What’s the fuel that fires up the engine of all your ministry efforts? It’s your volunteers. They’re the ones who are on the ground week after week—sometimes even literally—in things like children’s ministry and service ministries that are caring for those in your community. And it’s going to take an intentional plan to make sure you’ve got as many people as possible involved in serving in the ways that truly fire them up and help them grow in their faith.
People want to help. They really do. The problem is not in motivating people to help.
The problem often comes when you as church leaders expect those people to do the leg work of figuring out where they can help and then seek you out to offer their time and energy. The times when that happens are extremely rare, and you can’t count on that as a volunteer recruitment strategy. It just won’t happen. You need to make sure volunteers know exactly how they can get involved, step by step.
Here’s how:
You need to invite them.
You can’t just rely on a blanket announcement from the platform during worship to connect with people. Invite the right people to serve: the people you know are likely to say “yes” to your invitation because they have the right gifts and the right level of spiritual growth.
You need to mobilize them.
Using volunteers to power ministry is pretty obvious in many places—host teams, children’s ministry, etc. But there are volunteers within your congregation that are housing gifts you’ve likely never considered. Think about using them to make reminder phone calls, handle data entry, help in scheduling their fellow volunteers, and more.
You need to guide them.
You have to support your volunteers if you want them to be successful. Make sure you’ve developed and communicated processes to support them; don’t expect volunteers to create those things on their own. Help them see the parameters they need to operate within to be successful.
You need to equip them.
Give volunteers the tools they need to be successful, including a well-designed church management system (ChMS) so they can easily get the information they need, communicate with each other, and track the results of their efforts.
There are people sitting in your weekend worship services every week who could be a huge part of making a Kingdom impact in your community.
How are you going to get them involved in your ministries?