Serving as Spiritual Formation (Part 2)
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Before the pandemic, we typically saw 45% to 50% of all adults and students serving on a volunteer team at least monthly. Our most recent data shows churches reporting only 35% are serving today.
In the first episode of this series on “Serving as Spiritual Formation,” we talked about some of the most common mistakes churches make with their volunteer engagement strategy that are contributing to that shortage of volunteers. But in this second episode, we’re going to look at the structural mistakes churches make that lead to low volunteer engagement.
STRUCTURING TO SUPPORT VOLUNTEER ENGAGEMENT
In this episode, Amy and I talk about the structure of churches that engage the most volunteers in serving roles and specifically how this needs to be considered a spiritual formation issue.
- Core tensions with structuring teams
- Common structural mistakes
- Next steps to take to support volunteer engagement
This episode is brought to you by Planning Center: an all-in-one software to help you organize your ministries and care for your church.
With an easy-to-use platform of products, you can bring people together with event signups, room and resource reservations, automatic volunteer scheduling, and much more.
Start using for free now at planningcenter.com.
Leader Conversation Guide
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More Episodes in This Series
- Strategy for Volunteer Engagement – Episode 355
- The Discipleship Opportunity with Daniel Im – Episode 357
- The Rooted Experience with John Thomas from Mariners Church – Episode 358
- Spiritual Gifts, Serving and Growth Track with Chris Hodges – Episode 359
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. When we see a decline in the number of people serving in our churches, our first reaction tends to be that we have a strategy problem. But what if it’s actually how your team is structured that leads to lower volunteer engagement. On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy continue our series on serving in the church with a conversation on how to structure your team to maximize your volunteers. If you’re a new listener to the Unstuck Church Podcast, you don’t want to miss downloading the weekly episode show notes. Each week we share important information to support that week’s episode. We also share some bonus resources and give you access to the full archive of resources for when you listen to past episodes. To learn more, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Now, before this week’s episode, here’s Tony with our podcast sponsor.
Tony:
This episode is brought to you by Planning Center, an all-in-one software to help you organize your ministries and care for your church with an easy-to-use platform of products. You can bring people together with event signups, room and resource reservations, automatic volunteer scheduling, and much more. Start using Planning Center for free now at planningcenter.com.
Amy:
Well, welcome back to all of our listeners, and Tony, good to see you. Have you been on the road this past couple of weeks?
Tony:
I have. I’ve been actually back in the great Midwest, serving churches in both Fort Wayne and Cincinnati. Cincinnati Church was fun. Not only because it was a fun church to serve. I mean, we’re trying to, I mean, it’s a healthy church too. Amy, this church had close to 30% year over year attendance growth. Can you believe that?
Amy:
Oh my goodness. I can.
Tony:
Yeah. And so, the fun thing is they called us soon because they’re just, if they have stuckness, it’s just trying to figure out how do we continue to address some of the challenges that we’re facing because of the growth that they’ve experienced in such a short time. So that was fun. But because I was in Ohio too, I also got to see my Cleveland guardians play. So it’s always good, Amy, when I can mix business and pleasure, if you will.
Amy:
That’s a baseball team, right?
Tony:
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
Amy:
Football starts soon. Well, we are back in the second episode of our series on serving as spiritual formation, and last week we talked about how most churches say they need more volunteers, and we agreed with them. They’re not wrong.
Tony:
They’re not.
Amy:
Most churches do right now. And before the pandemic, we noted that we typically saw up to 50%, 45 to 50% of all adults and students serving on a volunteer team. But our most recent data shows churches are reporting only an average of 35% are serving today.
Tony:
Yeah. And we talked about it actually, it’s probably a dozen or more common mistakes that churches make with their volunteer engagement strategy that could be contributing to that shortage of volunteers. And so, if you didn’t listen to last week’s episode, go back and listen to it. Grab the show notes. Start there. But you’re gonna wanna review those mistakes we walked through last week, but today we’re going to look at structural mistakes that churches make that may be leading to lower volunteer engagement. And Amy, to set up the conversation, maybe help us, what’s that core tension that you sense pastors feel when it comes to structuring their team in a way that will engage more volunteers in serving opportunities?
Amy:
Yeah, I think the headline tensions are number one, there’s just not enough volunteers engaged on their teams. And the fact that it’s only gotten worse since the pandemic when we were kind of training people just to watch church. So we’ve been hiring more people to do the things we used to have volunteers do.
Tony:
Now, wait, wait a second, Amy. I think that’s how I responded to that question last week, isn’t that the same thing I said last week?
Amy:
Yeah. It helped me to prepare. That was an easy part to prepare for. Yes. It’s the same issue. I was gonna see if you could catch on with that. But pastors feel like there are not enough volunteers, you know, so how could we structure in a way that depends on volunteers if we perpetually don’t have enough, it’s like a chicken or the egg thing.
Tony:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. With that in mind, let’s do what we did last week for volunteer engagement strategy and talk about the structure of churches that engage more volunteers and serving roles. And specifically, let’s just make sure we illustrate how this is a spiritual formation issue. I mean, in addition to engaging scripture, some of the spiritual disciplines, relational connection through bible studies and small groups, and using those gifts to engage in ministry in our communities and mission trips and things like this, serving within the body of Christ is critical to spiritual formation. So let’s try to talk about some of those steps that we can encourage churches to consider as they’re thinking about their structure and how that relates to volunteer engagement.
Amy:
Yeah. Well, I will start out right at the gate. I think one of the mistakes from a structure standpoint is not having all of spiritual formation under one leader or one team. Really any size church, one person who’s owning that overarching pathway and being able to look at the health in all the various areas. You’ll have people under you who manage it, but when we spread it out, we dissipate the overall effect, I think, of our spiritual formation pathways. So the mistake would be is not having one person over things like groups and over things like serving and overseeing outreach. When you have one leader, I’ve seen it work. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. Traction on discipleship happens when we have one person who’s accountable for it. What do you have?
Tony:
What’s the, I was gonna say, Amy, just to be clear, I mean, it’s just not uncommon when we engage with a church and start to look at their structure that they do. They have one pastor over groups. They have another pastor over the kind of the serving engagement in the church. They have another pastor over missions and whatever, and they have another pastor sometimes over more broadly, discipleship and kind of the
Amy:
Yeah, adult discipleship.
Tony:
Education component, the component of that. They have another pastor over men’s ministry, another one over women’s ministry. I think your point is when you have separate leadership and separate teams over every step in the spiritual formation journey, it just makes it tough for any church to get traction, especially for the person that’s just trying to figure out what’s my next step.
Amy:
That’s right.
Tony:
So, that is a common challenge as it relates to structure. Amy, another one that came to mind for me was, and we see this with, as I mentioned that church a moment ago, that is experiencing fast growth. And for the churches that are experiencing growth and getting larger, this is a common challenge we see related to structure. I referenced it last week, but it’s hiring doers rather than leaders. But here’s why. What I think is driving that, and it actually is directly connected to serving. Because what ends up happening, especially in growing churches, is the growth is requiring more ministry to get done. Then we notice not enough people are serving. And so when we start to hire, we’re just trying to hire people to get ministry done. But by hiring doers of ministry rather than leaders of teams that get ministry accomplished, we’re kind of compounding the problem. And it we’re, it’s just a continual challenge then. Because when you hire doers, and I get it, there are certain functions, bookkeeping as an example, you’re gonna have to hire somebody to do that.
Amy:
That’s right.
Tony:
But when it comes to all of the aspects of frontline ministry that we’re trying to engage in people’s lives, the more that we can hire leaders who know how to build teams of people and then letting those teams actually accomplish the ministry, that’s the only way that we’re gonna get ahead of this volunteer engagement challenge. Because if you hire a doer, you’re actually paying them to do ministry, and they’re going to think that’s the win. The win is to get ministry done. They’re not going to be thinking in terms of what it’s gonna require to actually build the teams to get ministry done. So that’s my second one. I just think we need to be more intentional about hiring leaders rather than doers.
Amy:
And as you’re talking through that, it’s a such a common thing when I do a staffing and structure engagement that we don’t have anyone to promote, really, because they have, they have shown evidence of getting stuff done, but they haven’t shown evidence of being multiplying leaders, multiplying, equipping leaders, and any church will get stuck if we don’t have the right leaders, you know, leading the charge. So, all right, here’s mistake number three for me is making everybody responsible for volunteer engagement. Now what I mean here, every ministry leader is responsible to engage volunteers, right? We are responsible to build our teams, make the ask all of that, but making sure that there’s at least one person on the team who understands. I may have a specific ministry area, but I am the champion for volunteer engagement overall. Last week when we recorded this, you talked a lot about know your numbers.
This is the person who lies awake at night. When you’re sitting at 35%, when you wanna be at 50% of people engaged in ministry, this is the person that’s gonna raise the red flag and assemble the right leaders to work on this important spiritual next step. And so you also then have one way, you onboard new volunteers, you have one way of how you tier them out about like, who’s a volunteer, who’s a team leader, who’s a coach, how do we use that language? We, it’s one way then to do leadership development in our volunteer ranks, how we raise up coaches, things like that. So if everybody owns it, you’re never gonna be working on that critical next step. You’re just gonna be chasing people and trying to fill, find, you know, fill your position. So that would be a mistake if you make everybody responsible for volunteer engagement.
Tony:
Yeah. So Amy, I think another way I would say that is if you’re on paid staff, every paid staff member is going to be engaging volunteers, has to be engaging volunteers. But on your staff team, you need one person who is feeling the responsibility and has some authority around making sure you have an effective volunteer strategy. And that every team in the church is engaging that strategy effectively. Alright. And that leads me to this mistake. I think many times churches don’t consider, you know, when we build out our structure with volunteers, this is the win. The win is actually giving ministry away to people in the church. Lay people, volunteers, people serving. They feel like if we give ministry away like that, that we won’t be doing our job. In other words, we’re not gonna be earning our paycheck because we’re actually giving ministry away. When in reality the reverse should be true, you should be actually celebrated and then compensated. The more people that you engage in ministry, the more you should be rewarded. Because we’re essentially doing what God’s called us to. We’re equipping God’s people to do the work of God. So it’s actually maybe thinking about what is the real win here? The real win is empowering people in our church, equipping them to actually carry out the ministry.
Amy:
You know, just a side note here, Tony. I celebrate when people leave corporate America and decide to take a step into ministry. We saw a lot of that in our churches over the years. But I think one flaw they may come in with is they’re used to hiring staff. I’ve mentioned this recently. When I left corporate and came into my ministry job, I was building out my structure and just never even considered volunteers. I was thinking, who do I need to hire? Because that’s the muscle I had for 10 years. So if you engage someone from corporate America, coming into a leadership role on your church, this is something you’re gonna wanna pay attention to to make sure you really clarify the win that you just stated. That your win, especially if you’re in spiritual formation side of things, family ministry, your job is to give it all away. That’s the win. That’s what we celebrate.
Tony:
That’s right. That’s right.
Amy:
Which brings me to my next mistake. I think a mistake we can make in this area is that we start to celebrate the wrong things. We start to celebrate those doers who are staying super busy instead of celebrating the people who are empowering and equipping people to do the work. So when we have our staff meetings, for example, sometimes we celebrate people, we just finished Christmas run and, or we just did this and we wanna call out Tony Morgan for all the great work he did. No, it should be Tony, come on up here. I just looked and, your organization has built in all the tiers of our volunteer structure. Tell us how you did that, and then let’s celebrate Tony for doing that work.
Tony:
In fact, Amy, I worked with a church years ago and they were actually going through this process at their staff, at their all staff meeting. They had all the leaders of all the ministries present their work of building out all the volunteer teams that were required to accomplish their ministry.
Amy:
Oh, that’s so good.
Tony:
And then kind of gave a status report on how many of those volunteer roles are currently filled, and then the process that they were engaging to make sure that the balance of the roles got filled in the coming weeks and months. And so I love that when teams think about what’s the most important priority for our church in this moment, let’s give focus to that. Let’s give attention to that and then let’s celebrate the teams that are actually having the, having a great impact in that area.
Amy:
Okay. Tony, that was a great list, I think, of mistakes. And I think now let’s shift and start to talk about some of the next steps for churches who aren’t currently structured in a way that’s supporting their volunteer engagement as a part of the way they do spiritual formation. So where do you wanna start?
Tony:
So maybe like we did last week, Amy, I think it would be appropriate, we listed four or five mistakes we see when it comes to structuring to support volunteer engagement. Just to go through that list again with your team and do that red, yellow, green exercise that we talked about last week. In fact, we’ll include that list in the leader conversation guide for the email subscribers. And you can just ask yourselves, where are you currently structured in a way that inhibits volunteer engagement?
Amy:
And I really wanna circle back to the idea of not having all of the spiritual formation under one leader, one team. Can you tell I’m passionate about this one?
Tony:
Yes. Well, I agree with you. I am fully on board with that. You should be passionate because it makes a big difference with the churches that get this right?
Amy:
Yeah. I truly believe if you’re going to view serving as a part of the discipleship path at your church, you can’t be focused on just filling those vacancies. You need a leader to step back, work on this overarching strategy for your spiritual formation process.
Tony:
Yeah. And then also as a next step, and this kind of hearkens back to some of the conversation we had in last month’s podcast, podcast series on staffing. Just need to make sure that when paid staff are doing much of the ministry, just recognizing they aren’t as motivated to raise up other lay leaders and build volunteer teams. And we see this happen, especially as churches experience growth in the early days of a church, when the church is smaller, it’s not unusual to hire people that actually help you get ministry done. But as the church grows and that the role of paid staff, and especially leaders in ministry that are on staff, it shifts and some people can grow with the church and grow their leadership and really get more on the team building side of what needs to happen on ministry rather than doing ministry.
Frankly, some people can’t make that shift. But, and if that’s the case, you really need to go back and listen to last month’s series where we talk about how to handle some of those staffing misfits, because that could be an issue. That aside, let’s think about how we can fix this problem. First I would challenge your staff members to draw out an org chart that includes volunteer leaders and volunteers, instruct them to pretend you have a 12 week sabbatical coming up. What type of roles need to be designed to keep the ministry running in your absence? No staff positions allowed. You can’t just hire somebody to cover your sabbatical. We need volunteers and volunteer leaders to cover the time when you’re away. When leaders think about how they could get the ministry done if they weren’t there, it will help them design a team structure that should then effectively work when they are there, when they are engaged in their leadership responsibility. So that’s the first step. Lead pastors, I think you need to commit to regularly casting vision around what it means to be the body of Christ and the importance for every person to recognize they’re a part of this body and they have a role to play. So will any church get to a hundred percent engagement of people serving and being a part of the mission of the body of Christ? Frankly, I hope not because I hope in any given moment you’re reaching brand new people who are still considering the claims of Christ and taking steps towards Jesus. But we should be communicating and casting vision for every person to recognize their part in the body. Thirdly, I would just encourage you, when you’re thinking about staff recruitment selection, the onboarding process to clearly communicate this. Your number one job responsibility over everything else that you do in ministry is to equip God’s people to do the work of God.
So let’s just pretend we’re creating a job description or job profile for every position in the church. Whatever the tactical functions are of that role that need to be completed in any given ministry area. At the very top of that job description, I would include that statement. Your number one job responsibility over everything else is to equip God’s people to do the work of God and to make sure you’re communicating at the very beginning of an, of the onboarding process. This is a priority. This is what a win looks like for your position on the team. And then lastly, if you have one of those staff leaders who excels at volunteer engagement, celebrate that leader, promote them to expand their roles and give them a raise. You should give them a bonus.
Amy:
Yeah.
Tony:
Because they’re doing exactly what we want staff leaders to be doing. So make heroes of those staff leaders and make sure you elevate their role and appropriately compensate for them for that because in the end, really as they build teams and give ministry away, they’re helping you reach more people for Jesus, have a bigger kingdom impact and they should be rewarded for that contribution.
Amy:
Those are four extremely practical steps that if we all started doing that work, I think we’d start to see a shift in some of these numbers. All right. Well, Tony, any final thoughts before we wrap up today’s conversation?
Tony:
Yeah, and this is, I hope you hear our passion around this topic, because we are passionate about giving ministry away, and we’ve seen the impact that healthy volunteer engagement can have in the overall health of the church. But I just wanna encourage you don’t miss these next three episodes in this series. I had a chance to interview leaders at three churches who stand out as examples when it comes to spiritual formation, and then specifically volunteer engagement in helping people take a next step towards Jesus. In the coming weeks, you’re gonna hear from Chris Hodges from Church of the Highlands, Daniel Im from Beulah Alliance Church up in Edmonton, Canada, John Thomas from another great church, Mariners Church in Southern California. They’re all going to share some practical examples of how their churches are making sure serving is a part of their spiritual formation strategy.
And then make sure you subscribe to the podcast show notes so you don’t miss any of the conversations and resources coming up in the series on engaging volunteers as part of spiritual formation. We send out a weekly email with the new episode related articles and videos. And then we also include a leader conversation guide so that you can make sure that you are passing on to other staff leaders, other ministry leaders, some of the key thoughts and principles that we talk about that will help you take your next steps as a ministry. You can sign up for those show notes at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast.
Sean:
Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. At The Unstuck Group, our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align vision, strategy, team, and action. In everything we do, our priority is to help churches help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church today, reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with a brand new episode. So until then, have a great week.
