Leadership Development, Ministry Coordination
Assessing Congregational Volunteer Capacity: A Few factors and Limits
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The pressure has been on my congregation for many years. Though we have grown numerically over the past five, and with true growth as measured by first-time believers, we have not been able to keep up with volunteer and leader attrition due to aging and membership churn. This has meant an accelerating reduction in the number of ministries we can maintain and in our capacity to start new ministries.
The anxiety this situation creates can rush leaders into one of two approaches. A first approach is to be reactive and simply shrink the institutional structure by reducing the size of council or disbanding committees or lessening the frequency of some involvements. The downside of this approach is that reactive reducing can disconnect from a faith-oriented or hopeful vision for the future. The upside is that reality must be faced or it will impose itself in more painful ways than choice.
A second approach is to try to inspire new volunteers and deeper levels of involvement among the people already present. This could include leaders examining themselves for integrity gaps in their own involvement, making their congregations aware of the issue, challenging people to fulfill their baptismal vows to encourage children in the faith, or hoping that That Sermon will unleash a New Pentecost (Help me, Jesus.). The downside to this is that a church can make faith in God synonymous with faith in institutional continuance and the status quo, which results in disillusionment and potentially unfairly blaming people for being unresponsive to “God’s” direction. The upside is that honest congregational self-examination can open hearts for new works of the Spirit.
While both approaches have their merits, if rushed into, they can miss an opportunity to think critically about a congregation’s capacity. How many volunteer roles are reasonably possible within the group? How many leaders can be expected from this or that size of congregation? What is the burnout-level of a volunteer in terms of weekly or monthly church commitments? If leaders first assess capacity, they will be in a better position to act constructively.
So how does one assess congregational capacity? I asked this question of dozens of other CRC pastors and received more “following this discussion” messages than “read this” or “here’s how” responses, so there remain more questions than answers, but here follows a summary of what I learned.
However your church assesses itself, balance, Sabbath, necessary endings, and fresh beginnings are part of staying sustainably faithful. And despite all the organizational challenges, that churches yet endure to spread the gospel is one of the good signs that God really is working in this world. Onward!
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Comments
I'm not sure what category this falls under. It's sort of admin, but definitely not finance. It's sort of church renewal, but more like a step before renewal. Maybe the church worldwide would benefit from an analytics department. Maybe the Spirit just laughs at that.
This is a great post, Daniel, and that is a great question :) I put it under Ministry Coordination and kept Leadership Development. Does that help catch it? Thanks for writing!
Thank you for the valuable contribution Dan. Nuts and bolts considerations for local churches are, I believe, under-rated, until at least things threaten to collapse for failure to attend to nuts and bolts considerations.
A local church is a number of things, but one of them is an organization of multiple people. And any organization, churches not excluded, benefit from geeky work. I appreciate yours. :-)
Thanks for taking the time to write this Dan. Your research will benefit many churches who are wondering about this very topic.
Thanks Daniel!
Would you be willing to share your spreadsheet so we could plug our numbers in??
[email protected]
Certainly. I'll email it to you directly, since the spreadsheet in in-house to my congregation and I'd feel weird making it fully public. But if anyone wants it, just ask and I'll send it along.
Daniel, I really appreciate the article being written. My outreach team is trying to assess how to assess current involvement and trying to decide whether or not to add/subtract outreach partnerships. I think this could be a helpful tool in helping us determine where to move forward to. If you wouldn't mind sending it, my email is [email protected]
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