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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