When to Use Volunteers, When to Pay Them, and When to Hire a Pro

thinking strategy
Braden East

Balancing high standards with inclusivity in the life of a church can be challenging.

For example, not everyone may have the skills to sing in the choir or play an instrument during worship. How can we maintain quality without relying solely on professionals?

Here are three categories you can use to think about this topic:

1. The Talented Specialist

God has put people with unique gifts and talents in every church.

We should use them!

If you have someone in your congregation who specializes in exactly what you need - they’re probably the best choice.

2. The Willing Volunteers

Then there’s a grey area of things you COULD do in-house.

At my church, we’re redoing some fencing around our AC condensers outside the building.

We’ve gotten bids from professional contractors, but we also have guys with lots of construction and welding experience in our congregation.

Those guys could probably get something decent put together in a couple weeks.

It’s a decision between spending the extra money on a professionally built fence that will look more beautiful and last longer, VS doing it ourselves with a shorter expiration date (and probably less beautiful).

3. It’s Out of Your Wheelhouse

Finally there’s the category of things that would be wasteful and fruitless to NOT hire a pro.

A lot of churches don’t have the expertise to set up a sound system from scratch, file their taxes, or to renovate their sanctuary.

When I work with churches on a rebrand, I do my best to make sure they can take the reigns when we’re done.

Branding takes ongoing intentional effort, so I give clients a toolkit of graphics, colors, and fonts they can use right inside Canva (did you know churches can get Canva Pro for free?).

Conclusion

All that to say, I think there’s a level of excellence that each church has to decide if they want to pursue on a case by case basis.

If you have someone in your congregation who does it all the time, the decision is pretty obvious.

Conversely, it’s easy to hire a pro if nobody in your church would even know where to start.

The 2nd category takes more wisdom to decide on the best course of action.

Often these situations call for a hybrid approach, hiring a professional to get you started so that your volunteers can eventually take over.


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Boulder Problems and Branding
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I’m an extreme sports fan, and those who know me know that I would never pass up a chance to try one. Of course, I’m no Red Bull athlete, so it usually looks like me attempting the low-stakes version of whatever the true pros are doing. One of those sports I’ve casually enjoyed since high school is rock climbing, and believe it or not, there’s a nice analogy to branding here. In bouldering (climbing lower with no ropes above a crash mat), a route or particular climb is called a boulder problem. A beginner climber like me can climb any V1 boulder problem with ease and most V2s with moderate difficulty. Some V3 problems are too challenging at my skill level, while others are doable after a few attempts. (Don’t be too impressed - the scale goes up to V17). There was this one V3 problem giving me trouble on my last visit. I kept falling over and over, until I eventually felt so fatigued and frustrated that I gave up. Why am I sharing this story? I think it’s appropriate that they’re called “problems,” because they have a solution that takes more than brute force and raw strength to solve. They take strategy. All around me were more experienced climbers who could have showed me the trick to get past my sticking point. With their expert advice, I could have probably reached my goal with only a couple of tries. Even better, I probably could have learned tips from them for other problems too. Here’s the thing: If you want the fastest way to your goal, don’t be afraid to seek guidance from someone who’s done it before.
Two Strategies to Blast Through Creative Block
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A pastor scheduled a call with me last month to talk about a new congregation his church is planting next year. I can’t tell you the name right now, but it was a church who was running over 500 and was starting to struggle with shaping the culture and collective mission of that many people. If they didn’t get their branding and a visual identity in place before the plant, rebranding would have just gotten more expensive and difficult. They didn’t want to miss the opportunity but they lacked the confidence to rebrand with their internal team alone. Where do you start? To even begin a branding project, we needed to figure out the problem they were trying to solve. Did this church need to… REFRESH their existing brand? REPOSITION their identity under a new vision? or REACH OUT with their message? The church had just undergone a name church that was being announced later in the year. Their leaders were trying to cast a vision that was outward-focused and kingdom-minded. At first, this made me think it was a REACH OUT case, but the more I dug in, the more I realized what they actually needed was to REPOSITION. Why? Well, let’s look at their goals. The outward focus was a culture they wanted to create in their church body. While they ultimately wanted to reach out with their message (all churches should), they couldn’t do that effectively until they first grounded their church in a collective vision that included more than just their immediate membership. Their brand didn’t reflect the long term vision for the church, and it needed to visually align before both congregations could shift their focus to their region and community. Hopefully you can see how the REPOSITION approach was needed for this case. Instead of jumping in trying to scale up misaligned branding, we needed to build on their values and rework the brand identity from the ground up.
Boulder Problems and Branding
Published on:
I’m an extreme sports fan, and those who know me know that I would never pass up a chance to try one. Of course, I’m no Red Bull athlete, so it usually looks like me attempting the low-stakes version of whatever the true pros are doing. One of those sports I’ve casually enjoyed since high school is rock climbing, and believe it or not, there’s a nice analogy to branding here. In bouldering (climbing lower with no ropes above a crash mat), a route or particular climb is called a boulder problem. A beginner climber like me can climb any V1 boulder problem with ease and most V2s with moderate difficulty. Some V3 problems are too challenging at my skill level, while others are doable after a few attempts. (Don’t be too impressed - the scale goes up to V17). There was this one V3 problem giving me trouble on my last visit. I kept falling over and over, until I eventually felt so fatigued and frustrated that I gave up. Why am I sharing this story? I think it’s appropriate that they’re called “problems,” because they have a solution that takes more than brute force and raw strength to solve. They take strategy. All around me were more experienced climbers who could have showed me the trick to get past my sticking point. With their expert advice, I could have probably reached my goal with only a couple of tries. Even better, I probably could have learned tips from them for other problems too. Here’s the thing: If you want the fastest way to your goal, don’t be afraid to seek guidance from someone who’s done it before.
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