Is Serving Part of Your Discipleship Path?

I don’t think there’s a church I’ve talked to in the last two or three years, maybe longer, that has told me, “We have enough volunteers.”

Especially since the pandemic, most churches feel the pinch. In our Q1 2026 Unstuck Church Report, the average church had 41% of its congregation serving. Our benchmark is 50%. And part of the challenge for churches might be our approach.

Serving is really about discipleship. If getting things done is our starting place, we’ve set ourselves up for a challenge from the start. Serving is something we want people to experience, more than something we need from them. If the only time we talk about serving is when a ministry is short on volunteers, people will decide that what we’re really trying to do is use them to meet our needs, not offer them an opportunity to grow spiritually.

I recently connected with Jesus Arriaga, the Executive Pastor at ONE&ALL Church in San Dimas, California. We started working with ONE&ALL back in 2024. At the time, they were growing 21% year over year, and 88% of their church was serving. That’s off the charts. Here’s how ONE&ALL is approaching serving differently.

Serving as Part of the Discipleship Path

A couple of years ago, ONE&ALL made an intentional shift to make serving a prominent part of their discipleship path. They changed their language from “We need you” to “You need this.” And, they started telling stories about the people who serve at their church.

People need a reason to keep volunteering. ONE&ALL gave them one.

But, they knew they had systems work to do too. They built a team to brainstorm the barriers that were keeping people from serving. They found that their onboarding system was too complex. People would start signing up yo serve and give up halfway through.

So, they spent a lot of time making the sign-up process simple. They built a back-end workflow in their database so every person who signs up gets followed up with. Now, people move through the new system much faster, including follow-up, communication, and the early first steps toward serving.

Celebrating Your Volunteers

Another thing Jesus mentioned is what they call “Dream Team Weekend.”

They start with an evening gathering to celebrate their volunteers, and it carries into the weekend. Everyone who serves gets a shirt they wear all weekend. In the services, they highlight people, tell stories, and recognize outstanding service. They’re honoring the people who serve. And while they’re doing it, they’re creating FOMO.

(That may be the only time I’ll call FOMO a discipleship strategy.)

He also said their best recruiting tool is the coaching they give their staff and key leaders. They give them handles on how to be a volunteer recruiter and how to spot the people they should be inviting into serving.

That’s an underestimated tool in ministry. The people serving on the front lines are our best identifiers of new volunteers. They see who shows up early, who stays late, and who’s already helping without being asked.

Who Owns Serving?

ONE&ALL built resourcing serving into staff roles at their campuses. They have what they call “fully functioning campuses,” and one of the key roles at each campus is a discipleship pastor. They are responsible for identifying high-capacity volunteers, inviting them into volunteer leadership, and making sure every serve area has a volunteer leader. There are a couple of principles here I want to make sure you catch:

• First, what gets leadership and resources gets done. If your church doesn’t staff and resource serving, it shouldn’t surprise anyone when serving doesn’t grow.
• Second, every strategy needs a leader.

Too often, the approach to serving is that everyone on staff is responsible for it. And that’s true… but, they’re also responsible for a lot of other things. The tendency is to think somebody else will handle it, or I’ll get to it when things slow down. We say it all the time: if everyone owns it, nobody does.

You need one person who owns it. In ONE&ALL’s case, that’s a discipleship pastor. That person makes sure you have a clear, simple onboarding process, a system for identifying leaders, and follow-up that helps new people find their place on a team.

Stop Recruiting Volunteers. Start Inviting Disciples

Serving is more about helping people grow spiritually than about getting stuff done.

ONE&ALL changed how talked about serving, making it clear that the win was engaging in the mission. Your communication strategy might need to change, and you might need more opportunities to celebrate the people who serve at your church. Ask:

1. Is serving clearly on your path?
2. Does someone own it?
3. Do your systems make it easy to say yes?

Your people need a place to make a difference. If you give them that, you’ll probably never have to beg for volunteers again.

Our Unstuck Planning Process helps churches assess their discipleship pathway: where you’re winning, where people are getting stuck, and what to do about it. You can learn more at theunstuckgroup.com/start.