FIVE REASONS YOUR MINISTRY VOLUNTEERS QUIT

Church and ministry leaders have a perennial struggle in finding and keeping good volunteers. Let’s face it, without volunteers the ministry of the church would come to a grinding halt.

Today the ministry landscape for keeping good volunteers has become even more difficult. I'm going to cover this issue in two parts. My next article will focus on gaining and maintaining ministry volunteers. Right now, this article lists five reasons your ministry volunteers quit. Here we go!

1. It’s Out of My Control

I’m not giving this first reason just to make you feel better, but I hope it does. Sometimes volunteers quit because of things out of your control. Perhaps a volunteer has had a change in life. Maybe they had an addition to the family, or a job change that keeps them from being able to serve for the immediate future. I know of people who have stopped volunteering in church ministry because of aging parents who needed them more often. This is exactly what they should do. They need to take care of their family. We can all understand this. My point is simply this: You must prepare for life changes to happen in your volunteers that are out of your control.

2. I’m Burned Out

This is a common theme in our post-pandemic world. Many of our volunteers have heroically held things together. They’ve persevered through stress and trauma such as: life changes, job changes, loss, and health threats. When the pressure eases up, they begin to realize their emotional and perhaps even spiritual “tank” is empty. You’ve heard the saying, “You can’t give what you don’t have.” Well, they don’t have much left to give. It’s gone and so are they.

3. It’s Not a Good Fit

A volunteer may agree to join in a ministry, but later find out that it just is not a good fit for them. They, for whatever reason, are not passionate about it. It’s good to discover what your volunteers are passionate about, but that's for later.

Besides the “passion” issue, volunteers may not have a good experience in that ministry. Ministry expectations on the part of volunteers is an important thing and may contribute to more defections than you may realize. Some church leaders, in their eagerness to recruit volunteers, have painted a picture of a volunteer role that isn’t accurate. Be careful in your eagerness not to cause more problems down the road by mis-characterizing the experience of that ministry to a potential volunteer.

Sometimes it's not passion or experience, but an issue of skill that causes a volunteer to bow out of a ministry. The volunteer could come to the place where they believed his or her skills were not best utilized in this ministry.

4. I’m Not Being Supported

It’s common for volunteers to feel forgotten. A lot of attention was showered on them in recruiting and once they started, that attention went away. Hey, I’ve been there on both sides of it. We are busy people. There are so many things a church leader is trying to do. They don't have a lot of time to check up on all their volunteers to make sure they're okay. But it still needs to be done! They need to hear from you. Develop a system, offer some training, do an orientation, and find a way. More on that in the next article.

5. I’m Not Appreciated

Your volunteers will probably not come right out and say, “I’m not appreciated.” That would sound just a little too needy. However, they will quit if they feel like this for very long. Your volunteers need to know they are making a real difference to others. They didn’t volunteer because they didn’t have anything else to do. They volunteered because there was a need and meaning behind that ministry. Lack of appreciation translates into “not important.”

As you read through this, you likely had faces of volunteers appear in your mind’s eye. Why not take a moment to show some gratitude for them? Send a text, email, or a handwritten note. Think how you would feel if someone took a moment to express appreciation to you. You have in you the power through gratitude to lighten someone’s day and perhaps keep them as a ministry volunteer.

10 Ways to Promote Prayer in Your Church

“Nothing is more important to God than prayer in dealing with mankind. But it is likewise all-important to man to pray. Failure to pray is failure along the whole line of life. It is failure of duty, service, and spiritual progress.” (Bounds, E.M., The Complete Works of E.M. Bounds on Prayer, Baker. compiled 1990, pg. 370.)

“What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Spirit can use-men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men-men of prayer.” (Ibid, pg. 447.)

I’m afraid that many of us, without thought, have equated the work of the church with organizational activity. God's great power in the church is its faith and faith increases through prayer. “Jesus replied, ‘This is the work of God-that you believe in the one he has sent’” (John 6:29, CSB).

While most of my recommendations for promoting prayer are written from a pastor’s perspective, I believe that there is much in here for other church leaders and members. As you read, reflect on applications to your personal life and ministry. Here are the 10 ways to promote prayer in your church.

1. Make prayer a priority in the church leadership

Whether you have a large paid church staff or if they are volunteer leaders, spend regular and consistent time in prayer together. As a senior pastor, I led our staff meetings by first spending significant time in prayer before moving on to our other agendas. At the close of the staff meeting, we would pray over the plans that came out of the meeting at the end.

Two of the churches I pastored were elder led churches. These were my favorite. Our elder meetings were the best because we brought everything to the Lord and did not make decisions apart from a unity of spirit in prayer.

If it’s appropriate, try to pray with everyone you interact with during the day. When I had an appointment with a staff member, a church member or someone in the community, I would not let them leave without spending some time in prayer. I still do this frequently when I meet with people even over the phone or online.

Another way to make prayer a priority is to have your staff or volunteers read through a great book on prayer together. You could discuss it chapter by chapter at regular meetings and pray together. You will have your own ideas that are best for your setting.

2. Designate a time of clearly defined corporate prayer in services

We are notorious for using prayer as a segue from one part of the worship service to another. Prayer is certainly more than this. Think about adding a pastoral prayer time in your worship. This can be a very reflective and instructional time. During the week think about issues that your people are dealing with, struggling with. Take the time to write out a prayer, perhaps a little each day during the week. In other words, craft your prayer to the Lord on behalf of your congregation like you would a sermon. You could even publish the prayer in your bulletin or online.

3. Share stories, recent and past of answered prayer

One of the privileges pastors enjoy is hearing the ways God answers prayer in the lives of his church members. This is worth sharing and there are many avenues you could make this happen: In the worship service either live or on video, social media, and the church’s website.

Another inspiration is recounting answered prayer from the past. Our Christian history is full of prayer and God’s wonderful timely answers. Ample examples are found in the Great Awakenings and revival history of the United States. There was the great prayer revival of 1857 with Jeremiah Lanphier in New York City. Prayer so saturated the area and later the country that sailors on ships entering the harbor, not knowing of any spiritual awakening taking place, were falling under conviction of sin, and repenting even before docking. Here’s a couple of videos about these things.

4. Seek to improve your own prayer life

There is a certain gravity that envelops a praying person. It is also called the “fragrance of Christ”. “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing,” (2 Corinthians 2:14–15, ESV)

People recognize it when you spend extended time in prayer. The time is spent not just praying through a list, but seeking God with your heart, mind and soul. It is like the prayer of Moses to see the glory of God. Moses prayed, “Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.”” (Exodus 33:13, ESV)

My friend, Dr. Donald Whitney has some great advice on generally improving your prayer life. You can see it here.

Dr. Whitney also has a prayer app that was developed by one of his students to help add variety to his prayer life. You can download it from the App Store or Google Play for free.

Five Psalms: Praying Through Psalms of the Day

Five Psalms from App Store

Five Psalms from Google Play

5. Make an opportunity for ministry prayer at the close or between services

At my last pastorate, I was inspired by a neighboring church pastor, Sam Storms at Bridgeway Church, to add prayer ministry teams of two or three individuals who were available between and after worship services to pray with and over those who have needs.

I put together a Prayer a Prayer Ministry Team card. I personally recruited couples and individuals who were mature and prayerful. I gathered them together for about 45 minutes of instruction with the card. Every single one of them volunteered. In fact, they were excited to see what God would do. Here’s how we did it: During the announcement time and again near the close of the service, we would announce that prayer teams would we at a certain location if anyone would like to receive prayer. Not a Sunday passed by that we didn’t have someone want prayer and a few times we had people accept Christ during the prayer ministry time.

If you’d like a copy of the prayer ministry card we used, you can download it here.

Prayer Ministry Team Card

If you’d like help setting up a prayer ministry team, I’d be glad to assist.

6. Designate a prayer team for each church event

Every year your church has important and life-changing events. They range from Vacation Bible School to the annual Christmas Pageant. For each of these events, make sure to have a prayer team that is praying over every aspect of the event. The team doesn’t have to be big; it may be just 3 or 4 people. However, design a prayer sheet for that event and ask them to get together two or three times and to pray over the sheet. They may meet in person, on the phone or online. Focused, purposeful prayer for each event will make a difference in the heavenlies and on earth.

7. Have a congregation wide 21 day or 40 day prayer initiative.

The perfect time to have one of these is during the Lenten season. You could do it in preparation for the passion week or you could start it after Easter Sunday and set up 40 days that coincide with ending on Pentecost Sunday. You could also start the new year off with a 21 days of prayer emphasis for your church. Whether you do it at the first of the year, in preparation for Easter or in preparation for Pentecost, I wouldn’t do this more than once a year or once every two years.

Here are some guides that may help to inspire you. I feel confident that if you were to ask these churches if you could customize what they have done for your church, they would be flattered and of course help you to do that.

21 Days of Prayer

40 Days of Prayer

Rick Warren has a whole kit available for purchase if you are interested in all the bells and whistles.

Pastors.com 40 Days of Prayer

8. Teach your church how to pray

Yes, actually teach how to pray. I’ve done this several times. At my last church, we still had a Wednesday night meal and prayer service. I used this as an opportunity to teach on prayer. Once I taught through the Apostle Paul’s Prayers. After the teaching we would gather at our tables and pray on that subject of Paul’s prayer for that night. I had many, many compliments on this kind of praying. I also used some of Andrew Murray’s writings to help me in teaching on various subjects of prayer.

One year I preached a series on The Lord’s Prayer called “The Prayer that will Change Your Life”. I took 10 weeks on the Sunday morning series with application each Wednesday Night prayer service. One of the best resources that helped me design this was by Elmer Towns, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer for Spiritual Breakthrough.”

You can get a PDF of this book for free here:

Praying the Lord's Prayer - Towns

9. Promote prayer walking events coordinated to the church and community calendar

Create a prayer walking guide that matches the needs of a particular event. For example, with the start of a new school year it would be appropriate to ask different families or small groups to prayer walk near a school or around a school. For people who cannot walk distances, they could “pray the windshield” from the car. There are a variety of needs students and teachers will have. Prayer walk the school bus barn and the sports complexes. In the wider community, prayerwalk before and during county fairs and festivals. If there isa city council meeting, ask if you could pray in the meeting room before the event takes place. When asking, find out if there is anything they would like remembered in prayer. Any community or church could use groups of people praying on-site with insight before an even

Here's a link to a prayer walking guide I created for my last church. It’s in a word document, so you can change the graphics and text.

Prayer Walking Guide

10. Use available technology to enhance prayer

Create a page on your church’s website for prayer requests. Get your webmaster to set it up where a request can be posted on the page for all to see or to be private. You can make the page one that people have to register to access. That will keep out spam. You can create a prayer wall and project that on the screen during your prayer service or prayer time in church for those present to pray over the requests. Promote the prayer wall page on social media. Just make sure you have a designated person to monitor the page and to reply to requests.

Encourage your small group ministries to form social media groups where they can share prayer needs with one another. Ask these groups to provide a link on their social media to your church’s prayer wall page.

Leveraging technology with prayer and outreach provides a fresh new way to intentionally reach your areas for Christ. Your church could join the www.BlessEveryHome.com ministry and encourage your members to join with their own individual accounts. This is a great way to saturate neighborhoods with prayer and good deeds. It may be the best outreach tool that uses prayer as a basis for ministry.

Check out the BlessEveryHome.org website. There is a video that explains how the process works, and it does.

BlessEveryHome

I don’t intend for you to try all ten of these ways to promote prayer in your church. Perhaps you won’t try any, but while reading through this list, you thought of another way to promote prayer in your members and in yourself. That is even better. My prayer is that you will grow in the knowledge of Christ through the time you spend with him. Amen.

Eight Ways Your Inner Critic Sabotages Your Life

We are given a conscience by God, but that conscience is not given fully formed. Our conscience is shaped by our experiences and our responses to life. It is further molded by the perceptions we have of our experiences. This is also a part of spiritual formation. Everyone experiences spiritual formation, from Christians to atheists, we are all spiritually formed in one direction or another.

A great influence on spiritual formation is your family of origin. Since formation takes place in the early years of our lives, we don’t readily recognize it. It becomes evident when you recognize you are doing something, without thought, just like one of your parents.

One of the funniest things I’ve witnessed was my wife say something, then to abruptly stop talking. Next, she exclaimed, “I sound just like my mother!” I’ve experienced this with both of our adult daughters: “I sound like mom!” It’s a startling realization that we are being shaped in the early part of our lives, for years at a time, often without even knowing it, only to realize it as adults.

This kind of formation is a double-edged sword. It can be great if you had someone to help you interpret these experiences in a healthy way. The other edge is when you don’t have the best of examples or a healthy person in your life to interpret life-shaping events. Our formation is then found wanting.

For most of us, our spiritual formation is a mixed bag. We have some very good values on the one hand and in the other, we are challenged in how we view the world. Our early experiences are interpreted for us by parents, religion, siblings, caregivers, teachers, and friends. These then become the structures in which we view everything else. The structure of our thoughts determines our view of the world.

The thought structures that we’ve adopted may be true or false, or a variation of both depending on the circumstances. This becomes part of your inner critic.

Next, we are going to list eight different ways our thought structures have been formed that are harmful to us. It is essentially eight ways your inner critic may sabotage your life.

It is important for us to be critical with our inner critic and acknowledge to ourselves when we have been holding thought structures that sabotage our lives, making our situations worse than it really is or needs to be.

I’ve drawn these eight different ways from two books by Dr. Daniel Amen. I’ll reference them at the end of the blog. So here are the eight ways your inner critic can sabotage your life.

1. All-or-nothing thinking

This kind of thinking is focused on absolutes. You won’t hear “maybe” or “sometimes” come out of this kind of thinker’s mouth. This thinking uses words like “all”, “always”, “never”, etc. Part of this thinking is believing that everything is either good or bad, that there is nothing in between. It’s a black or white rigid thinking.

You might get away with this in simple math, but not in simple relationships. One secret to building long and successful relationships is the ability to compromise. Anyone who has been married for a while knows the application to this statement: You can be right, or you can be happy, but you can’t be both. Which one can you live with?

2. Focusing on the negative

This is when your thoughts see what is bad or negative, ignoring anything good that may be in the situation. You may be speaking in front of a group of people, and you didn’t cover the material as you had thought you would. That may cause you to feel like the presentation was terrible. However, there were likely many there who got something good out of it. They didn’t know what you knew. They didn’t have the same expectations you had of yourself. Remember, “God works all things together for good” (Romans 8:28).

3. Fortune telling

Fortune telling is letting one bad experience determine how the rest of the trip, job, or life will turn out. Getting a flat tire early in a car trip does not mean that the rest of the trip will be bad. Having a bad dating experience doesn’t mean all members of the opposite sex are idiots and you should give up. Do you see where I’m going with this? Don’t give up. You don’t know how it will turn out. Give life, love, and God a chance.

4. Mind reading

Mind reading is believing you know what the other person is thinking even though they haven’t told you. This is a major reason why people have so much trouble in relationships. They assume they know what the other person is thinking even before they get a chance to give evidence. It’s hard enough when someone assigns bad motives to your actions, let alone putting their own words inside your head. Give people the benefit and wait for them to speak. It may be much better than you thought.

5. Thinking with your feelings

Feelings may lie to you. Your thoughts may lie as well. Be aware how dangerous it is to say, “I feel you don’t love me” or “I feel like a failure.” You must counter “thinking with your feelings” by thinking with your thoughts. Look for evidence. Maybe these feelings are just coming from your own insecurities or unrealistic comparisons with others.

6. Guilt beatings

This is a specialty of the inner critic. Guilt beatings begin with “I should…” or “I ought…” or "I must…” There are expectations tied to these statements about your performance.

Dr. Amen states that it is better to replace “I should…” with “I want to….” It removes it from the guilt arena and moves it into positive motivation. Guilt beatings are effective, but only for a while. They soon lose their power because the benefit of good behavior is clouded by our negative motivation. When we see it is good for us, we can move from “have to” to “want to” to “get to.”

7. Labeling

When you label someone or something with a negative image, you limit the way they can be perceived. If you label someone a “jerk” it will be almost impossible to see anything good come from them. There may be much good that the person does, but the “jerk” label covers it up. The same goes for yourself: “I’m too stupid”, “I’ll never get it right”, and “I’ll never change.” These are all labeling. When you apply that label, it makes it easy to give up and not try anymore.

This can also work in the positive side but in a negative way. Someone has labeled a son or daughter as being “perfect.” Now they cannot see what everyone else sees about them. They have flaws and shortcomings like everyone else. But the person who has labeled them “perfect” just can’t see it.

8. Blaming

This is the worst one of the eight. Blaming is when you blame others for the problems in your life. Statements like: “It’s not my fault”, “If you hadn’t…” or “How was I supposed to know…” It is unattractive when a child does it, but it is downright insulting when an adult will not just take responsibility for their own actions or inactions. It’s a sign of a real change in character when a person accepts responsibility for the failures in life. It means that they can do something about it. When you don’t take responsibility and it’s always someone else’s fault, you are powerless to make change.

It's not necessary to overthink how you think, but it is good to do a check-in to verify if your thinking is matching up with reality. Sometimes a good objective friend can help. But for most of these, simply withholding judgment on others is enough. You’ve got enough trouble in this world without making yourself part of it.

For further reflection on these, Dr. Daniel Amen has put this into two of his books: Change Your Brain Change Your Life, Revised and Expanded. by Daniel G. Amen, M. D. pgs. 116-117 and in his book Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. pgs. 100-106.