The 5 Most Effective Ways To Recruit Volunteers with Brandon Cox MINISTRYLIBRARY Video Book Summaries For Church Leaders Hey, I m Brandon Cox, pastor at Grace Hills Church in northwest Arkansas, editor at Pastors.com, a couple other things, and I want to talk to you today about recruiting and releasing volunteers in the ministry. I have met very few pastors or leaders in churches who had plenty of volunteers, who had expressed that they were good in that area, we don t need any more people. There s about a 98% chance that if you re watching this, you re hoping for more volunteers, you re looking for more volunteers, and chances are, you re probably wondering how in the world do I find them. When it comes to recruiting volunteers, deep down what know what doesn t work. But because we don t know what else to do, we keep trying the same things that are not very effective. Let me just start out by talking about why this matters so much, because if we re not careful, we ll do this with the wrong motive. Our motive will be, I want to make life easier, I want to have a larger organization, I want things to do more smoothly. I want more volunteers, because I want things to be easier. That s not necessarily the right motive or the right reason to be finding more volunteers within a church culture. So let me just give you a couple reasons why this does matter, good motives for us to have. First, it s part of discipleship. If following Jesus means serving like him, means taking up the towel and serving the way he served, then that means that when we recruit people to volunteer, we re actually recruiting them into following a disciple of Jesus. We re recruiting them into what it means to be more like him. It s a discipleship issue, helping people serve is helping people follow Jesus. It also is something that grows the volunteer. In other words, it s not just that I need them to do this for me, it s that I need them to do this for them. It s that they re going to stretch their faith, they re going to learn some skills, they re going to develop more relationships, they re going to learn to trust God more as they serve, they re going to have greater self confidence as they serve. It s to grow the volunteer. Then a third good motive is that it grows the church. Let me be careful here, I don t mean that we need to get people to volunteer so that our church grows, so that we can boast in larger numbers.
What I m saying is, that if we want to reach more lost people, it makes sense that I need more volunteers working in the harvest. It grows the church, it grows the kingdom when we are able to draw more people into serving and into volunteering. That s all well and good, but how do we do it? Let me just start out by talking about what we don t do. Here s what doesn t work, and I think you know this and you probably knew I was going to say it, but I just need to clarify it because even though we know it doesn t work, since we don t know what does work, we keep doing it. What doesn t work is mass recruitment through announcements. In other words, there are about five major areas where we as churches try to do this, we try to do it from the stage, Hey, we ve got kids ministry that really needs help. It s awful down there, so we need people to go down there. Please go down there and serve. Nobody does. Nobody responds to a stage announcement. There s lots of reasons for that. There s screen announcements, which are fine in terms of if you want to get involved in worship ministry, email this person. That s okay, but it s probably not a good place to communicate a need for more volunteers. We need more people in the nursery, if you re willing to help, then remember these eight steps to take when you leave here after you ve eaten lunch. It just doesn t work. We do this with social media. We put it out on the Facebook page, Hey, we need kids volunteers, if you re willing, leave a comment below. Everything you post, if 5% of the people who like your church see it and then 5% of those people interact with it and 5% of those people will actually leave a comment, that s probably not the best way to recruit volunteers. We do it through the bulletin, and my goodness, has it ever worked? We don t recruit volunteers by making an announcement in the bulletin. That doesn t mean you shouldn t make a call for volunteers in the bulletin, you just shouldn t trust that that s going to work or be the primary means. I t s okay to say we ve got an event coming up, if you want to help, go to this website or email this person, that s okay, you re going to get some response. It s just not the best response. We re getting to the best response in just a minute. The last thing is newsletters, monthly newsletters, email newsletters. Again, you just lump it in with bulletins and social media and stage and screen announcements.
It just doesn t work because it s massive, because it s very easy for people to assume that someone else is going to respond, that someone else is going to say yes to that call. Mass recruitment just usually doesn t work. I want to talk about what I think are the five things that do work. I said earlier, I have not met very many people who have enough volunteers. I have met some. I have come across some church leaders who ve done an amazing job at recruiting volunteers. I ve worked in a church staff in the past as a pastor, and now I m the lead pastor of a church where I think I ve seen this be very effective. And so I want to share with you out of those two experiences when I was on staff at Saddleback Church and in the last five years of planting Grace Hills church, these are five things that I have watched work over and over, with great effectiveness. I want to rank them. I m going to go in order of the least to the most effective, but all five of these means are better than everything we just said. Here s the fifth best way, the number five way to recruit and release more volunteers in the ministry, is to tell the stories of people who are currently volunteering. That is, to highly the stories of people whose lives are being changed by serving. People who are finding fulfillment and purpose and meaning and significance to tell their stories and amplify their stories, is a huge means of recruiting other people to come and create their own story. We were doing a sermon series that included a couple of messages about serving once, and I wanted to share some stories in that. On a Sunday morning what I did, I was the lead pastor, teaching pastor, so I was up on stage, and I said hey, sometime in the next week, I want to challenge you to do this. By the way, we reminded people by email. We remind them on social media, but I said from the stage, I want you to take out your phone and shoot a 30 second selfie video telling us the answer to this question: why do I serve Jesus? Answer that question in 30 seconds or less, why do I serve Jesus. Then, we told small group leaders to remind their groups about it, and to be willing to take that video for their group members, and then we sent out reminders. We really tried to remind people during the week, take out your phone, and then we would say things like man, we re getting some videos, these are great, keep them coming.
People would do it. We had a lot of people that took out their phones, took a 30 second video because it was easy to do, and then we just gave them email address, just email it to this address, and they would send it from their phone s email system, and it would come to us. Because it s 30 seconds or some of them were upwards of a minute, but because it s that short, it can be emailed. They sent them into us, and then we took all those videos, put them into a montage with some nice background music, and faded transition from one to the next, and it became a very powerful recruitment tool. We even used it later, not just in the sermon series, but we used it on our website, a couple of different places, and on social media when we were doing pushes for volunteers. And so telling the stories of current volunteers is really powerful and really essential. To me, it s the fifth best way to recruit people and to release people to ministry. Here s the fourth best way. A post sermon specific call to action. That s not the same as a stage announcement. The person who gets up and welcomes everyone, who says, Hey, by the way, we re looking for some volunteers, that s not very effective, especially if they re just reading it out of the bulletin. Just shoot me in the face, don t ever have someone just read junk out of a bulletin that people are already reading for themselves. What I m talking about is, when you finish preaching a sermon that is designed to get people to make a spiritual commitment, and that spiritual commitment, the specific call to action in the sermon is to serve Jesus, then after the closing song, after the sermon is over, if the lead pastor, the teaching pastor, whoever taught the message, can come back up or step back up and say, Hey, if you re willing to start today, if you want to act on this sermon right now, I m going to give you two areas we re looking right now for people to serve. One is in our preschool and the other is as a greeter. You got to be a little bit crazy to care for preschoolers, and you got to be a little bit crazy to be a greeter. So take out your communication card and if you re willing to try one of those two areas of ministry, or you can let us know which one, but if you re willing to try out one of those areas of ministry that I just mentioned, write crazy enough in all capital letters in the bottom note part of that communication card, and then drop it in a box or a bucket or hand it to one of our leaders on the way out.
I ve just given them something specific and attention grabbing to write, crazy enough. Write crazy enough, give us your name and your email, that s it, don t ask for anything more, we don t need your home address and your social security number and your blood type and your family history, we just need your name, your email address, and we just need to know you re crazy enough. Drop that in a box. Then you ve got work to do the next week in reaching out, following up, plugging people in. That s a big one, a specific call to action after a sermon. Here s the third best way to recruit and release people into ministry. It s using your discipleship pathway, your next steps discipleship pathway. If your church doesn t have a next steps discipleship pathway, there s probably going to be a good video that you need to watch elsewhere here. You ve got to have some way of helping people understand incrementally what is the next step for me in my spiritual growth. How do I get closer to Jesus, how do I go more on mission and give my life away more, as opposed to living for myself more. Here s how we clarify that at our church. We re a purpose driven church. If you ve never read the purpose driven church, it came out in the 1940s and it revolutionized everything. Here s how we look at it. We want everybody to basically think about their spiritual life in terms of five steps of growth. One is that I m committing to God s family. I m going all in, I m becoming a member, I m joining up. However you want to term it, whether your members are members or owners or whatever, there s this step of, I m not just going to casually attend, I am going to endorse what this church believes, I m going to join this family and be part of this family, that s a step. For us, the second step is, I m going to start practicing and developing the habits and disciplines of a disciple. For us, 101 is membership, 201 is maturity. It s how do I grow in maturity, how do I develop these steps. One of those steps, and by the way, when we talk about membership at our membership class, one of the things we say at the membership class is, that part of being a member means serving. If you re joining today, go ahead and let us know where you d like to serve, where you d like to try out, because it s part of being a member. It s a high expectation right up front. Step two though, is discipleship, it s growing in the habits and the disciplines, and guess what one of the disciplines is? Serving other people.
Step three for us is ministry, and that s where we say hey, let us help you discover your shape for ministry. That s your spiritual gifts, your heart, your ability, your personality, and your experiences, and how all five of those mix together to help you to serve other people. We don t want you serving somewhere that you re not shaped for, that you re totally uncomfortable with, that frustrates you. Instead, we want to know how has God gifted and called you, what has he done in your life to prepare you, what kind of personality do you have that s ready and available for this, and where do you need to plug in. For us, step four is venture out of the comfort zone and live life on mission, which means serving as a volunteer in my community, on a foreign mission field, whatever it may be. And then the last step for us is to see all of life as worship, to develop a work/home/family, all encompassing everything about who I am is designed to worship Jesus. Again, every one of those is a clear next step of how do you want to get involved and serve. That s the third best way. So far we got tell the stories of people who serve, make a specific call to action with a right then next step after the sermon, the third best way is to have a discipleship pathway. Number two is for ministry leaders to personally recruit volunteers. Not the senior pastor. It s okay if the senior pastor recruits people. If he s telling people, Hey, you ought to serve, that s fantastic. But it s even better when a staff member or team leader is doing their own recruitment, if they re fishing from the pond. When I was on staff at Saddleback Church, pastor Rick used to tell us, Everybody here has a free fishing license. If you recruit someone from someone else s team, you just made room on their team for someone else to come up and serve. Go for it, free fishing license. So we d tell our staff leaders and our ministry leaders, if you can recruit someone onto our team, they belong there, they didn t belong where they were, they belonged there. We ll find someone else for that. Just leaders and staff members in particular, recruiting their own volunteers. It s very diffcult when you ve got one person assigned the role of connecting people into different ministries. It sounds good on the surface, the problem is, it s a lot of work for one person to carry out. It gives people just one relationship. Have different leaders recruit. By the way, if you re going to do this, you also have to train those leaders how to recruit. How you recruit is not, Please, I need help, please come do this. Instead, the way that you recruit is, I see something in you, you could totally do this. See the big difference there?
Get out of the beggar mentality of, Man, we re just dying down there, we really need help, we need some warm bodies. Will you please give up an hour of your life? I know it s asking a lot, but would you come serve? No, forget that. There s a vision, there s something great that you can take part in here. You need to be serving. I see something in you and I believe you re up to this. I believe you re up to this. Here s the best way to recruit. This is the single most effective means of recruiting and releasing volunteers into ministry. It s not rocket science, it s not shocking, but it s big and it s this. It s volunteers recruiting volunteers. Existing volunteers personally recruiting their friends. Now you re going, that seems elementary, shouldn t that be happening anyways? Maybe it should be, but a lot of times, it s not because we re not talking about it. We re not reminding our volunteers, Hey, did you know that not only can you serve in this ministry, but one of the best ways you can serve is to tell your friends how much you enjoy it. When you start seeing people who re volunteering in a ministry, and they re going to their small group and telling their small group what a blessing it is and saying hey, would you guys come with me, it s a lot of fun, I d love it if you d come serve alongside me, that is powerful. That is where I ve seen the largest number of volunteers come from, is by being recruited by other volunteers. It s relational, it s powerful, it s personal, and it lets the new recruit know, I m not doing this alone. I m going with a friend. Guess what? Volunteer teams are like small groups. It s like another small group experience. In fact, I often tell people, the people who stick in a church are people who get in a group and get on a team. If you do those two friends, you re far more likely to stick around. Getting into a group helps because I develop relationships. Getting on a team helps not only because I m serving and giving my life away, but also because it s more relationships, and relationships are what people stick to. They might show up at your church this Sunday for content. They might come because of the wild and crazy sermon series you ve got planned, and if so, that s great. But people stay for love. They stay for relationships. Guess what? At the end of the day, when you do this well, when you recruit and release volunteers for ministry, your church thrives as a result.
In fact, I don t want to get too specific with quantities, this is not a 90 day money back guarantee or anything. This is more just an observation, that if you can double the number of people serving and volunteering in ministry using the technique we ve just talked about, then you create the capacity for your church to double in size, because those volunteers are now more invested, more excited than they ve ever been before, and you now have more places for people to come and fill in. As people work their way up the ladder, you ve now got room to bring more people up behind them. So get at this. It s not just about getting the word out about your awesome church, it s also about getting the word in. It s about moving people up that ladder of leadership, growth and development, and when they serve and they thrive, your church grows. Take those things and use them and then later, maybe you can let me know what didn t work. I think that if you do these things, your church is going to be blessed through it.