For three years Jeff Thompson’s recruiting system had run well. He’d had occasional problems, but not one major Christian education position had gone without a qualified person on promotion Sunday. The secret was his annual, churchwide recruitment survey followed by personal interviews that allowed Jeff to match people’s gifts with ministry needs.
But now he was stymied. Mary Jenkins had retired from children’s church for preschoolers.
She was a legend at Walnut Heights Bible Church (churches and people named are composites of true situations). For eighteen years, even when the silver-haired lady was the only adult present, children had been touched by her love.
Mom Jenkins’s longevity, though, was part of the problem now. Potential leaders balked at the idea of being held captive by 3-year-olds for the next two decades.
Now, four days from promotion Sunday, the position was still unfilled. Dozens of people had been considered, and eight had been approached. Their responses were classic: “I simply cannot lead that department.” “I’m going to have surgery in the fall.” “I’m going back to work.” “I need some time off.”
He was ready to accept any warm body that would say yes. He wasn’t sure he even could find one of those.
Worker Deficiency Syndrome
Unfortunately, virtually all church leaders or committee heads face a similar problem for some position: the junior high youth sponsor, the vacation Bible school director. Most vacancies represent thankless jobs in which the only comments heard are from unhappy parishioners.
In some churches the worker deficiency syndrome seems chronic. Often, these churches haven’t developed a year-round strategy for recruiting and developing volunteers. Or they have a declining membership and a static but aging pool of workers. Or they contain many new Christians who cannot yet be placed in teaching positions.
But even the healthiest of churches inevitably faces a time when no one wants a particular job. Then church leaders try a variety of recruiting strategies.
Ineffective Strategies
Calvary Church is one such healthy church with a recruitment problem. The church has seen rapid growth. An articulate young pastor has involved adults in home Bible studies. People exhibit a genuine excitement about the future of the church — everyone, that is, except the Christian education workers.
Frances Clancy, the chair of the Christian education committee, has tried everything she can think of to provide enough teachers. First pleading. Then buttonholing. Then announcements in the bulletin and from the pulpit. Finally, she got the pastor to give one of his patented “volunteer for the Gipper” messages. But even it yielded only meager and short-term results.
In the meantime, Frances has gone to part-time helpers in children’s church—one month on, two months off. The problem with the system is best illustrated by the crying of the DeHaan twins on the Sunday of the change in leaders. Preschoolers need the security of familiar faces every week.
For a short time Frances contemplated combining two departments but had rejected the idea because of the dramatic developmental differences between a 2-year-old and 5-year-old. The only other option was to pay someone, but with the church strapped by payments on the new building, the idea wasn’t realistic.
Frances had tried or considered every option she knew. When the traditional recruitment strategies fail, what then?
Key Questions
Before throwing up their hands in despair, both Jeff Thompson and Frances Clancy need to ask themselves several questions. While the questions may not solve the crisis, they will provide new perspectives on it.
- Drop? What would be the impact of discontinuing the program? From time to time, each ministry should be reexamined. A lack of workers, especially when such a shortage becomes chronic, may indicate the ministry has outlived its usefulness. Released-time classes for children from Lowell Elementary School had been held at Abel Memorial Church for over forty years. Spurred by the slogan, “By God’s grace we’re able,” the church viewed the prospect of discontinuing the classes as a concession of spiritual defeat. The fact that a majority of the children were Hispanic and none of the parishioners was conversant in Spanish was not considered significant. Yet the language problem hindered the church from securing parents’ permission for their children to attend, and classes had dwindled to only five or six children per week. When surgery put the teacher, who had faithfully been instructing the children for twelve years, on the disabled list, the Christian education board had to ask, “What would be the impact of discontinuing the program?” The conclusion, honestly stated, was that they would have a bruised self-perception and nothing more. The released-time program had been seen as the church’s effort to evangelize a changing neighborhood, despite the lack of enthusiastic response by the Hispanic children. To drop the class might even force the church to become more realistic about its relationship to the neighborhood.
- Harm? What would be harmed by continuing the existing program without the staff we feel we need? Unfortunately, this question frequently is answered by adults who have not spent an hour in an inadequately staffed Sunday school class, club program, or youth group meeting. Seldom do adults consider the negative attitudes children may develop through poorly supervised situations. Bellwood Community Church had tripled in size in four years. One key to the church’s growth was the dynamic Sunday morning adult Bible classes. They were so meaningful, however, that few adults wanted to leave to teach the children. And the rapid growth of the church necessitated placing in each room twice as many children as the fire code allowed. Had the church asked the harm question, the board might have shut down an adult class or two until appropriate staff and space were found for the children. There is a time when the short-term harm is an acceptable risk — when, for example, greater harm may be inflicted by rushing into leadership adults who are spiritually or socially immature. But the emphasis is on short term. If there is long-term risk, it may be wiser to discontinue a program.
- Other approaches? Could other activities accomplish the same ministry goals? Children’s church had become impossible to staff at Greenwood Assembly of God. For one thing, no one really understood what the children’s church was supposed to accomplish. Further, there were too few curriculum materials for the volunteers. Then Lenny Fletcher suggested the grade-school children be taught to worship through creating puppet programs for the preschoolers. With Fletcher’s enthusiasm, the sewing ability of old Mrs. Collingsworth, and some children’s Bible story and music tapes, Churchtime Puppets became part of the educational program. Volunteers were much easier to secure, since most adults had seen Muppets on TV and had enough child in them to be willing to work with the idea. Woodlawn Congregational Church answered the other-approaches question for its six-member junior high youth group. Every year the church had to twist a parent’s arm to be youth-group sponsor. Then Harry Jacobsen dedicated his video equipment to the Lord. Harry was turned loose with the youth group to document everything the church did for the year. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, a video camera with two or three junior high students behind it began showing up at worship services, Sunday school classes, board meetings, choir practices, weddings, and even a funeral. In the process the students learned the meaning of the word appropriate and got an in-depth view of the church in action. In both these cases, innovation captured the imagination of people whose abilities had been overlooked in the previous recruitment process.
- Dramatize? When the previous questions have been asked without a satisfactory solution, ask, How can we dramatize the need for workers? Two words of caution: drama should not be used Primarily to create guilt, but rather vision; and workers obtained in this manner likely will need immediate on-the-job training to be effective. Obtaining preschool Sunday school teachers seemed impossible in a major West Coast church. The church had provided a full-time staff member and two part-time helpers, but still the ratio of learners to teacher was about 13:1. So one Sunday, at the invitation of the pastor, the entire 3-year-old department was led, hand in hand, down the center aisle of the church during morning worship. The pastor sat down with children all around him and expressed his deep concern that Christian people were not available to teach the love of Christ to such wonderful children as these. Then he taught a brief lesson, with the children responding. For the immediate future the recruitment problem was solved. A Florida Sunday school superintendent printed in the bulletin, “Due to a shortage of volunteer ministers to teach in the primary department, only the first sixteen first-, second-, and third-grade children to arrive at Sunday school next week will be permitted to attend classes. The Sunday school board is sorry for any inconvenience caused by the understaffed condition of our church’s teaching ministry.” The superintendent was prepared to turn away the seventeenth and succeeding children. The announcement brought enough volunteer workers to continue the teaching ministry without interruption.
The Ultimate Solution
When all is said and done, the issue of workers in the church’s mission is a spiritual battle. The problem can be addressed by crisis management techniques, such as the ones suggested here, but the ministry needs are seldom met by such strategies alone. The Lord Jesus admonished his followers to ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field (Matt. 9:38). It was a recruiter’s prayer.
When it comes to the jobs no one seems to want, the prayer base must include as broad a representation from the congregation as possible. Even the children who will be led should ask the Lord for appropriate volunteers. As James 4:2 reminds us, “You do not have, because you do not ask God.”
Jeff Thompson had to dramatize the need, but when people realized its severity, trainable leaders were available within days. Frances Clancy found an alternative to children’s church. She formed a puppet ministry for the 2- and 3-year-olds that combined the creative efforts of select junior high students with a couple of adults. Her imagination created a ministry team for a job no one had wanted.
Mark H. Senter III is assistant professor of Christian education at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and is active in Wheaton Bible Church.
