6 Places You Lose Volunteers (and How to Keep Them)
One of the biggest challenges in every ministry, not just kidmin, is that you always need more volunteers. The maxim "never stop recruiting" exists for a reason. Turnover is constant, which means recruiting never really ends. But simply finding more people doesn't solve the problem on its own. You have to retain the volunteers you already have. Here are six places ministries lose volunteers and what you can do about each one.
1. Look for Them
Every conversation about volunteers has to start with recruiting, because every person who would have said yes but was never asked is a volunteer you lost before you even had them.
A year or so after COVID, we relaunched our Wednesday night programming. The shutdown wiped out my entire volunteer base for that night, and I had to start from scratch. For weeks, I scrambled every Wednesday trying to find someone to cover my three nursery rooms. I was tied up in elementary and couldn't be in four places at once. I’m not that good.
What I eventually realized was that I kept going back to the same small group of people and expecting a different result. That well was running dry. I had to look elsewhere.
Not to switch metaphors, but I call these “pools” of possible volunteers. I write about them in more detail here, but the short version is there are four places to look. In kidmin, parents are your first pool. If you lead in another ministry, the first pool is people you serve. The other three are adults who attend the service you’re recruiting for, your youth, and finally adults in other services.
Across all of these pools, the key is the personal ask. You can’t rely on the bulletin, stage announcements, or volunteer drives. Nothing replaces a direct conversation. Even if you're an introvert, you have to get out and meet people and ask them to serve. If you don't, you'll end up doing everything yourself alongside your spouse, wondering why no one else seems to care. I've been there. It's not sustainable.
2. Onboard Them with Clear Expectations
The second place ministries lose volunteers is in what they're actually asked to do. Sometimes the task is so vague or so small that volunteers wonder whether they're making any difference at all. Before someone even says yes, they need to understand what they're signing up for, and it needs to feel worthwhile. The solution, regardless of church size, is job descriptions.
Early in my ministry, kidmin was essentially the David Reneau Show. I handled check-in, worship, and the Bible story myself. I had volunteers, but I reduced them to crowd control. Most didn't stay long.
After a few years I realized I wasn't leading well and had to start giving things away. Job descriptions were where I started.
When you bring on a new volunteer, onboard them properly. They need to know what they're doing and how to do it well. Without that clarity, they'll leave feeling like they didn't contribute, or worse, they'll try to contribute in the wrong way and leave out of frustration. I've built tools to help with this. You can find them here.
3. Meet with Them Regularly
A volunteer pre-service meeting is one of the most important things you can build into your ministry culture. Just because you explained everything clearly during onboarding doesn't mean your volunteers will remember it next week, let alone next year.
Ask your volunteers to arrive 15 minutes before they serve and use that time well. Connect with your people, celebrate a win, cast vision, walk through the plan for the day, and pray together. Done consistently, that brief meeting will empower and energize your team before they head out to serve. You can read more about how to lead it effectively here.
4. Show Them You Care
John Maxwell says people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. You can't treat volunteers like cogs in a machine. Take a few minutes each week to genuinely ask how they're doing and actually listen to the answer. People stay in places where they feel known and valued.
My first pastor introduced me to a concept called relational currency. Every relationship has an account. Deposits are the follow-up calls, thank-you cards, birthday notes, and invitations to coffee. Withdrawals are the desperate Saturday night text asking someone to cover a Sunday morning. Overdraw that account and you'll lose the volunteer. Lose enough volunteers and you'll lose your ministry.
So if you've had to make a withdrawal recently, follow up. Call the volunteers who stepped up and thank them. Write cards. Celebrate them publicly at your next pre-service meeting. Buy someone a cup of coffee and catch up. Your volunteers are people first. Treat them that way, and they'll stick around. I go deeper on volunteer care here and here.
5. Give Away Responsibility
As you lead, you’ll start to see volunteers with more potential than holding a door open for someone. There’s a good chance you have managers, business owners, teachers, and salespeople in your churches. They can do more than you’re asking. And many of them can do parts of your job better than you. And that’s ok.
I believe ministry leaders are not called to do the work of the ministry but to equip others to do it. That only happens when you give things away.
Start by looking for owners. Owners are the ones who show up early and stay late. They spend their own money to support the ministry. They're the ones you call when you have a last-minute hole and you know they'll say yes. Most of your volunteers will be renters. They show up, do their role for a season, and move on. That's fine. Renters are essential to making ministry happen every week.
Find your owners and give away a few of your responsibilities. I talk about how to do that well in this post. Once you get a few good owners, you can create a lead team and start investing in them more heavily. Here’s how.
6. Correct Them When They're Wrong
Some volunteers probably shouldn't be serving in your ministry anymore. They're disruptive. They argue with you in front of others. They hear the vision and go a different direction. Or worse, they’re living in sin.
I once had a volunteer who decided to run his own class during a church-wide event after I'd explicitly asked him not to. He locked the door to his classroom so I wouldn't find him.
Difficult volunteers exist in every ministry, and it's your responsibility to have the hard conversation. Meet with them privately, loop in your pastor if needed, and speak with grace and honesty. I write about how to handle that conversation well here.
You will always lose volunteers. That's just the reality of ministry. But if you work consistently and intentionally on these six areas, you will still need to recruit, but you’ll always have plenty of dedicated volunteers working to carry the ministry forward.
If you have gaps in multiple areas, I'd suggest focusing on one at a time, working through them in the order I've laid out here. The one exception is number six. If you have a volunteer actively disrupting your ministry right now, address it before it spreads.
Which of these is your biggest challenge? What do you need to work on first? Let me know in the comments!
One of the biggest challenges in every ministry, not just kidmin, is that you always need more volunteers. The maxim "never stop recruiting" exists for a reason. Turnover is constant, which means recruiting never really ends. But simply finding more people doesn't solve the problem on its own. You have to retain the volunteers you already have.