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One of the hardest things about ministry is that we can get so busy doing great work that we forget to celebrate. We forget to celebrate small wins with parents and little moments of breakthrough with students, but we also sometimes forget to celebrate the work of our youth ministry volunteers. When you celebrate volunteers in youth ministry, it can go a long way in establishing not only a healthy youth group culture now, but in setting your ministry up to be sustainable for the future. Let’s talk about how we can make a big deal out of even small moments with our adult volunteers.
Making Volunteer Celebration A Part Of Your Ministry
Youth ministry is a sowing ministry. Your volunteer leaders invest time and energy into your middle or high school students and rarely see an immediate return. It isn’t that there are no returns in the world of youth ministry. It’s just that, if we’re waiting to see all of the fruits of our labor when it comes to teenagers, we might be waiting a while.
Most of your volunteers probably know that, and there’s a good chance they’ve come to a place of peace with it. But still, it’s nice to get some positive feedback as a sign that what you do matters. So celebrating your volunteers is a great way to provide your current volunteers with a little tangible gratification.
Not only that, but it’s also worth noting that celebration is an important spiritual rhythm of our faith. Remembrance and celebration are baked into Jewish culture because God wanted it that way. He recognized its importance for humanity. But even in the New Covenant, we have celebration interwoven into spiritual practices like communion and baptism. Celebration was a key theme in many of Jesus’ parables. It truly is good to celebrate, and our volunteers are worth celebrating!
Understand The Different Ways People Feel Celebrated
Because our volunteers are human, celebrating them isn’t always so straightforward. You may have heard of The Five Love Languages? Well, the reality is, that people receive things like love and appreciation in vastly different ways. That can make things tricky because what might feel like celebration for one volunteer may feel like punishment to another. So, in a sense, the best way we can honor and celebrate a volunteer is to know them well enough to know how they want to be honored and celebrated.
So below we’re going to offer five different ways to celebrate volunteers. But before we do, I want us to acknowledge that some of these ideas are great ideas or terrible ideas depending on which volunteer leader you want to try them on!
5 Key Ways To Celebrate Volunteers In Youth Ministry
1. Make Them The Heroes
Being a youth pastor is a weird role. Depending on your personality and the culture of your ministry, it can be this role where you are an absolute rockstar to a small group of adolescents. When you’re the one doing the teaching, planning the events, and cracking the funniest jokes, it can be easy for your students to see you as the hero. But my encouragement to you is to intentionally platform your volunteers as the heroes whenever you can.
- Point out to your students when a volunteer provides snacks or leads a game.
- Highlight a volunteer’s amazing talent display.
- Say over and over again that the youth group is so much better because of your volunteers.
The teenagers in your youth group probably don’t think very often about the sacrifice required to volunteer. You do, though. So, as often as you can without making it weird, pedestal your volunteers as the heroes of your ministry.
2. Feed Them
This might seem silly, but one of the things I’ve learned about managing volunteer teams is that, more than anything else, many volunteers just like good food. And, I mean… that makes sense. We’re known for serving a lot of pizza in youth ministry, and pizza stops being a guilt-free meal right at about 30 years old. So if you want to celebrate your volunteers, I suggest you find a way to feed them a really good meal every once in a while.
- Ask a host family in the church to cook their favorite recipe.
- Scrape together some funds and have a meal catered.
- Invite them to your house and make your world-famous chili.
And honestly, this is a pretty phenomenal tool for recruiting volunteers. If, every six months or once per year, you invite current volunteers and the potential volunteers you’ve had your eye on to hang out together over a good meal, you may discover that your current volunteers do the recruiting for you! There’s a saying in ministry: “Your best volunteers recruit your best volunteers.” So if you need to convince your senior pastor or the board why you need to spend several hundred dollars on a catered dinner, you can always try to lay it on thick as a volunteer recruitment strategy!
3. Honor Volunteer Milestones
This is going to require some administrative work, but a great way to celebrate your volunteers is by honoring their milestones. One year, five years, first camp, etc. By taking a minute or two to highlight these kinds of milestones, you show your volunteer team that you’re counting. That it matters.
In my church, we have a specialized, custom t-shirt that we hand out for small group leaders who lead the same small group for seven years. It’s a jersey in the church’s brand colors and it has the number 7 and the person’s last name on the back. It’s a little bit silly, and it’s not that expensive, but neat gestures like that send the message to your volunteers that their faithfulness has been noticed.
Some other ideas include:
- Their favorite candy, but the wrapper is wrapped in an additional, printed paper wrapper with their face on it
- A hat with your church or student ministry’s logo on it
- A rap about them (AI can help with lyrics) performed in front of the youth group
Silly. Inexpensive. Personalized.
Those are the kinds of things a lot of your volunteers will probably like. And, also, if you do the rap one, please send a video of that in to us at Small Church Ministry. PLEASE!
4. Let Them Do What Gives Them Life
To be honest with you, some volunteers don’t want to be celebrated for what they’ve done. They more so want to be given a chance to do what they love to do. Some of us have people on our team who, back when they were new volunteers, proposed an idea to us that we weren’t crazy about, and we tabled it. It’s not that the idea was unsafe or out of pocket. We just weren’t ready to set them loose with their idea yet.
A fantastic way to honor and celebrate your volunteer is to extend the rope of trust a little bit. Let them run their polka dot party or whatever strange idea they seem really passionate about! Who knows… it might be pretty cool! But whether their wacky idea hits or flops, they’ll feel celebrated because you bought into their passion and let them do the thing they’ve been dying to do!
5. Give Them Time Off
Finally, a huge way to celebrate your volunteers is by giving them time off. I mean there’s no more celebratory day of the week than Friday, right? It’s because Friday is the national celebration of time off from work. Some people love getting time off from volunteering. They love what they do, and they love to occasionally take a break from it and recuperate.
So one of the best ways you can honor and celebrate your volunteers is to give them intentional off-ramps to refresh and rest. When you do that, you show them that you see them and care for them beyond what they do for you or your ministry.
- Give your volunteers 4 weeks off in the summer
- Invite each volunteer to take a 2-month sabbatical after 2 years of serving
- Ask a parent from the church to fill in for a volunteer once/quarter so each of your volunteers can rotate taking a week off every once in a while
Your Volunteers Deserve To Be Celebrated!
Leading volunteers is hard work, but it’s an amazing privilege that we get to take part in. Your volunteers are incredible, and they deserve to be honored and celebrated. What works for one won’t necessarily work for all of them, but hopefully these five ways to celebrate volunteers in youth ministry at least gets the ball rolling.
- Make them heroes publicly
- Feed them
- Honor volunteer milestones
- Let them do what gives them life
- Give them time off
At the end of the day, we don’t get to control how long our volunteers stay with us. We may honor and celebrate them to the best of our ability, and they still sometimes walk away at inopportune times. But we serve a God who provides, and He does right by us with consistency and intentionality. Let’s live that out toward our amazing volunteers!
Read More:
3 Key Steps To Recruiting Volunteers For Youth Ministry
Retaining Volunteers In Youth Ministry: 6 Key Tips
5 Helpful Tips For Volunteering In Youth Ministry
Mike Haynes is the creator and owner of G Shades Youth Ministry Curriculum. Over the course of 10+ years doing youth ministry in churches of all different sizes, Mike has developed a passion for creating resources that help small church leaders thrive.
