How to Exponentially Expand Your Ministry Volunteer Pool

After hanging up the phone on the third person I asked to work at the Welcome Center, I laid my head down on my desk and thought, “How am I ever going to get out of crisis recruiting mode?—I’ll never have enough ministry volunteers to fill all the spots I need to fill each week.” 

I hated this part of my job as the Connections Coordinator of my large church of 2000 people. Despair began to set in, feeling this was the most impossible task in the world. But I had to quickly figure out how to create a larger pool of qualified volunteers to draw from each week. And that was my responsibility.

I knew that people are most motivated to get involved when they first come to your church. They want to make friends, connections and see if this church is a place they can contribute. 

But often, if they are never asked, they never volunteer. I needed a system to draw out their talents and find out their past ministry experience as well as how God was working in their life right now to draw them into service.

Our church gave out mugs to all new visitors. These mugs had the church name and logo across the front and were filled with chocolate kisses and wrapped in saran wrap. I mean, who’s going to pass up a mug of chocolate on Sunday morning when asked who is visiting the church?

And the best part—they can’t easily tuck it into their coat or purse as they exit the building. Everyone knew who to “mug” on the way out of service!

But how do you capture that initial excitement of those exploring your church? How will they quickly know if your church is right for them and see themselves contributing their talents and gifts to grow your church? How will they know if they connect with other people in the congregation and pastors and ministry leaders?

To help facilitate this, we started hosting a Welcome Session after each service in our conference room just off the foyer. We’d have greeters and ushers see those who had newcomer mugs and invite them to come in to discuss ways to connect at our church with a trained facilitator and have them fill out some information about themselves so we get to know them as well. This seemed like a great idea in theory . . .

But guess what? It flopped! People just seemed too shy to come into a small room by themselves and initiate a conversation when they weren’t even sure they knew what questions they had.

So back to the drawing board! How could we accomplish the same thing, but make it less intimidating for newcomers? Then I came up with the idea for a 4-week class that ran every other month. 

That way, people can find out about it, register for it, and then attend when the next one launched. It was a group class, so people didn’t feel intimidated or singled out. And it has been going strong for over 10 years!

At The Loop, I strategically created a curriculum that walks newcomers through who we are as a church, it’s foundation, core beliefs and vision. Then we move on to helping people identify their top growth needs to get involved in the various ministries at church. 

The following week we help them identify their top skills and areas of contribution. And the final week they meet the entire church staff and do several rounds of Q&A with those they are most interested in serving under for exploratory serving opportunities.

Each session of The Loop, participants would fill out part of a packet providing our church staff helpful background information on each of them that their table host would keep until the final day of class. 

This information would be disseminated to the appropriate ministry leaders (often to multiple leaders) for timely follow-up for rapid connection into their respective ministry areas.

Then, the month following The Loop, recent graduates were encouraged to “try out” up to three different ministry serving areas as well as get involved in any growth ministry areas (discipleship classes, home groups, Celebrate Recovery, etc.) to meet their growth needs.

Each ministry department would strategically schedule their initial training within the off months of The Loop to quickly onboard newcomers into their areas of ministry. For example, if The Loop was offered every odd-numbered month, departmental volunteer onboarding training was offered every even-numbered month.

By doing so, this would keep people highly engaged, build organic relationships, and quickly assimilated into the Body life of the church. Or, they could be added to online training at that time now that they had personally met the ministry leader at The Loop and made a first-hand connection.

The Loop also works well to build up new emerging leaders just as effectively as it serves to assimilate newcomers into the church. For each Loop session, we would typically have 16-24 people register, requiring 4-6 table groups, each of which needing a table host. This provided a great short-term (4 week) commitment to help build up facilitation skills for potential home group leaders as well as other ministry leaders. 

Then, if table hosts were faithful in their short, 4-week commitment, we knew they could handle the challenge of up to a 6-month commitment and then gradually escalated them from there to longer term commitments.

I hope this helps you begin percolating on strategic assimilation and equipping ideas to fuel your church’s volunteer pool. With over 800 adults attending the church, if we were able to get each one to commit even one hour per week in a well-suited area of ministry, that would be the equivalent of 20 full-time staff positions and save the church multiple $100,000s of dollars each year that could be allocated elsewhere!

Check my math: If 800 adults commit to one-hour weekly (800 people x 52 weeks = 41,600 hrs/yr). One full-time position = 2080 hours per year (40 hrs/wk x 52 wks/yr = 2080). Then divide 41,600 by 2080 = 20 staff positions! Voila! Try this out by substituting your church’s average adult attendance per week.

Next Steps: For those of you who want to stop recruiting through a sieve, feel free to grab The Overwhelmed Ministry Leader’s 3-Month Plan to Multiply Your Church Volunteer Workforce. ?? This will set out three months’ ?????? worth of strategic activities to begin to lay the framework for your church’s entire ministry volunteer development strategy. I can’t wait to hear how this becomes a game changer?? for your ministry recruiting!