Recruitment: The First Step Is the Hardest

Day 1

Launch Day

Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty,

but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests.

PROVERBS 14:4

The words poured out of her mouth before she could stop them: “It’s just easier for me to do it myself.”

At one level, of course, this youth leader is right. Almost always it is easier to do it ourselves. We avoid the hassle of having to coordinate and communicate. We avoid having to follow up with people who drop the ball.

“Everyone is busy,” we say to ourselves, “and I’m the one being paid for this work, right?”

We’ve heard dozens of reasons why leaders, even very intelligent and very spiritual ones, choose not to build a solid volunteer team. But quite frankly, the reasons are all rubbish.

Ministry is not singles tennis. It’s more like football or hockey or baseball. It’s the team that wins. Too many youth workers I know are like a coach who decides to save time on the front end by playing all the positions—quarterback, receiver, safety, linebacker. “It would be so much easier,” I can imagine the coach saying, “if I didn’t have to spend all that time recruiting! Think of all the time I would save in the off-season!” Coaches who didn’t have to recruit would be free to focus on developing their own skills rather than going through the tedium of building a team.

I hope you’re getting the absurd metaphor.

If you want to save time in the short run, you’ve got the wrong book. Faithful ministry is almost never meant to be a do-it-yourself project. It’s a do-it-together project. You want a job you can do by yourself? Get a newspaper route. Be a telemarketer. Sell shoes. But ministry will require you to be a team builder more than a solo player. Of course, you know this already. It’s why you picked up this book.

Today’s Mission

Scan through the entire thirty-day plan (this book) to get a sense of the rhythms of the weeks.

Answer this question in writing, and be prepared to share your response with your prayer partners when you meet with them: At the end of this 30-Day Change, how would I like my ministry to be different? (Hints: How many volunteers? What kinds of volunteers? What’s different about the recruiting process? The training process? How does it feel different?) You might know you’ve got this right when you read it and it creates a little lump in your throat.

Invite two people to be your prayer partners through this process—to pray for you and for the process, to meet with you weekly and to help you think through the implementation steps found in the next twenty-nine days. Suggest meeting times, ideally in a rhythm that lines up with your reflection days (days 8, 15, 22, 29).

Send an email or text or make a call to at least three previous volunteers who have left the youth ministry (or maybe even the church) in the last year or two. Let them know a little about this project, and invite them to give you some feedback to help you understand each of their particular reasons for no longer working as a volunteer. See the end of this chapter for a sample email you could send, including a few key questions to ask.

Determine what day you will carve out as your reflection day (or sabbath day) each week. On reflection days the assignments will take much less time. We have provided questions for you to work through in preparation for your weekly check-in with your prayer partners. Once you have determined when your reflection day will be each week, orient your thirty-day project around those days. For example, if you determine your reflection days will be on Thursdays, select a Thursday at least eight days away and make that day eight of this project. Make the day before day seven, and the day after day nine. Keep numbering days accordingly until all thirty have been assigned to a specific day on the calendar.

For each of the non-reflection days, schedule two hours to focus on your 30-Day Change project. It may not take two hours every day, but having the time set aside will ensure that you have appropriate margin to accomplish each 30-Day Change daily mission.

Read the following brief excerpt on recruitment from Mark’s book Sustainable Youth Ministry.

Recruitment: The First Step Is the Hardest

The study behind the book Youth Ministry That Transforms revealed that less than a third of professional youth workers experience regular success in recruiting volunteers. Less than a third! Our experience with youth workers bears this statistic out.

Quite accidentally, we stumbled onto the biggest obstacle in recruiting volunteer leaders. After working with church after church that just couldn’t seem to get traction in recruiting volunteers, we started asking youth workers, “How many hours have you spent in the previous week actually recruiting volunteers?” Almost invariably, it was less than an hour (most often, it was exactly zero).

To get a youth worker off the dime, we recommend that he or she make five recruiting calls in the coming week. Since at this point we’re not expecting a definite yes or no, we call these “cultivating calls” rather than recruiting calls. The assignment is not to recruit, but simply to make the first call (even if that is simply leaving a message). This process can take anywhere from ten to thirty minutes.

Before we end our conversation with the youth worker, we agree on the names of people he or she will call for what volunteer positions and agree to an accountability check the next week.

But when we check in a week later, the youth worker who “desperately” wants more volunteers has often not made a single call. Something has come up—an unusually busy ministry month, a student in crisis, a dog who ate the list.

We’re talking about an assignment that could have been completed in less than thirty minutes, maybe in as little as ten. But the average youth worker has extraordinary difficulty finding those ten minutes.

Here’s why: Recruiting is hard.

Few of us like to ask people to do things for us. Most of us would rather just do it ourselves than go through the discomfort of making calls. As a result, many youth workers step into the fall (when the season opens) unable to field a complete team and complaining about being overwhelmed.

This pattern perpetuates the myth that “no one in our church ever volunteers.” Frantically cobbling together a group of volunteers who fill slots every other week or so reinforces the perception that they’re only helpers in someone else’s ministry. When we see a youth ministry with rotating helpers, we can be sure that there is dry rot in the foundation.

Sadly, most volunteer recruitment comes in the form of blanket solicitations to large groups. The assumption, of course, is that such an approach will save the recruiter time. But in the long run, blanket appeals always wind up taking more time, for very obvious reasons:

Blanket appeals often attract volunteers who would simply not be appropriate to work with teenagers (I refer to blanket bulletin appeals as “pedophile invitations”). Getting the wrong person to stop being involved takes a lot more time than never having him or her involved in the first place.

The kind of initiative-taking leaders we’re looking for seldom flock to blanket announcements. They need to be recruited personally, one at a time. They’ll need to be contacted anyway, so blanket appeals only multiply the amount of time required.

A flurry of public announcements about the desperate need in the youth ministry perpetuates a climate of desperation, which almost always results in a flurry of unsolicited advice-giving from well-meaning church members and senior pastors who assume they need to help the youth worker fix his or her problem.

But hidden beneath all the reasons that recruiting doesn’t work, there’s good news: when those responsible for a youth ministry actually invest the appropriate amount of time in the recruitment process, at the right time, we can almost guarantee success.

We’ve seen lots of variations, shortcuts and “brilliant” ideas for recruiting volunteers (for example, some suggest that you have the kids recruit for you, or threaten to cancel a program if you don’t have enough volunteers), but none of those work nearly as well as working a very clear process. Remember, we’re investing, not gambling on great ideas.

Sample email to previous volunteers

Dear [NAME],

I’m writing to ask a little favor.

You are someone I trust and respect, and I would really value your input on a project I am stepping into.

I’m working on building our volunteer team for our youth ministry for next year. As someone who has been but is not currently a youth leader, you have a perspective that can be incredibly helpful as I step into this season of building our team.

Would you be willing to answer a few questions for me? I’ve included them below. You can send me an email, or just call my voicemail (555-555-5555) and leave me your responses. I’m not looking for a well-prepared essay, just your immediate thoughts.

Thanks so much for the investment you’ve already made in our ministry. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and even more to the ways that your input will affect the way we build our next volunteer team.

Here are the questions:

What were the biggest motivating factors in your choosing to serve in the youth ministry?

What were the biggest motivating factors in your choosing to stop serving in the youth ministry?

What was the most helpful thing the leadership of the youth ministry did to help you have a meaningful, impactful experience working with youth?

What might the leadership of the youth ministry have done differently to have made your experience working with our youth more meaningful, more impactful or maybe even less of a hassle for you?

If the leadership of the youth ministry had done the things you recommended in the previous question, might you still be serving in the youth ministry now?

Thanks so much for taking a little time to help us think through these questions together. Your input will be invaluable for us.

Blessings,

[NAME]

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