Retaining Volunteers In Youth Ministry: 6 Key Tips

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If you haven’t felt it before, it’s only a matter of time before you do: the sting of a volunteer telling you they’re stepping down. Sometimes, a volunteer stepping away from their role on your volunteer team is completely outside of your control. But since there are also systems we can put in place as ministry leaders to better care for our volunteers while we have them, let’s explore what retaining volunteers in youth ministry might require.

Understanding The Important Role Of Volunteers

Before we jump in, it’s important we step into the mind of a potential volunteer. Retention actually begins at recruitment, so understanding why someone would volunteer to work with young people is key to recruiting volunteers well and keeping them once we have them. People often choose to volunteer in a youth group setting because they want to give back, they have a passion for teaching, or they’re responding to a need. 

The first two reasons are strong, internally motivated reasons for volunteering, and these are the volunteers most likely to stick around for the long haul. The latter is not an indication that they’re temporary. It’s not uncommon for people to start doing something for one reason, and continue doing it for a long time because they discover a better, more compelling reason along the way. But as we explore the ins and outs of retaining volunteers in youth ministry, it’s worth noting that internally motivated potential new volunteers are more likely to volunteer from a healthy place over a long period of time than externally motivated potential volunteers.

But, of course, the reason we’ll take volunteers of all kinds (internally or externally motivated) is because volunteering is so, so crucial to what we do! Even if you’re a volunteer in youth ministry yourself, having a team of youth leaders around you is so important to the life of your ministry. Your students benefit greatly from multiple non-parent influences in their faith development.

Parents of students are often cared for better when they have options of which youth leader to go to with a concern or question. And, of course, you cannot do absolutely everything in youth ministry by yourself, so having a few faithful volunteers to lean on is huge for your own health, longevity, and effectiveness in ministry.

Addressing The Biggest Struggle Of Volunteer Retention

There is at least one huge reason why churches (small churches specifically) struggle to retain youth ministry volunteers: 

Life is busy. 

I know you may have come here hoping for something deeper or more profound than that, but this statement is as true as it is obvious. Life is incredibly busy, especially for those in a small church. Contrary to what some may believe, it isn’t that less ministry is done in a small church. It’s just that there are fewer people to carry out the work of the ministry. So life is busy for all people of all churches, but busier for those integrally involved in the life of a small church. That means that, regardless of what you do or say, there are going to be times when you don’t retain a volunteer.

If I can talk with you at a heart level for a minute, this reality is so important for you to grasp at your core. Too many times, we as ministry leaders take things personally when they’re not personal. Because we have too much of our sense of fulfillment and purpose wrapped up in the X’s and O’s of ministry life, we get bent out of shape and hurt when great volunteers have to step away because it feels like we’re being punched right in the identity.

But sometimes, hopefully more often than not, a volunteer stepping down has very little to do with you or your leadership. It was just time for them to use their time, gifts, and talents in a different area of life. 

But, of course, it’s still in our best interest to do everything we can to retain volunteers. So let’s talk through a few of the best ways we can do just that!

6 Key Tips For Retaining Volunteers In Youth Ministry

1. Outline Their Role Clearly

A great way to ensure you retain volunteers on the back end is by outlining their role clearly on the front end. For instance, if you’re recruiting small group leaders, be sure to give each of them a short document (half a page to a page in length) outlining their roles and responsibilities. Sometimes volunteers step down because they didn’t realize what they were stepping into to begin with, so we honor them and their time well when we tell them on the front end exactly what it is that we want and expect from them.

I want to acknowledge how scary it is to do this. When you see a pair of young adults in your church, with all of their youthful energy and fresh, relatable wisdom, something within you wants to snag them so badly that you might purposely under-communicate the expectations so as to not scare them off. I get it.

This is the most human thing to do in the world. But our God is a big God, and the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of convincing people to take on hard volunteer roles if it’s something they’re meant to do. So let’s just be honest and upfront about what it is we need and trust that God will bring us the people who are a good fit in His perfect timing.

Before we move on to number two, I also want to mention that clearly outlining the roles and responsibilities also involves clearly communicating the benefits and rewards! Most of us believe wholeheartedly that serving in youth ministry is one of the best things a person can do with their lives. Why wouldn’t we communicate that when we’re recruiting on the front end?

Can you imagine what it does for a person to have the why of youth ministry laid out for them on the front end? In the hardest seasons of volunteering, you want your leaders to have a strong grasp on the why of youth ministry, so outline it on the front end along with the roles and responsibilities!

2. Give Them The Space To Be Themselves

For some of you reading, this won’t be an issue. But for others of us who maybe prefer a higher level of control, this can be really difficult to do! We have to remember, though, that someone who’s agreed to be part of our youth leadership team signed up to utilize their unique passions, skill sets, and perspective to contribute to a team!

That means that sometimes one of your volunteers is going to teach their group in a way that feels a little weird to you. Sometimes a volunteer is going to have an idea that feels outlandish. Occasionally you’re going to need to take a risk and let a volunteer try something that you’re not quite sure is going to work. 

People want to feel significant. They want to know that their presence makes a difference. So don’t stifle your leaders and snuff out their joy by trying to control things too tightly. Give them clear guard rails, and then let them play and explore and discover inside of those guard rails! When you do this, you’ll find volunteers are willing to stick around a whole lot longer.

3. Approach Your Relationship With Them Holistically

Human beings have a way of framing up our relationships with other people in a specific way. It helps us know how to relate to them. This is why the topics you bring up with your best friends are completely different from the topics you bring up with your coworkers. But sometimes this tendency leads us to box people in and treat them one-dimensionally, and that happens all of the time in church ministry.

When you see your volunteers at church or reach out to them occasionally via phone call or a one-on-one meeting, be sure not to box them in and frame them up as just “a youth volunteer.” Remember that they are a whole three-dimensional person with a vast life beyond the youth room. So ask them about their work, their relationships, their dreams, and their hobbies. If during a coffee date with a volunteer, you spend more time talking about their mom’s health or their kid’s developmental issues in school than you do the X’s and O’s of youth ministry, you win. Care for your youth volunteers holistically, and they’ll stick around for the long term.

4. Offer Accessible Ways For Them To Develop

Most of us probably recognize that training volunteers is an important aspect of having volunteers, but some of us tend to go a little overboard. Remember when you were in high school and that one teacher would assign hours and hours of homework as if their class was the only class you were taking? Yep. That. 

So instead of doing a 3-hour volunteer training once per month, consider reducing the in-person multi-hour gathering to once per quarter or twice per year. Then, to ensure your volunteers have opportunities to develop, offer easily accessible drip training videos via email once per week or a few times per month. These kinds of quick video snippets feed into the normalized, modern-day rhythm of short video consumption, and it’s something your volunteers can consume at a time most convenient for them as they go throughout their week. If creating volunteer video trainings feels overwhelming, a great youth ministry curriculum like G Shades can provide that for you in addition to the weekly teaching content for your students. 

5. Create Rhythms Of Break

This is going to feel counterintuitive, but if you want your volunteers to stay, sometimes you gotta make them leave. Giving your volunteers rhythmic breaks communicates to them that you care about their health as people. Every once in a while–maybe twice per year or so–you should consider building a multi-week break into your volunteer schedule. This means you’ll still have youth group, but you’ll pull it off without your normal team of volunteers. Does that make you anxious?

Me too, a little bit. 

So here’s an alternative. What if instead of giving all of your volunteers two weeks off at once, you extended a personal invitation to one of your volunteers at a time to take two weeks off? That’s intriguing, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that make them feel seen and cared for? Maybe you know that a busy stretch at their job is coming up, and you preemptively approach them to give them two weeks off of youth group so they don’t have to ask or stretch themselves too thin trying to do it all. What a neat way to care for a volunteer, and I guarantee they’ll remember that when the thought of stepping down inevitably crosses their mind.

6. Send Them Off Well

If you want to retain volunteers for the long haul, play the long game. Sometimes, despite your best efforts and healthiest systems, a volunteer is going to approach you about stepping down. Send them off well. Do it because it honors them and honors Jesus. But do it also because life is long and the journey is weird. So while they may step away now thinking they’ll never be back, they may be back. And if you treat them well while they’re with you and send them off with honor and grace, you increase the likelihood that, someday, when life calms down or they feel that stirring in their heart again, they’ll come back and volunteer again.

Seeing, Loving, And Caring For Our Volunteers

It’s always hard when volunteers tell you they need to step down. And despite our best efforts, it’s going to happen from time to time because life is busy for everyone. But when we clearly outline their role, give them space to be themselves, care for them holistically, offer accessible ways for them to develop, give them breaks, and, if need be, send them off well, we create the kind of culture that makes volunteers want to stay.

Let’s make our volunteers feel seen, loved, and cared for as they step into the fulfilling and challenging roles God has called them to. It’s weighty, but we really are partnering with God to help someone live out His calling on a particular season of their life, so let’s be sure their experience with us is a positive one. And in return, we’ll get to see the beautiful, compounding payoff of our team’s investment in the lives of students over time.

What more could we ask for as ministry leaders? 

Read More:

6 Important Steps To Build A Strong Youth Ministry Team 

Incorporating Mental Health Awareness Into Youth Ministry

Build Relationships Within Your Youth Group – Small Church Ministry