How To Unlock Greatness In Your Church Volunteers

A little over nine years ago, I became a student ministry small groups pastor at my current church.

I’ll be honest, I sort of talked my way into the job because in hindsight, I didn’t really know that much about creating and maintain a thriving small groups ministry.

However, one of the guys that I worked closely with, whose name is Jon is an absolute guru.

I was amazed at how much buy-in, longevity and passion he got out of his volunteers. I’ve been building off his strategies and practices ever since.

The good news is that what I learned from him is transferable to any volunteering or staffing role that you might oversee.

And, so, here are five strategies for unlocking greatness in your volunteers.

1. Vision

People long for meaning and purpose and when they find something that taps into these desires, they will often pour their heart and soul into the task or role.

One of the first lessons I learned from Jon is that we often ask for too little of our volunteers.

The truth is that we can ask for a whole lot more if the role is truly meaningful.

In our case, we were asking young adults to step into the role of spiritual mentor for teenagers.

We painted a vision of becoming one of the most important voices in the life of a teenager for years and years to come. For many in our church, this vision has become incredibly compelling and meaningful.

The point is this: You can ask your volunteers for much more than you think if what you are asking them for is truly meaningful.

2. Expectations

Funny thing. People hate being bad at stuff.

We all want to succeed.

If we play a sport, we want to get better.

If we go to school, we want to pass the class, preferably with decent grades.

If we are parents, we want our kids to grow into mature and successful adults.

We all want to succeed. And, we prefer to measure our success.

This is why we have grades, why we keep score and why we track sales.

Measuring success is important to us. We want to know how we’re doing.

The same applies to volunteering.

Volunteers want to know how they’re doing.

• Am I making an impact?
• Am I meeting expectations?
• Am I the only one who is failing at this?

These are questions that every volunteer asks.

Again, we all hate failing and we all want to succeed, particularly if the role really matters to us.

Because of this, if you want to unlock the best in your volunteers, they need clear expectations.

They need to know exactly what you’re asking them to do and what it looks like to win.

This obviously looks different in every volunteer role.

In our student ministry, we communicate our expectations through something we call Invested Leaders. (You can view the document down at the bottom of this blog post)

Feel free to check it out and borrow ideas from it.

If you want to unlock greatness in your volunteers, clearly spell out the expectations.

In most cases they will rise to the challenge.

3. Game Plan

Have you ever noticed that new things are intimidating?

Even if you’re someone who loves to try new things, there is a discomfort that comes with stepping into a new role or experience.

The same applies to volunteering.

In fact, I believe that this initial discomfort often leads to a quick exit for many prospective volunteers.

For years, we have used a strategy to fight this.

In our student ministry, we put on a kickoff event for all of our volunteers in which we walk through a night of student ministry without any of the students.

We walk through each element of the experience so that new volunteers can see and feel what it is like.

We also explain why we do each element and what volunteers should be doing during the element.

In my experience, this event helps new volunteers feel more comfortable and gives them a game plan for success.

In whatever context you lead volunteers, some sort of orientation event might be helpful in helping volunteers construct a game plan for how they should act in their role.

4. Ongoing Training

Most churches train their volunteers through one or two training events that occur before or during the ministry season.

These training events usually involve what I like to call the “fire hose method.”

Have you ever tried to drink from a fire hose?

It’s not pretty.

In the course of a few hours, we blast our volunteers with everything they need to know about the volunteering role.

In my opinion, there is only so much a volunteer can retain from an experience like this.

I think there is a better way.

Our approach is to train our volunteers with less content but more often.

In our children’s ministry, this looks like a fifteen minute meeting before the children’s ministry program begins. In our student ministry, it looks like an hour long meeting that occurs before our student ministry programming begins.

And yes, we do this every week.

I know what you’re thinking:

How do you get your leaders to show up an hour early?!?

We feed them. And, we expect it.

You can’t volunteer in our ministry if you repeatedly miss this meeting.

Back to the idea of training: Our strategy is to give our volunteers one concept, strategy or idea every week that will help them grow in their role.

It might be about navigating crises. It could be about the art of leading conversations.

It might be about how to win at our winter retreat.

It’s always something, it’s always compact and it's always useful.

If you want to unlock greatness in your volunteers, consider training more often, with less content, at a time that is attached to when they serve.

5. Mentors

While expectations and training are important, there is another piece required to truly unlock greatness in volunteers and that is mentoring conversations.

It’s one thing to know what it looks like to succeed as a volunteer and to be taught the tools and strategies for making it happen.

It’s an entirely different thing to sit across a table from someone who has experienced what you are going through.

Every small group leader in our ministry gets two mentors.

One is a volunteer coach and the other is a staff member.

The coach is someone who was a small group leader. They know what it’s like and they’re in a place where they can share their experience and expertise with others.

These two mentors can encourage, challenge and offer perspective.

In my experience, if you want to unlock greatness in your volunteers, you have to structure for it.

This means creating volunteer or even staff roles to invest in the development of volunteers.

This has been a huge part of our success for years.

Wrap Up

Well, there are five strategies for unlocking greatness in volunteers.

There is more that I want to share on this topic but I’m going to save the last five strategies for my next post.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on investing in and empowering volunteers.

Feel free to share your ideas or ask questions in the comments below.

(Click here to view the Invested Leaders Content)