

To implement this approach, start by categorizing all volunteer positions by spiritual giftedness and temperament type. We recommend using the DiSC assessment for temperament—not because it’s objectively better than Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram, but because of its simplicity. Once you’ve sorted your positions, create intentional opportunities (especially for newcomers and new members) to take these assessments. Then, instead of overwhelming them with every possible option, show them only the opportunities that align with their gifting. From this curated list, they can choose based on their passion and experience.

In the Healthy Churches Toolkit, we already have assessments and standard job descriptions for common volunteer roles. We’ve taken the liberty of sorting them by DiSC type and Spiritual Gifting. Later this year, we will release an automated tool subscribers can use to run the assessments and make recommendations via an AI-based tool. You can click here to get 7 days free of the Healthy Churches Toolkit. Or, you can do this work from scratch on your own. In either case, it’s much better to connect the right person with the right opportunity to increase enthusiasm and decrease burnout rather than simply beg people to volunteer.

Hack 2: Go Small to Go Big

One of the most effective shifts you can make in volunteer recruitment is breaking down your ministry needs into specific, targeted roles rather than broad categories. This precision approach not only makes recruitment more manageable but also yields better results.

Think about how different it feels to say, “We need a bass player who can commit to two Sundays a month” versus the vague “We need more people in the worship ministry.” The specific ask does two powerful things: it helps potential volunteers clearly envision themselves in the role, and it makes it easier for your leadership team to identify ideal candidates. When you know exactly what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it.

Start this process with a thorough volunteer audit. List out every current volunteer and their role, then identify the specific gaps you need to fill. Instead of noting that children’s ministry needs help, break it down into concrete positions: “We need two check-in volunteers for the 9 AM service, one preschool storyteller for the 11 AM service, and three backup volunteers who can serve monthly.”

This detailed approach might seem tedious at first, but it transforms your recruitment strategy. Rather than overwhelming potential volunteers with broad, undefined needs, you’re presenting them with clear, manageable opportunities to serve. It’s the difference between asking someone to climb a mountain and asking them to take the first step on a well-marked trail—one feels daunting, while the other feels doable.

Hack 3: Broaden Your Circle of Recruiters

Most churches make a common mistake in volunteer recruitment: relying on too small a group of people—usually just staff or ministry leaders—to do all the recruiting. This creates a bottleneck and misses out on one of your most valuable recruitment resources: your current volunteers.

Your existing volunteers often have connections and relationships that staff members don’t. They know people from their small groups, their neighborhoods, or their kids’ sports teams who might be perfect fits for specific roles. Plus, current volunteers can speak authentically about their ministry experience, making their invitations more compelling than a general announcement or staff request.

Here’s a practical way to expand your recruitment reach: Pull out your church directory or database and print a list of everyone who isn’t currently serving in any capacity. Then, take these three steps:

First, highlight potential “prime” candidates—people who regularly attend, seem engaged, and have capacity to serve. Second, based on what you know about them, make educated guesses about their spiritual gifts and what roles might be good fits. Finally—and this is crucial—identify who in your church community would be the most natural person to have a conversation with them about serving.

This approach transforms recruitment from a top-down process to a relational web of conversations. Instead of the children’s minister trying to recruit every new nursery volunteer, you might have a current nursery volunteer reaching out to another mom she knows from MOPS, or a senior usher inviting someone he connects with over coffee each Sunday to join the greeting team.

Hack 4: Streamline Your Ministries to Decrease Need

Sometimes the best volunteer recruitment strategy isn’t recruiting at all—it’s taking a hard look at your ministry structure to ensure it matches your church’s actual capacity. Many churches find themselves in a perpetual volunteer shortage not because their people aren’t willing to serve, but because they’re trying to sustain more ministries than their congregation size can reasonably support.

Think of it like managing a household budget: when expenses exceed income, you have two options—increase income or decrease spending. Similarly, when volunteer needs exceed your volunteer pool, you can either recruit more volunteers or reduce your volunteer needs. While recruitment is important, there comes a point where it’s no longer the answer. If 70% or more of your regular attenders are already serving in at least one ministry monthly, you’ve reached an impressive volunteer engagement rate that will be challenging to push much higher.

This is where the concept of “right-sizing” your ministries becomes crucial. While some volunteers can serve in multiple roles (what we call “double-dipping”), we typically recommend limiting this to no more than two positions per person—and realistically, not everyone will take on multiple roles. This means you need to be strategic about which ministries you maintain and which ones you might need to pause or consolidate.

The solution often requires making tough decisions about your ministry portfolio. Rather than running every possible program, focus on doing fewer things with excellence. Read our detailed article about streamlining ministries for specific guidance on this process. In the Healthy Churches Toolkit, we provide comprehensive training on building an effective discipleship pathway and distinguishing between primary and secondary ministries—essential frameworks for making these strategic decisions.

Remember, scaling back isn’t failure—it’s stewardship. A streamlined ministry approach often leads to higher quality programs, less volunteer burnout, and ultimately, more effective discipleship.

Transforming your volunteer recruitment approach isn’t just about filling slots—it’s about building a sustainable, thriving ministry environment where both your volunteers and your church can flourish. These hacks require more intentional effort upfront, but they pay significant dividends in volunteer satisfaction, longevity, and effectiveness.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to fill positions—it’s to build a culture where service is natural, fulfilling, and sustainable. By implementing these strategies, you’re not just solving today’s volunteer shortage; you’re laying the groundwork for long-term ministry health and growth.

If you’re ready to take your volunteer ministry to the next level, start by implementing just one of these hacks. Choose the one that resonates most with your current situation, and begin making small changes. Over time, these strategic shifts will transform not just how you recruit, but how your entire volunteer ministry functions.

Watch this episode on YouTube!



A.J. Mathieu is the President of the Malphurs Group. He is passionate about helping churches thrive and travels internationally to teach and train pastors to lead healthy disciple-making churches. A.J. lives in the Ft. Worth, Texas area, enjoys the outdoors, and loves spending time with his wife and two sons. Click here to email A.J.


Got questions? Meet with our team for a free Discovery Call.

Church Revitalization Podcast Transcript:

A.J. Mathieu [00:00:00]:
Need more volunteers in your church? We’ve got some great hacks for you today on the church revitalization podcast.

Introduction [00:00:07]:
Hello, and welcome to the church revitalization podcast brought to you by the Malthus 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. Mathieu.

Scott Ball [00:00:26]:
Welcome to the church revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I’m joined by my friend and cohost, A.J. Mathieu. A.J., welcome to the program.

Introduction [00:00:35]:
Well, I’m glad to be here, Scott.

Scott Ball [00:00:37]:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Same bat time, same bat channel, my friend. This is episode 276, if you can believe it. Creeping up on that old 300.

A.J. Mathieu [00:00:47]:
That’s a big number. Can’t wait for that. That’s gonna be great. So yeah. Good.

Scott Ball [00:00:51]:
We’ll celebrate it the way we have other milestones, which is to go.

A.J. Mathieu [00:00:55]:
Yeah. Or we mention it.

Scott Ball [00:00:56]:
Yeah. Yep. Kinda like we just did with this one episode. Okay. Today, we’re talking about, recruiting volunteers. This is a pain point for many of you.

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:06]:
Mhmm.

Scott Ball [00:01:06]:
And if you clicked on this episode on YouTube or on the audio version, you clicked on this because you’re hoping that we just hop into these hacks. So I won’t belabor the point. And we can just get right into it if you’d like.

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:21]:
Let’s do it. Maybe maybe we’ll knock this one out faster than usual, and everybody can get back to work improving their volunteer recruitment.

Scott Ball [00:01:29]:
The things that we’re gonna recommend.

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do that. Alright. Hack number one. We’re saying optimize for calling, not urgency. And this is, not an intuitive response because when we feel the pain of it, usually comes on well, I was gonna say, usually comes on quickly. It probably comes on quickly over and over and over because it if something happens and we’re like, oh my gosh.

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:54]:
We’re feeling the pain of this need, and then it you end up getting through it, and then it you don’t think about it again for a little while, and then it pops back up again probably because somebody called in sick or, you know, just can’t make it or quit. Mhmm. And and then so it’s probably is this recurring cycle. And urgency is what demands attention. Right? You know, this, what’s what’s that what’s that, idiom, tyranny of the urgent. That’s what I was trying to think of. Tyranny of the

Scott Ball [00:02:24]:
urgent. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

A.J. Mathieu [00:02:26]:
And instead, we’re suggesting to, take some steps to avoid it becoming urgent and instead optimize our volunteer recruitment for people’s calling, gifting, interests, passion, these kinds of things that will yield better and longer term results in getting people in the right place to begin with in the church. Now, when we could go super deep on this one point, and we have previously on these kinds of things. So, Scott, maybe we’ll circle back around to this, in the near future and go a little bit deeper on this first point. But, but what we’re trying to get across is urgent needs for volunteers will never be satisfied without coming back to the root cause and filling these positions, with the right people.

Scott Ball [00:03:18]:
Yeah. I mean, here’s here’s what doesn’t work, and this is what most churches are doing. Urgent pleas as as you’ve said from the pulpit, they don’t work. I’m gonna be honest with you. The the the ministry fair thing that you do, you know, once in the fall, once in the spring, has limited, limited effect, you know. And you know, you get this ministry fair, everybody’s trying to promote their ministry. Like, now you’ve created a competition between your ministry and all these other things. People are going in there as consumers shopping your different ministries to see which ministry they might like to join.

Scott Ball [00:04:01]:
You know, all of this is not good. As if as if the hand could be, you know, as if some shoe wear company could promote to the hand, you know, you really ought to wear shoes on your hands. No. Shoes don’t hands don’t wear shoes. They wear gloves. And so, you know, to to to set up a ministry fair is like promoting to these different parts of the body of your church. Try being this thing, but if that’s not what they are, then it’s not the right fit. So what you need to do is, help people better understand how it is that they are wired, how it is that they are gifted, how it is that they are called, and help them to accept the reality that they are called.

Scott Ball [00:04:48]:
There’s no person exempt from the calling into ministry. Every person is called into the ministry. So, this speaks to what you were talking about, A.J.. The the problem is that when you have urgency driving this problem rather than intentionality driving this solution, then you don’t do the things that it takes to help connect people to their calling. So you have to do the hard work of actually going through all of your volunteer positions and categorizing them with what kind of person is best fit, you know, for this particular position. And then you have to do the hard work of helping people to discover what their calling is and what their gifting is so that you can match those two things together. And, you can’t do it in a rush, and you can’t do it in a hurry. And I understand that a lot of you are going, but I but I need it in a rush, and I need it in a hurry.

Scott Ball [00:05:43]:
You know, we’ll we’ll talk about some other things that might help, but the long term solution to this problem is slowing down and doing this intentionally and not and not pushing the gas and pushing your people. Because, over the long term, A.J., what happens is people burn out because it wasn’t a good fit, you know, or they’re just not enthusiastic about it, or people just don’t not every person responds to that kind of a pitch. And so you have people who just sit on the sideline because they figure, you know, this is only for the people who are willing to go the extra mile to meet that short term need. So, everybody has a part to play and taking the time to help people understand what their part is is the it’s not a hack. It’s not a trick. We’ve talked about this on the podcast several times, but we had to put it first, A.J., because it’s the number one solution. Now something I do wanna mention real quick before we move on to number two is that in the Healthy Church’s toolkit, we already have in there a couple of assessments that you can use, that you can download and use. They’re printable, like a disc assessment and a spiritual gifts assessment.

Scott Ball [00:06:54]:
You can download those, and they’re in word document format. So if you wanted to make some language changes or put your logo on it, you can do that. We also have, job descriptions, volunteer job descriptions that we’ve already sorted for you. We’ve we’ve put their temperament alignment and their spiritual gifts alignment on that job description. So you could change it if you wanted to, but it’s gonna save you a ton of time. And we’ve made ones for the most common things for greeters and small group leaders and children’s ministry volunteers, the things that most churches have. So it’s it’s maybe not every position you have, but it’s a lot of them. It’s gonna save you a ton of time.

Scott Ball [00:07:34]:
So, sign up for that. And coming soon, I I don’t wanna say when because we’re still working on the bugs, but we’re actually working on an AI based tool that people will be able to fill out, like, a DISC assessment and a spiritual gifts assessment in the tool, and then it will make recommendation recommended matches, on based on a list of common or generic volunteer opportunities that most churches have. And that’s gonna be inside the toolkit for churches to use as well. It’s on the roadmap as all I’ll say. I I don’t wanna commit to a date, but Yeah. Yeah. All good reasons to be in there.

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:12]:
Sure. I mean, yeah, in addition to those resources, we’ve also got a lot of the the principles that were sort of just mentioned conversationally here are within the leadership pipeline design training and also in the toolkit. So, yeah, you beat me to it because I as we’re if you’re going through this, I’m like, this would be a great time to pitch the toolkit. Just go to malpersgroup.com. I’m not even gonna give you a slash because right there on the homepage, there’s a button that says get the toolkit. So seven

Scott Ball [00:08:35]:
days Seven days for free. So

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:37]:
Seven days free. I mean,

Scott Ball [00:08:38]:
we’re not gonna penalize you if you go in there and you download all those job descriptions.

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:42]:
Yeah. We’d like

Scott Ball [00:08:42]:
for you to stick around, but I get it. I’ve done that kind of thing before if you’re like, oh, I just want that thing. You know? Go in there. Sign up.

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:51]:
Yep. Do that. Alright. Our second hack, we’re saying, go small to go big. And what we mean by this is you you need to get more specific. Too often, again, this urgent call goes out, and 99.9% of the time, it’s, we need more volunteers in children’s ministry. Because, yeah, that’s that’s where, like, your biggest volunteer area. You’ve got the most, you know, separate age groups and classrooms and, you know, you need two deep leadership in all those places, so it’s a huge pool of volunteers, depending on the size of your church, can get really, really big.

A.J. Mathieu [00:09:27]:
But not being specific enough, you need to think about it from the hearer’s side. You’re sitting out there in the congregation on a Sunday, and you’re like, We just need more people. You know, we got all our children’s ministry is growing, or maybe it’s not. And we we need things. And people are when you take this internally in, you’re like, what does that mean, and would my participation make any difference in that? You know, I mean, if you needed to raise money for your church, and you’re like, yeah, we need, you know, $10,000,000, your people are like, what can I do? I can’t contribute to $10,000,000. But if you’re like, hey, you know what? If everybody if we could have $25 a month going towards this thing, then somebody can look at that and go, oh, I can contribute $25 If you’re like, We need three people to cover because we need we just need an assistant with the three year olds, and we need somebody that can, lead story time two Sundays a month, with the elementary age kids, somebody can hear that and go, I can picture myself in that. That sounds like something I could do. So get specific.

A.J. Mathieu [00:10:37]:
We said go small to get big. Get specific to go broad. And you’re gonna you’re gonna get more people when you talk about specific needs. And, and I think and this is something you can change. This is just a language change, but you are gonna need to know the actual data. So if if you’ve been stuck up at the front of the church every Sunday saying we need more people in children’s ministry, and you don’t actually know what the need is, learn what the need is, and change the way you’re you’re putting that out.

Scott Ball [00:11:05]:
That’s right. And, you know, it’s what you’ve kind of touched on is more from the promotion side. I I kinda wanna touch on even just the leadership side of things and the mental part of it. Yeah. I’ve used this example before, several times in throughout the podcast in reference to church planting. When you think about recruiting a launch team for a church plant, oh, we need 75 people. It’s very overwhelming, but when you break it down into smaller parts and go, well, we need, you know, we need a bass player, and we need a drummer, and we need, you know, five people who will agree to be greeters. And you and you start breaking it down into its component parts, it becomes less less daunting because you can think of someone who would be good for that.

Scott Ball [00:11:51]:
And what tends to happen is we just think of these things in buckets. We need more children’s ministry volunteers, or we need we need more people in the band versus going, well, no. We’ve got one bass player, but we need one more bass player so that we can have a healthy rotation, you know, of every other week. That’s way easier to do because now now you’re not thinking of band members generally. You’re thinking of who do I know that plays the bass, or how could I talk to how could I pitch that as you you were talking about? Hey. We we are looking for someone who plays bass. We’re talking to other people who might know someone who plays bass. It’s just a completely different type of conversation.

Scott Ball [00:12:34]:
The other thing from the leadership perspective on this, A.J., is that churches are very often, they have a sense that they don’t have enough volunteers. It’s a feeling, but they don’t really know. Like, how many volunteer positions do you have in the church? How many of those are currently filled? How many are actually vacant? You can’t just have a generalized sense of we need more volunteers, do you? I mean, I don’t, most churches don’t know. So this is actually something that we work on in our leadership pipeline process when when it’s one of the major workshops that we do is we essentially do this volunteer audit where we go through and we look at every possible position, the ones we have, the ones that we need that maybe don’t exist yet, and we start to figure out where are these holes, where are these gaps. It’s just way easier to recruit volunteers when you know where the actual gaps are, not the ones that you’ve sensed that you have, but the ones that you know that you actually have. So, this would be my encouragement here would be to do a volunteer audit. List every volunteer opportunity you have, figure out how many you need in each position, and figure out how many you already have in each position. And you might I don’t know.

Scott Ball [00:13:55]:
The the other side of that exercise, A.J., could be even more panic because you’re like, oh, wow. We’re we’re short even more volunteers than we thought we were. Or a sense of relief where you go, actually, we’re doing okay. You know, we really need 15 volunteers would really fill the gap in, and you might go, well, we can do that. So a generalized sense of, oh, we got the eighty twenty rule or we got a none of that is helpful. Be specific. And, maybe a theme is emerging here, A.J., which is the, the overall maybe overarching hack is to be intentional. Mhmm.

Scott Ball [00:14:36]:
Slowing down thinking versus just panicking constantly. It it doesn’t help you. It doesn’t serve you.

A.J. Mathieu [00:14:44]:
Yeah. Man, attention intentionality is a common theme across a lot of what we talk about, and and how to get churches healthy for sure. Alright. Our third hack, and, you you touched in on this a minute ago, Scott, broaden your circle of recruiters and empower people and encourage people already engaged in the work of the ministry in your church to be part of the recruitment process. If if, you know, I was leading, a small group or, you know, the toddlers class and we needed an assistant, I mean, honestly, I would rather have somebody I enjoy working with, maybe somebody I’m already friends with rather than just hoping you send me a stranger. Now, you know, if your church is 50 people, you’re gonna know everybody anyway. But, you know, when you get to a point, you people don’t know everybody. Mhmm.

A.J. Mathieu [00:15:31]:
And but a lot of times, I think volunteers don’t even feel like they can be a part of that process of helping to recruit for the ministry. I think this should be highly encouraged. Now, of course, you want to know, again, what are the qualifications, what type of person are we looking for, so that the, you know, your your then broadened group of recruiters know who to who to ask. But, this is going to help you find people more quickly. Employ this tactic, this hack, and I think you’re gonna fill your volunteer positions faster and maybe have even, you know, better better energy in these, ministry areas because the people perhaps are working with people that they’re comfortable with, they enjoy being around, and, will kind of lift each other up together.

Scott Ball [00:16:22]:
Yeah. I mentioned the eighty twenty rule. I think that there’s a, maybe, unintentional thing that happens in a lot of churches. This is especially true the larger a church gets, but it it’s true even in sort of more normative sized churches, is that 80% of the people I’m sorry. 20% of the people do 80% of the work to some degree because that’s a natural thing that happens, but to another degree because, those of you in leadership only know 20% of the people really well, so you keep asking the same 20% of the people to do more and more things. You you just don’t know everyone, or you don’t know everyone as well as you know that 20%. And so, you need to start including more people in these discussions and activating and empowering more people for recruitment. So here’s a practical step you can take, hop into your church management software, if you have it, you know, or if you’ve got an old school church directory, you could do it that way manually, I suppose, or an Excel spreadsheet, whatever you’ve got.

Scott Ball [00:17:26]:
And, try to make a list of all of the people that aren’t currently serving in at least one ministry, at least once a month. So I’m not talking about people who they help out each year at the trunk or treat, or they did an operation Christmas child box or whatever. I’m talking about people who aren’t regularly serving somewhere. You might maybe also include in this list people who the only thing they do is they’re a greeter once a month that you might that’s that’s an important role, but you might kind of put them into the pile of people who might be able to take on some other responsibility as well. And start going through this list and start thinking through what’s, what would maybe be a good fit for this person? And you might come across some names you’re like, I don’t even know who that guy is. So you wanna start thinking through who would know who this person is. And, and then from there, if you can start making some matches or potential matches for ministries, Like, oh, I heard this guy plays bass. Who would be a good person to go and talk to that person? Yeah.

Scott Ball [00:18:33]:
Maybe it’s someone that they that goes to small group together, like you said, A.J., or maybe it’s someone who, has a friendship or, you know, their their family friends or whatever, and maybe activate that person to invite that other person to serve. Or or you can start asking it around. Who do you know that plays that plays bass? Who do you know that that’s interested in, you know, who works in the school system and might be good at working with kids? You don’t know everyone. And when you get outside of fifty, sixty, 70 people, I promise you even at a hundred or 120 people, there are certain people you know really well and other people you don’t know as well. And so you might not be the best recruiter for every position.

A.J. Mathieu [00:19:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, get your existing bass player up there and say, hey. We’re looking for a bass player, but bass players should never have microphones. So that’s not don’t do that.

Scott Ball [00:19:28]:
You just offended some bass player somewhere. I I disowned the comment. I have nothing to do with it. Send your hate mail to a jmatthew@malpersgroup.com.

A.J. Mathieu [00:19:40]:
What I would say, though, you know, blend this in with, you know, what was mentioned at the top about, you know, being specific about what you’re looking for. You can even have a little fun with this. You know? Like, we’re looking for somebody. You can name off these characteristics. Put them up on your screen if you have that. You know? Let put it out there in a way that people might internalize it and start thinking, wait a minute. He’s describing me or he’s describing my interests or, you know, she’s really making it sound like she’s talking to me. And, you know, let a little bit of holy spirit conviction happen then with somebody, and they’ll raise her hand and go, alright.

A.J. Mathieu [00:20:14]:
I’ll I’ll do that. So, yeah, I think I think these are some really doable things that, maybe you haven’t tried, and I think you’ll see some good results from.

Scott Ball [00:20:24]:
Yeah. Absolutely.

A.J. Mathieu [00:20:26]:
Our fourth hack is, one you’re not gonna like. I’m sorry. But we at least saved it for the end to get you hooked on the list. Streamline your ministries. Essentially what we’re saying here is you might have maybe you’re trying to just do too much right now. You might have more than you need, and it’s just really hard to fill that many volunteer positions. And so, yeah, I mean, I’m just gonna have to rip that Band Aid aid off for you. It it might be time for a reality check on are we intentional? Let’s come back to that word.

A.J. Mathieu [00:21:01]:
Are we really being intentional about the ministries in our church, the programs and things that we do? For true desirable discipleship goals. And are people actually engaged in that? Do we do we have some things that that could be cut, that are gonna free up lots of resources in addition to human resources that could be better allocated somewhere else. So this is a tough one to hear. It’s one of the hardest parts of the work that we do with churches because this is an this is a component of our strategic envisioning process. We talk about these things, And, but it it it’s an important one. If, you know, if there’s a chance maybe you’re overprogrammed, then this is worth looking at as well.

Scott Ball [00:21:48]:
Totally. I think I work we one of the things that we do in the church ministry analysis, which, by the way, if you sign up for the Healthy Church toolkit, you get access included to the for the, church ministry analysis as part of that. And it’s a consulting service. It’s not just like a survey you fill out once. We, you know, put a whole report together and meet with you and all of that. But, anyways, one of the things that we do in the church ministry analysis is we ask some questions about volunteering and some sense that people have about leadership and participation and all that. We also ask for some hard data numbers on how many people in your church are actually volunteering and serving. And what we often find is that people will say, wow.

Scott Ball [00:22:32]:
The engagement is really low. But the actual numbers tell us that act that quite a few people actually are volunteering. And it it’s hard to calculate that exactly because some you have some people who double dip, so they might accidentally have been counted twice because they serve in children’s ministry and as a small group leader, so they might have been double counted. But we ask them to clean their data as best they can to make sure that’s not happening. Anyways, all that to say, there’s very often a church has a higher percentage of engagement in volunteering than they think they do, and there is an upper limit to that. And it’s, like, maybe close to 70% or so. If about 70% of your people are volunteering in at least one ministry area at least once a month. You probably won’t get much more than that because there’s always new people.

Scott Ball [00:23:20]:
You know? You know, kids don’t volunteer. So, you know, that you’ve got that number that immediately kinda comes off the top, for lots of reasons. You’re not gonna you’re just not ever gonna get hit a %. That’s not even realistic. And so if you’re getting close to that, you’re at, like, 57, 60, 60 five percent of your average weekly attendance is serving regularly, you’re there. Like, you’re think of it like a budget. You’ve maxed it out. And and so you can reduce the spending, so to speak.

Scott Ball [00:23:55]:
By reducing the volunteer load, and that’s the way to solve that problem. Or you have to grow the church to the size that the number of ministries you have, you know, to you have to right size the ministries to the size of your church. And a lot of our churches that we work with, A.J., they’re just massively over programmed, and it’s just not realistic. In fact, I was meeting with, if they’re listening to the podcast, they know who they are. Just last week, I was meeting with one of the churches that’s going through our pipeline process and they came to this realization. They were like, I think our volunteer engagement is pretty good. You know, we’re working on getting people in the right spot and so on, but I think we’re over programmed, and and we’re gonna have to make some cuts and some streamlining if we’re gonna be healthy. Otherwise, we’re gonna we’re gonna burn out our folks.

Scott Ball [00:24:47]:
And, that’s a conclusion they came to all on their own. I didn’t even say that to them. And, you know, but you can’t know that, A.J., unless you’ve actually done the work of figuring out what are all of our positions. If you start doing this is how they came to it. We did the math. And they were like, here are the overall number of volunteer positions we have, and here’s the number of people in the church. It’s not realistic for us to maintain all of these positions Yeah. Given the size church that we are.

A.J. Mathieu [00:25:16]:
Yeah. You do have to you’ve gotta collect the data. You gotta be working from good good data because, you know, you start talking about cutting things, you’re gonna have to have that information to support those kinds of changes and to bring people, you know, into that that, you know, like way of thinking and seeing the value of that kind of a change. So, yeah, this is not this is not the some of these things we’re talking about, you can do them next Sunday. This isn’t one of them. This is a longer term process that

Scott Ball [00:25:41]:
Like, most of these things are things you can’t execute before next Sunday, probably. Well,

A.J. Mathieu [00:25:46]:
you can change your you can change your your language. Yeah. I think you could probably Yeah.

Scott Ball [00:25:49]:
Yeah. Okay.

A.J. Mathieu [00:25:50]:
Probably do some of that stuff. But, yeah, this is definitely not one of them. Yeah. Yeah. And and I think and you mentioned you sort of liking it to to money and budgeting. I think it’s a great way of thinking about it. You know? I mean, the the volunteer needs in the church, the positions that need to be filled, that’s the expense side of the equation, and filling those with volunteers is our revenue side, and we’re constantly thinking

Scott Ball [00:26:12]:
it’s a human resource. Right?

A.J. Mathieu [00:26:14]:
Yeah. It’s a that’s exactly right. Just like a financial resource, which, you know, those ministries might also take. There might be a money thing connected to this as well. That’s not what I’m

Scott Ball [00:26:22]:
sure

A.J. Mathieu [00:26:22]:
it is today. But it could be you’re needing more money also because we’ve got too many ministries that that have financial expenses. But you might have too many things happening that have too man too much human resource expense. And instead of trying to increase on the revenue side with more volunteers, we might need to cut our spending on the needs side. So

Scott Ball [00:26:43]:
Yeah. Because it can create this false sense of, well, we just don’t have good engagement. No. Your engagement numbers are really good, but you’re asking way too much. You’re you’re not gonna be able to sustain that level of volunteer engagement for the number of positions you have for the size of church that you are. It’s just that doesn’t why are you even trying to do it’s unrealistic. So, I don’t know, A.J.. I would kind of the overarching note, I would say, is, I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, so it’s one of these bells I keep ringing.

Scott Ball [00:27:19]:
But all of this kind of work in that Eisenhower matrix falls in that important but not urgent category where you go. We we don’t take the time to think about it and so we are only thinking about volunteer recruitment when we’re feeling the pain of our unintentional actions. And and the solution to this problem is not to chase a shortcut. It’s to do the hard work of an of intentional leadership pipeline design and leadership development. And, and so maybe we deceived you a little bit by calling these hacks, because hack maybe implies a shortcut. But maybe the dirty little secret all along is that doing the hard work is the shortcut because you’re going to be plagued by chronic challenges if you don’t take the time to do this intentional work that we’re talking about in today’s episode.

A.J. Mathieu [00:28:20]:
Yeah. We highly encourage you to take that on. So, definitely head over to malphursgroup.com, right there on the homepage. You can click to get started in the toolkit, have access to resources and training. And then there’s plenty of ways that you can get in contact with us, as well. We would love to have a we can, you know, have a Zoom call with you, talk about, where’s your church currently at, and what are the what are the pain points that you’re feeling, and how can we come alongside you to help work through those and, see your church improve, see the church the health of your church improve, and the, the productivity of your ministries focusing on making and maturing disciples of Jesus, growing and improving. We’d love to see that happen. This has been episode two seventy six of the church revitalization podcast.

A.J. Mathieu [00:29:08]:
So while you’re at malphursgroup.com, you can throw in a slash two seven six at the top and get over to today’s show notes. There’s a link there also to, see today’s episode on YouTube. And, if you do happen to go over there, click subscribe on that. Hit the bell so that, you’ll be sure and catch every week of the church revitalization podcast in all its video glory. We’d love to see

Scott Ball [00:29:33]:
you over there. Yeah. We’re getting some some increased engagement over there, which is fun to see. So It

A.J. Mathieu [00:29:39]:
is fun. Yep. We love

Scott Ball [00:29:40]:
hearing you. We can’t get comments on, like, Apple Podcasts. We don’t get that. Yeah. But we, we get that get that from time to time on the old YouTubes. So hit us up over there. Or if you’re listening on the podcast, like the audio, and you have something you wanna say, you could always go over to YouTube.

A.J. Mathieu [00:29:58]:
Sure.

Scott Ball [00:29:59]:
Tell us there.

A.J. Mathieu [00:30:00]:
Yep. Love to see you there. Thanks, everybody. See you next week.

Want to become a
 Healthy Church? 

We believe getting churches healthy again is just as important as planting new ones. Here are our best tips to get you going in the right direction.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.