There isn’t a church we’ve talked to in the last several years that has said, “We have enough volunteers.”
Especially since the pandemic, most churches feel the pinch.
But part of the challenge for churches might be their approach. They aren’t highlighting the fact that serving is actually part of discipleship. It’s more than something we need from people; it’s something we want for them.
I recently connected with Jesus Arriaga, the Executive Pastor at ONE&ALL Church in San Dimas, California, to talk about how they are winning in serving. 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!
In this episode, Jimmy and I discuss how ONE&ALL is approaching serving in a way that actually works.
- Serving as part of the discipleship pathway
- Simplifying the volunteer onboarding process
- Celebrating your volunteers
Most churches are recruiting people. They're finding volunteers to fill some kind of serving gap. And One & All, they've been inviting people into a next step with Jesus. [episode 474] #unstuckchurch Share on X We need to explain why it's also a win for somebody who's gonna take that step as a disciple.[episode 474] #unstuckchurch Share on X Stop recruiting to needs and start presenting opportunities. [episode 474] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Planning Center.
Planning Center is software designed to help churches help people. With multiple tools in one connected platform, you can stay organized, communicate with your team, and create meaningful ways to connect with your congregation.
Start for free at planningcenter.com—pay only for what you need, and cancel anytime.
Get the Leader Conversation Guide
Opt-in here and get access to the Leader Conversation Guide for this episode and to the full archive. Emailed each Wednesday.
Share Your Thoughts and Questions on Social Media
We use hashtag #unstuckchurch on X @unstuckgroup and on Instagram @theunstuckgroup.
Write a Review—It Helps!
Your ratings and reviews really do help more pastors discover the podcast content we’re creating here. Would you take a minute to share your thoughts? Just open the podcast on iTunes on your phone or computer, click Ratings & Reviews, and leave your opinion. Or leave us 5 stars on Spotify.
Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and this is episode two of our series on where churches are winning, specifically on how they’re helping people grow as disciples of Jesus. I’m joined again today by Jimmy McLoud. Jimmy’s the lead pastor at First Christian Church in Canton, Ohio, and an Unstuck consultant. Jimmy, welcome back to the podcast. You’ve been doing, I know, a lot of traveling and working onsite with churches lately. Do you have any churches that you’d like to brag on?
Jimmy:
Well, thanks, Sean. I’m excited to talk about another great church on this week’s episode, and I’ve been having a blast the past couple of weeks working with churches all over the Northeast in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan. But I was thinking about this this morning. A lot of times, we work with these churches that are doing these amazing big things, and those are the highlights that tend to rise to the top.
But I have to brag on this little church that I’m working with right here in our community. They’re just down the road from us. This church, when they took our Unstuck Church assessment, they came out in the life support phase of the life cycle, which is a pretty tough conversation to have with a church. But I didn’t know what to expect going into the conversation, and I have to give them credit. They have rallied together. They are doing the hard work of actually closing their church and replanting a new church in its footprint.
Sean:
Wow.
Jimmy:
And it’s been, honestly, one of the most fun conversations I’ve ever had with a church. They’re incredible people. I love their hearts. They have a great vision for this new church they’re gonna give birth to in their community. And I’ve just been having a blast. So that one’s been a lot of fun, and it came out of nowhere.
Sean:
That’s incredible. I mean, that takes a significant amount of courage for a leadership group and a church to say, “We’re willing to do that.” But good for them. That’s awesome.
Jimmy:
It does. They’re pretty amazing.
Sean:
Well, last week we kicked off this whole series with a conversation on small groups. We heard from Christy Gibas at the Table Church, a church that’s so committed to the group’s strategy that they completely changed their name as a church. Their groups are built to look up, in, and out, as Christy said, and every new group starts with an apprentice and a date to multiply within their church. And we also heard about a couple of people who joined a group, took a step towards membership and being involved in the church, went to Christy’s house and had dinner with her before they ever attended a weekend service at the church. So it’s a pretty incredible story. If you missed it, go back and give the first episode of the series a listen. This week, we’re talking about serving. Specifically, we’re gonna look at one church that’s engaging more people in serving because they’ve made it a part of their discipleship pathway.
Before we get there, though, let me say thanks to this week’s podcast sponsor, Planning Center. If your church is struggling to stay organized and connected, Planning Center is an all-in-one church management software built to simplify administration so that you can focus on people. You can track first-time guests, schedule volunteers, manage check-ins, even accept online giving, all in one place. So if you’d like to learn more, and you can even start for free, just go to planningcenter.com.
So, Jimmy, I don’t think that there’s a church that I’ve talked to probably in the last two or three years, maybe longer than that, maybe since we came out of the pandemic, that has told me we have enough volunteers. In our Q1 Unstuck Church report from this year, from 2026, the average church had 41% of its congregation serving. And compare that to our benchmark, our benchmark is to have about 50% of your church serving. Now, the good news is that that 41% is up six points from where we were the year before, so there’s progress being made, but I don’t think that really many churches at all would say we’re where we wanna be. So, Jimmy, I’m curious, have you guys felt this at First Christian or are you gonna be the first pastor since 2020 that tells me you have plenty of volunteers?
Jimmy:
That would be awesome. Every church is feeling that pinch. We are definitely feeling that pinch. And we’re making progress, but it’s been slow. And for us, we’ve identified a cause and effect, Sean. The effect is that we don’t have enough volunteers, so we live in this constant state of recruiting, but the cause is not what we thought it was gonna be when we started to really dig into why we don’t have enough volunteers. We identified something we didn’t expect. We actually have more volunteers on most of our teams now than we did before COVID, but what we’re finding is those volunteers are less available, and I would maybe even say less committed to serving regularly than they used to be. So maybe pre-COVID, our kids’ ministry volunteers would’ve served two or three times a month, and now it’s once a month, and that’s regular volunteering, but that just leaves more gaps to fill.
So it’s not that we don’t have the people; we’re just not getting as much of their time. And I think it’s interesting, and this has been discussed on the podcast before, that pre-COVID, it was easier to get people to serve than it was to move them to be generous financially. And post-COVID, the data shows that trend has reversed, and now it’s easier to get people to give financially to support the church than it is to get them to serve. So when I talk about that with the churches I’m working with, 100% of the time, heads are nodding around the table because everybody’s feeling that volunteer crunch right now and it hurts.
Sean:
Yeah, for sure. And I don’t know if this helps or not, but this isn’t just a church problem. I’m not sure if that makes it any better, but I think it’s a little bit more comforting for us to hear that every kind of organization out there is feeling that right now. Even the one maybe church has considered kind of their biggest competition to Sunday mornings, and yes, I’m talking about youth sports, volunteerism and engagement there is down. There’s actually some research by an organization called the Do Good Institute there at the University of Maryland, and they found that in 2021, the share of Americans volunteering through an organization saw its largest decline since the government actually started tracking all of that. And the pandemic didn’t actually start that slide. Their research director has said that volunteering rates were slipping a little every year, starting in the early to mid-2010s.COVID, the pandemic, just made it worse, and it still hasn’t fully recovered today.
Jimmy:
Interesting.
Sean:
So here’s the part that I found most interesting, though. Their research also found that belonging to a religious congregation is one of the strongest influences on whether people volunteer and give. So churches aren’t just competing for volunteers. We’re one of the places that volunteers actually come from for other organizations. He also made the point in the research, and I think every church needs to hear this, people need a reason to keep volunteering. I just wanna add, part of the challenge for churches might be our approach. Yes, we definitely need to get things done as churches. We have always been volunteer-driven organizations. And if we wanna reach more people or even just open the doors for a weekend service, we need volunteers. But if getting things done is our starting place, I think we’ve set ourselves up for a challenge from the very beginning of all of this.
Serving is really about discipleship. It’s something that we want people to experience more than something that we need from them. Jesus said he didn’t come to be served, but to serve. And it’s hard to say, “Yep, I follow Jesus, but I don’t serve.” Do you agree with that, Jimmy?
Jimmy:
Absolutely. I wouldn’t recommend pastors put Mark 10:45 on their volunteer recruiting forms, but maybe guilt trips are your thing. I don’t know. But it’s definitely the reason that serving belongs on every church’s discipleship pathway. When we treat serving just like filling spots, we are inadvertently teaching people that church is just a vendor and they’re helping us, they’re serving us as the staff, and we make ourselves the hero. When we treat it like discipleship, we’re communicating that by serving, people are following Jesus and they’re serving him. So at FCC, one of our five core values is to help people find their purpose, and we have strategy built around how we do that, starting with gaining a lot of clarity around how you’re wired on a personality level, on a passion level, on a gifting level. And then we’ll tell people your sweet spot is wherever your passions and your giftings intersect. I just preached about that last weekend.
But then part of how we help people lean into that knowledge is by finding a place to serve in or through the church that aligns with their unique purpose and calling. Like Dallas Willard, I’m a huge fan of his writing and he talks a lot about how that kind of synergy when what you do lines up with who God created you to be just makes things click in your soul, and we wanna help people discover that. That’s what’s gonna keep them not just… They won’t just offer to serve once, but like you just said, Sean, it’ll keep them coming back. So we orient all our serving on-ramps that way. If the only time we talk about serving in the church is when a ministry is short or struggling or desperate, people sniff that out so fast.
And usually they run from it. They’ll decide what we’re really trying to do is use them to meet our needs, and it’s not about offering them an opportunity to grow spiritually.
Sean:
Totally agree. All right, Jimmy, let’s get to the solutions quickly on this one because I think everybody listening right now already gets the problem to this. I recently connected with Jesus Arriaga, who’s the executive pastor of a great church out in San Dimas, California, One & All Church. We started working with One in All back in 2024, and at the time, One & All was growing 21% year over year, but they had 88% of their church engaged in serving.
Jimmy:
Wow.
Sean:
That is off the charts. Usually, when a church is growing that fast, serving takes a while to catch up. I’d expect a church growing like that to land somewhere between like 40 and 45% of their church serving. One & All was double that. So I had to ask Jesus, what is driving this for you guys? And he told me that a couple of years ago, One in All made an intentional shift to make serving a prominent part of, you guessed it, their discipleship path. They changed the language from, “We need to,” to “You need this.” And they started telling a lot of stories of people who were serving at their church. And you remember the research that I mentioned a little bit ago, people need a reason to keep volunteering. One & All got intentional and purposeful about giving them one, but they knew they had systems work to do within their team, so they built a team that actually sat down and brainstormed the barriers that were keeping people from serving in their church. And it took this team an entire year to assess all of the areas that they needed to improve. But I just love the intentionality behind that.
What they found as they went through this work was their systems were far too complex. People would start signing up, and they would actually give up halfway through the process. Nobody’s ever said, “I’d love to serve. I just wish the signup form would take longer.” Right? So they spent a lot of time making the signup process just really simple, and they built a backend workflow in their database so that every person who signs up gets followed up with. Now people move through their new system much, much faster. They get follow-up, they get clear communication, and they also get these easy first steps towards serving. So, Jimmy, we tell churches all the time that systems drive behaviors. I just think this is an awesome example of that.
Jimmy:
Yeah. And we should say that again for the people in the back. Systems drive behavior 100% of the time. Most churches’ signup processes, the problem, Sean, is they were designed by staff for staff.
Sean:
True:
Jimmy:
We orient those things to make our lives easier. So it’s a process that makes sense to us, but it doesn’t make sense to anybody else. And we act like they’re gonna go through, you know, jumping through the hoops to figure it out. And the truth is they just won’t. They’re designed to make things more convenient for us, but they make things more difficult for the people that we’re asking to serve. So, you know, two things I would say on this subject.
First, we need to give people something really simple to use. When I’m working with churches, I’ll use my watch as an example. I have an Apple Watch on my wrist right now, and I love this thing because it does a lot, but it only has one button, one knob, and a touch screen. And I don’t know if I ever use the knob or the button. So if I lifted the faceplate off of this thing, it’s got, I don’t know, microchips and conductors and stuff soldered together down there, and I couldn’t possibly explain it all, and I couldn’t put it back together if you took it apart, but I don’t have to because all I need to know is I know how this touchscreen works. And that’s what we need to give people. As church leaders, we need to deal with the complexity on our end so that what we put in the hands of the end user is easy. We owe that to them. But if we’re honest, our processes are usually complex enough that often even staff and leadership don’t know how they work, and that’s why we can’t fix them when they break.
There’s something Howard Hendrix used to say, and I love this quote. He said, “If it’s a mist in the pulpit, it’s a fog in the pew.” In other words, if leaders don’t get it, nobody else will. In engineering, they call it irreducible complexity. That means if you made it any simpler, it wouldn’t work anymore. You can’t take anything away, you can’t reduce it any further, or it’s gonna break. And I think that should be what we strive for. It’s not always what we’re gonna end up with, but if we’re striving for that irreducible complexity, it’s gonna make life so much easier. And honestly, it’ll attract more people to serve.
And the second thing is follow-up. Nothing disenfranchises people faster than hearing a need, being moved to respond. They feel that prompting, so they take the step, and then they get crickets. There’s no reply or it takes a while. The silence and the lack of response, what that says to them is we didn’t really need them after all, or maybe even worse, that we didn’t want them or they didn’t matter enough for us to send a simple email or a text or make a phone call. It takes a few seconds. So my challenge for church leaders would be try going to sign up at your church as if you were a guest. Go through your own process. Make up a name so your team doesn’t know it’s you. Try the form and ask yourself, is it long? Is it complex? Is it short and easy to complete? Time how long it takes somebody to get back to you. You know, go through those steps and ask yourself, would somebody who’s not fully invested in our church be willing to jump through these hoops to give of their time?
Sean:
Another thing in my conversation with Jesus that he mentioned is what I think is a really great idea, Jimmy, they call it their dream team weekend. They start with an evening. It’s typically like a Friday night to celebrate all of their volunteers. And that celebration carries throughout their entire weekend. Everyone who serves at the church gets a shirt. They wear their shirt all weekend, so it’s easy to spot who serves. And in the services, they highlight people, they tell stories, and they recognize just really outstanding volunteers. So what I love about that is they’re honoring the people who serve, and while they’re doing it, I think they’re creating FOMO, which may be the only time, Jimmy, that I’ll call FOMO a discipleship strategy.
He also said that their best recruiting tool is the coaching that they’ve given their staff and key leaders. So you just have highlighted some of this as well, but they give them handles on how to be a recruiter, how to spot people that they should be inviting to serve. And that’s one of the things that’s missing. Not all of our staff were wired up to just naturally be able to see that. So being able to help them and equip them is really, really good. And I think an underestimated tool in ministry, the people that are actually serving right now on your team, they are on the front lines and are best identifiers of those new volunteers. They see who shows up early, who stays late, who’s already helping out without being asked. And this is part of what One & All is doing, leveraging those people at the front lines to do that shoulder tapping of people they know would be a great fit in those serving areas. That’s just underutilized. What have you found at your church, Jimmy, that’s helping people take those steps into serving right now?
Jimmy:
Well, first of all, I love that dream team weekend idea, and I think they should totally pitch that. Like all the marketing materials should say, “Dream team weekend with Jesus because you don’t… Is this Jesus? Is it Jesus?” And I think more people would show up. So if you’re listening, guys, there’s my free advice. There are a few practical things that we’ve tweaked at FCC, but one less tangible but really effective shift we’ve made is we have been very, very specific to stop recruiting to needs and start presenting opportunities.
Sometimes when I’m working with churches, and every single church I’m working with right now, volunteering makes a list of places they’re feeling a little bit stuck or they have questions. And so sometimes what I’ll do, Sean, is I put a couple of pictures up on the screen. One of those pictures is like a cruise ship and it’s in beautiful blue Caribbean water and there’s water slides and you can tell people are having a good time at the pool and it just looks like fun. And I don’t even like cruises, but it looks like fun. And then the other picture I put up is this rusty old tugboat and there’s holes in it and it’s sinking and the water’s all murky.
And I’ll just ask them, you know, if both captains invited you onto their ship, which one would you jump onto? And the answer’s pretty obvious, but the illustration is meant to explain, when we recruit to needs and we get up and we make these desperate volunteer pleas all the time, what we’re doing is we’re asking people to jump onto what seems like a sinking ship. And people aren’t gonna get very excited about that. So we wanna present it like an opportunity, just like, you know, their language. Instead of, “We need this,” it’s like, “You need this,” or, “We want this for you.” Like we need to make it a value add, because it is hard, it’s an ask. So being aware of that, we need to explain why it’s also a win for somebody that’s gonna take that step as a disciple.
Sean:
Yeah, that’s very good. I wanna add one other thing that I learned in my conversation with Jesus. I asked him specifically how they at One & All are resourcing serving right now. I’m always interested in that. And he said that they’ve built it into the staff roles at their campuses. So this is a multi-site church. They have different campuses, and they have what they call fully functioning campuses. And one of the key roles at each campus is actually a discipleship pastor who’s focused on their discipleship strategy. So every campus has a discipleship pastor, which is really interesting. I love that. That discipleship pastor’s responsible for kind of identifying high-capacity volunteers, inviting them into volunteer leadership, and then making sure that every serve area has a volunteer leader. So they’re driving some of this as part of discipleship.
Now, centrally, they have a discipleship pastor, or what they call a lead discipleship pastor as well, and then a budget built to support increasing serving across the board in the church. So there’s a couple of principles that I love behind what he shared there that I wanna make sure everybody catches. First, what gets leadership and resources tends to get done. So if your church doesn’t staff and resource serving, it should not surprise anyone when serving isn’t growing. The second thing was that every strategy needs a leader. Too often the approach to serving is that everybody on staff is responsible for it. And that’s true, but they’re also responsible for a lot of other things. So the tendency is to think that somebody else is gonna handle it, right? Or when things slow down, we’ll get to it. You know, we say this all the time, if everybody owns it, nobody does. So you need one person who owns it. In One & All’s case, that’s a discipleship pastor. That person makes sure that you have clear, simple onboarding processes, a system for identifying leaders, and a follow-up process that helps new people really find their place on the team.
Jimmy:
The other way that I’ve heard that said is the best way to starve a dog is to ask five people to feed it, which always makes all my PETA friends cringe when I use that illustration. But the idea is, if you think somebody else is feeding the dog, you may not do it and you don’t suffer, but the dog does. Our system for this was suffering not long ago, and so here’s a little free extra advertising for our podcast sponsor, Planning Center, but we use their workflows for so much of what we do, and it’s an amazing tool, but it relies on your people to hold up their end of the deal. So we had built an incredible workflow, and we thought, “Man, we have a great system built around this. This is gonna work perfectly, and we’ll have all these people serving.”
And what we found is we had these people who were doing their part, filling out the volunteer interest form or responding when we put opportunities out there in front of people. And then some of our people who are really organized and administratively gifted were following up on those things, and then we had some other people who weren’t, and the volunteers were just getting backlogged in the system because we had, like, 14 different leaders who had to respond to those things, and we needed a point person.
So we actually just reworked our org chart to make this process work even better. We now have one person on our staff at a central level who receives every single volunteer interest form. She follows up immediately with that person, like, within 24 hours, they get a reply from her. And the team leader, whoever’s team that person wanted to serve on, they’re CC’d on that email response or text or however that contact goes out. And so then she’ll enter them in the workflow, she’ll assign it to the leader of the ministry, and then she monitors the conversation.
Since we changed that process about two and a half months ago, our conversion rate from interest forms to people actually getting plugged into roles to serve went from, this is pretty pathetic and embarrassing, but it went from about 38% to now it’s a little over 90%. And it just took putting one leader in charge and kinda saying, “Hey, you’re gonna feed this dog.” And as she does, she does a great job, and it changed the game for us. We just had to make it one person’s responsibility.
Sean:
Yeah, I love that. All right, so let’s start talking through kind of practically what pastors could do here. I would just encourage them actually to start right there, I think, Jimmy. Decide who’s going to own serving at your church. If you don’t have that point person right now, like Jimmy just talked through at his church. And you might have the margin like One & All did to make that a staff role. They created one at every campus. Or you might start with one central strategist. It could even be in some churches a really high-capacity volunteer that’s a systematic thinker that could lead this for you. Either way, I think the question is the same. Who owns your serving engagement system and your goals for serving?
Another thing that I’d encourage you to do is just audit what you’re currently doing. You might, like Jimmy’s church, be using Planning Center right now to go through those workflows. Go through an audit. Is this working or not? You might change the whole process. Maybe it isn’t working at all right now. An audit would tell you why it’s not working, and then knowing why will keep you from building those same mistakes into whatever you build for the future. One & All actually spent over a year on theirs. They had a team. It took them a year to go through. They did it the right way. Yours might not take that long, but don’t skip it. Don’t just rush through the process. This is far too important. Jimmy, what would you add to that?
Jimmy:
Well, I think building that right process is absolutely vital, but it can’t stop there. More churches would win in this area of the discipleship pathway if they’d go further than creating a great sign-up form and actually design the first 90 days for a volunteer who’s in a new role. What I see a lot of churches do is put all their energy into getting people’s attention or ultimately getting somebody to say yes to serving, and then a new volunteer shows up, and somebody hands them a lanyard, and they’re often on their own to figure out what to do next. And you mentioned some great research earlier, Sean, that highlighted something critical, and that is people need a reason to volunteer, and then they need an even better reason to keep volunteering. So getting someone onto a team is recruiting, but that’s not discipleship yet.
Keeping them volunteering is discipleship, and that’s where we want people to be. And we only get one shot with most people. If they offer to serve and the follow-up flops or the onboarding is weak, then they might never offer to serve again. So map out what a new volunteer experience is in their first three months and ask questions like who welcomes them on day one? Do they know where to go? Who serves alongside them the first few times so they’re not alone? When does a leader check in? And what does that conversation look like? What do you wanna know from that conversation? And then design questions to get that information so you can raise the bar later. Don’t ask yes or no questions, but design questions that prompt the kind of answers you wanna get. One & All fixed the signup. Sean, I would guess that their 88% success rate with getting people in their church to volunteer has just as much, if not more, to do with some great work they’re doing after the signup, and that indicates some radically successful volunteer retention, which starts with intentional and thorough onboarding.
Sean:
Yeah. And that reminds me too, another one of their key shifts that they made in their process was communicating clearly to people that serving is part of your discipleship journey. And they shifted that language, they said, from “We need you,” to “You need this.” And it’s so true. At the end of the day, this is more about helping people grow spiritually than it is about getting stuff done. So changing how they talked about serving and then they celebrated it like crazy, it made it clear that the win wasn’t just showing up to do whatever the task was. It was actually engaging in the mission. So your communication strategy might be another thing that needs to change. You might need more opportunities to celebrate the people who are serving at your church right now because what’s true is what gets celebrated gets repeated.
Jimmy:
Yeah, that’s true at home. It’s true at work. It’s true in the church. Most churches celebrate something from the stage, and it’s not always even a good thing. If your church is making 50 announcements every weekend, what you’re celebrating is that you’re a really busy church and it might be working against you.
Sean:
Right, yeah.
Jimmy:
So you gotta think about, we are celebrating something. What is it? For us, a few years ago, we said, “Hey, we wanna see more people take the next step of baptism, and we wanna see it more often.” So we started recording every single baptism, whether it happens on a Sunday or any other day, we record it, and then we replay it live in every service the following weekend, and they air on social media too. We do these recap highlight videos. And man, like clockwork, you can mark the date on the calendar almost immediately, the number of baptisms begin to increase dramatically.
So we did the same thing with volunteering. We thought if it’s working with baptism, let’s try it with this. Every single weekend now, we spotlight a volunteer in our service. We’ll have a staff member or a volunteer team leader who will shout out somebody who’s faithfully serving on their team. It’s not an announcement to serve. It’s just purely like a video high five, basically saying, “We’re so thankful for you. Thanks for doing such a great job and making a difference.” And since we’ve started doing that, we’ve seen more people step up to volunteer in those areas without ever asking because they can see that we appreciate the people who are serving. So that’s been a game changer for us.
Stories beat stats. So a 30-second story about a volunteer or a 30-second thank you to a volunteer from a staff member is gonna recruit more people than a slide that says, “Hey, we need 12 more volunteers,” or whatever. It makes your volunteers the hero instead of making it all about your church or your staff team or any specific ministry area.
Sean:
That’s great. I’m a guy that loves stats, but I would much rather hear a story. That’s far more interesting, compelling. I like that. Jimmy, we need to wrap up for today. What do you hope pastors walk away with from our conversation?
Jimmy:
Man, I hope pastors walk away with this one reframe, okay? Stop recruiting volunteers and start inviting disciples to serve. And think about that paradigm shift and how that plays out, but don’t think about it like we’ve gotta recruit volunteers. We wanna invite disciples to serve and then take that to the next step by asking and answering three questions. Number one, is serving clearly on your path? Number two, does somebody own it? And who? If you can’t think of a name, then nobody owns it. And number three, do your systems make it easy to say yes? So think through those questions because people don’t need another ask. They get asked a thousand things every single day. What they need is a place to make a difference. And if you give them that, you’ll probably never have to beg for volunteers again.
Sean:
That’s good. And it reminds me of One & All’s shift from the “we need you” language, because that’s about the problem the church has, right? To the “you need this” language, which is about your growth. That’s about you, that’s you focused. Most churches are recruiting people. They’re finding volunteers to fill some kind of serving gap. And One & All, they’ve been inviting people into a next step with Jesus.
Jimmy:
Or is it Jesus?
Sean:
Jesus, that’s right. But I mean, it was Jesus’ leadership. They built the systems, the staff, they have that whole celebration process to back it up, and that’s how a church can grow 21% in a year and still have close to nine out of 10 people serving, which is really remarkable. If you’re a church leader that’s feeling short on volunteers, don’t start by asking how you fill your schedule, start by asking whether serving is actually a part of your discipleship pathway, and like you said, Jimmy, does anybody actually own it at our church?
So, if today got you thinking about where serving fits within your discipleship path or whether it’s on your path at all, that’s exactly the kind of question that we help churches answer. Our Unstuck planning process helps churches assess their discipleship pathway, where they’re winning, where people are getting stuck, and then what to do about it.
And then we help you build out a plan to move forward. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can go to theunstuckgroup.com. And if you know somebody who leads volunteers at a church or at your church, I would say send them this episode. It might be the most encouraging thing that they hear this week, so hopefully this is shareable and worth sharing with them.
Next week, Jimmy and I will share a story of a church that’s winning when it comes to generosity. This is gonna be really fascinating, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss it.
Leave a Reply