Helping volunteers to leave well

Dave Thornton
Apr 11
5 min read

A guest blog by Matt Wan, Founder of Cross Connecting.

I wonder what you would think of as the top problem facing Christian organisations and churches working with young people today?

As I’ve interacted with various different individuals and organisations, there are two main changes becoming more and more apparent. Firstly, encouragingly, there is a real uptick in hunger amongst young people today in engaging with spiritual matters, which is very encouraging. However, the second pattern that has emerged, much less encouragingly, is that Christian organisations and churches have never had a bigger problem with volunteer leader recruitment and retention as right now in a post-Covid world. It seems that there is a desire from Christian organisations and churches to engage with young people, but they can never seem to have enough people to help in this essential ministry area.

And these two patterns have drastic implications. How are we going to engage with all these young people who want to engage, without the volunteer leaders to engage with them? Or, as Paul puts in it his letter to the Roman church:

"How can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them?"

Romans 10.14 (New Living Translation)

And that’s why we need to think much more deliberately about our volunteer leaders and how to build and maintain the teams that are needed to meet this rising need and opportunity to engage with young people. Like any team with shortages, there are always two elements to this: 1) the need to find new volunteers, and 2) caring for our volunteers well, so that they continue to see their part in ministry. I’ve seen many ministries encounter serious problems, or even fail, both in Christian organisations and in local churches, simply because they have neglected one or both elements of this.

But in order to know how to recruit new volunteer leaders and then how to care for them well and engage them in ministry, sometimes it is helpful to examine what hasn’t gone well. For a multitude of reasons, volunteer leaders will be leaving their teams at some point, and they often leave not just with their time and skills, but with valuable insights about how the ministry could (or must?) improve for the experience of the young people, as well as that of other volunteers on the team.”

Yet most churches and Christian organisations don’t presently tap into this knowledge when their volunteers leave. What if there were a way to access this knowledge, to give us valuable insights into how to improve the ministries that we’re involved in? And this is where perhaps we can learn something from the professional corporate world. For those of you who have ever been employed in a job in the secular world, at the point of leaving, it is good HR practice to be given an “exit interview”, where employees leaving have the opportunity to discuss their experiences and their motivation for leaving. This then allows employers to reflect on what has been said, and gives them the opportunity to improve things for those who remain.

Obviously, it is quite a different situation with volunteer leaders leaving, most pertinently in the fact that the primary aim of those looking to build teams of ministry volunteers are not first and foremost thinking about “job satisfaction in the workplace”! But is there value in showing our volunteers that their voices matter? Is there mileage is learning from others’ experiences, and making improvements to enable ministries to develop and thrive? Is it worth bearing the pain and hearing where others’ frustrations are with our ministries, so that we can have the opportunity to improve the experience of those who remain? And the answer should be a clear resounding yes.

I don’t know whether your specific ministry has the practise of conducting exit interviews with volunteers who are leaving your teams. But if not, I would encourage you to consider adopting this practise; not just for the sake of adopting a process, but to enable you to see more of the bigger picture and where the opportunities are for your ministry to develop and thrive.

You might be wondering how to conduct an exit interview and what this would look like, particularly if you’ve not worked in the corporate world. From my own experience of conducting exit interviews, I have found it helpful to have two priorities in mind. Firstly, to give those who are leaving the opportunity to reflect on what has gone well. It is important for those leaving to leave well, and to look back and see God at work through their involvement. And this might translate to asking questions about what they’ve loved most about serving as a volunteer leader, or what they’ve most appreciated, or how they’ve seen God move. But secondly, I have also wanted those leaving to know that their voices have been heard and understood, and that their constructive feedback would be taken seriously. I have found that people who leave are often people who still believe in and care about the ministries they’re leaving, even though they’ve decided to leave. And as such, I would want to be asking questions that give opportunity for those leaving to speak honestly and openly about what could be different and how things could improve. I would definitely want to find out what they would do if they were in a position to enable and usher in change. That’s not to say that we will go and implement everything they say! But what they do say should act as food for thought as we think about what the best way to conduct our respective ministries is.

Example questions to ask at exit interview:

What have you most appreciated about being part of the team?
Is there anything you thought hasn’t gone as well as it could, that we can improve?
Do you have any fresh ideas of how we could improve this ministry?
What would it take to convince you to continue being part of this team?
If you were in charge of this ministry, what is the one thing you would change?

So as you continue to work through how to meet the needs of your ministries through developing teams of volunteers, the hope is that this blog will have been useful in helping you think through the need for hearing from your volunteers, even when it feels hard and they make the difficult decision to leave your team.

Dave Thornton writes: "I completed my first exit interview recently. It was a young woman who was stepping down from one of our youth teams because she had decided to change church. Before I was challenged about exit interviews, I would have just let her go, sent an encouraging email thanking her, and that would have been it. Instead, I asked to meet up. When we finally spent half an hour together, it gave me a great opportunity to thank her for serving, but also to be encouraged together as she talked about what she had seen God do in the group. I could call out some gifts that I'd seen in her, and we could also talk about what could have been done better. It took a bit of work to organise, but it felt like we'd finished well."

On supporting volunteers, also see Teresa Nixon's guest blog: Too busy to care? Making time to support volunteers better.

Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay.

Dave Thornton's book Raising the Bar. It's a whopping (nearly) 400 pages!

If you want to think more about this, read the chapter 'A healthy team' in my book, 'Raising the Bar: Nearly Everything You Need to Know about Christian Youth Ministry' which you can buy here. It's nearly 400 pages! In it, you'll find other ideas about finding, training and growing leaders in your groups. You can find out here what other youth leaders think about the book.