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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the growing challenge pastors face in finding leaders for key church ministries. He explains how clear expectations, meaningful roles, and intentional support can transform reluctant helpers into dedicated ministry leaders, while highlighting the deeper motivation of service as a pathway to purpose, growth, and impact.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Well, in thinking about subjects for the podcast, I wanna stay always focused on the practical issues related to ministry leadership. But I wanna talk about things that are really current and particularly important to pastors and other leaders today. And so a few weeks ago, I put together a list of about a dozen pastors from various places and various backgrounds, various ethnicities.
Jeff Iorg:I put a pastor on the list from rural Tennessee, another one from a major church in a large West Coast city, African American, Asian, Anglo, small churches, large churches, a cross section if you will. And I drew that list from my friends, men that I've worked with, known, served with, partners in ministry. I emailed them and I asked
Jeff Iorg:them two questions. First, what are you facing right now that's pressing you in pastoral ministry? And second, because all of these people that I wrote are leaders in their own context. Second, when pastors come to you with problems, what are they asking you to help them resolve? So what's pressing you and what are
Jeff Iorg:you helping others resolve? Now, I wrote about a dozen pastors, and I frankly thought as busy as they all are that, you know, I might get back a response from two or three, and it would probably be a few days before I heard from anyone. Within the first hour after I sent that email, I started getting responses. And I got responses from every single person I asked those two questions, and I got everything back from bullet point lists to two page emails paragraph after paragraph answering the questions. I consider this information podcast gold.
Jeff Iorg:So for the next several weeks, I'm going to be talking with you about the issues that were surfaced by these pastors, about a dozen of them, who answered my two questions, what's pressing you right now in pastoral ministry? And when other leaders ask you for help, what are the issues they bring to you to help them resolve? Well, the first thing I wanna talk about today is an issue that was raised about finding leadership in particular areas of church ministry like preschool, children's, and youth, or teenage, or student ministry. Now the person who wrote me this said, the most frequent question I'm being asked by other pastors is where do I find the people to staff the ministries that we need in our church related to preschoolers, children, and students or teenagers? And in the context of the question, he was asking where can we find people who have been called into these ministry areas that we can employ to get them done or to provide leadership in these areas?
Jeff Iorg:Well, I think that the presumption that you're going to find people to pay to do these jobs is the first mistake in trying to resolve this issue. I think instead, we have to reconsider the whole possibility that we need to lead in most areas in church ministry with a robust team of volunteers who get the job done. And that leads me to the theme of this podcast today, that is finding more workers, finding more people who will plug into and give meaningful leadership in these crucial areas of church ministry. Yes. It is possible if you're in a large church here in the South that you might have the resources to hire someone to be your children's minister or your preschool director.
Jeff Iorg:You might be able to hire someone to be a part time or maybe even a full time youth pastor. But the hard reality is when more than half the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention are led by bi vocational most of the staffing in all of our churches is going to be done by volunteers who step forward and take on these roles and responsibilities. But that does not happen spontaneously, and in fact, it's getting harder and harder for it to happen at all. Because for various reasons, it is becoming more and more difficult to get people to plug into these long term volunteer ministry leadership roles. Now, it is getting more difficult, but it is not impossible.
Jeff Iorg:You know, high level volunteers are serving in lots of places in our culture and also in our churches. Let me just give you one example, that's youth
Jeff Iorg:sports. Most youth sports organizations,
Jeff Iorg:Little League Baseball, YMCA Basketball, Catholic Sports Leagues, AAU programs, most of these programs are operated by volunteers who make a high level commitment because of their passion for the sport, their willingness to invest in a rising generation of athletes, their desire to influence and teach character and other life skills through sports. They make a significant investment of time as volunteers to get the job done. And I'd count myself in that, in that category. For 10, I served on the board of a little league baseball league in, Oregon. Ten years.
Jeff Iorg:So for ten years, I went to a monthly board meeting that lasted about two to three hours. And then during the season, I was involved almost daily in board leadership and in league leadership, helping to put on a program of little league baseball in our community. And I did that completely
Jeff Iorg:as a volunteer. They didn't pay any of my expenses. They didn't pay me
Jeff Iorg:for any of my time. I completely provided that kind of volunteer service. And then let me take it to another level. A little league baseball has a firm rule that if you want to umpire in their little league all star tournaments leading up to and including the little league world series, you cannot be paid as an umpire. You have to volunteer your time to little league in order to be considered to move up into those higher level tournaments and responsibilities.
Jeff Iorg:And you may say, well, you can't get good umpires if you don't pay them. That's completely wrong. Completely wrong. Because a lot of people who are umpiring at that level will be paid to umpire high school baseball and then come and volunteer at Little League because they believe in the program and wanna invest in the community and give the highest quality, help they can into those programs.
Jeff Iorg:And so for twenty five years, twenty five years,
Jeff Iorg:I umpired little league baseball and never took a check-in any capacity for anything that I ever did in those programs. Listen. That's the kind of volunteering that's going on in our communities today. People are volunteering in youth sports and in other contexts and in volunteering in significant ways to get the work done. You might say, well, that's really not fair.
Jeff Iorg:They should pay umpires. Why? Why? They don't pay the coaches, and they're spending far more time even than the umpires are with their teams and with their players. And they're expected to do that in a volunteer capacity.
Jeff Iorg:I'm simply saying volunteerism and volunteer leadership and significant volunteer leadership in community programs is happening all around us. So, yes, it is more difficult to do this in church than it seems that it was a generation ago, but we should not give up on the possibility of raising up significant volunteer leaders for our churches because it's more difficult than it might have once been. You know, this idea of volunteerism is not just an idea that's come along because we need to find a way to do more with less money. Although that can be a motivation, it's not the total reason. I've developed something I call a theology of volunteers.
Jeff Iorg:I I wanna lay that out for you here to help you understand why volunteerism is really at the core of what's supposed to be the Christian movement that we're a part of. First of all, the church is an all volunteer
Jeff Iorg:organization. Everyone volunteers to be part of
Jeff Iorg:the church. You come to faith in Jesus Christ, and then you choose to become a part of the church where you're serving. The church is an all volunteer organization. No one gets paid to be a church member. Everyone volunteers.
Jeff Iorg:Second, the priesthood of all believers is rooted in the reality that all of us all of us share responsibility to serve and to make a difference in God's kingdom. The priesthood of all believers does not say the people who are paid should do priestly responsibilities of representing people to God and God to people. No. The priesthood of believers says that all people share this opportunity no matter if they're paid or not. Another aspect of this theology is that all Christians are gifted for ministry.
Jeff Iorg:You can find this in Romans 12 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians four and first Peter four. Various passages of scripture outline spiritual gifts and the importance of them. But one of the things that's that's clear about those teachings is that every believer has spiritual gifting of some kind or another. So a theology of volunteers rests on these foundational statements. The church is an all volunteer organization made up of a priesthood of believers who all share equally in the responsibility to serve God and to represent God to others, and that all believers are gifted for this kind of service.
Jeff Iorg:Now, in addition to that, another aspect of a theology of volunteer service is that pastors are designed to be equippers. That is our role that we've been given in Ephesians four, that we equip the saints for the work of service. We are not primarily people who do ministry, although we do ministry both to model and to accomplish, but we are primarily assigned the responsibility of being equippers, meaning that we train, develop, recruit, play, supervise, and encourage others to join us in getting the work done. And then a last aspect of my theology of volunteers is that service in the Bible is presented as a pathway of both influence and of fulfillment. The greatest among you is a servant of all, an opportunity for influence.
Jeff Iorg:And then fulfillment, meaning that we who serve find our greatest satisfaction in serving the Lord by serving others. Service equals influence and fulfillment. So this lays out a theological foundation, if you will, for this kind of effort. Now, that doesn't mean that it's easy. If you're going to build volunteer leadership, particularly in areas of church ministry like preschool children and student ministries, as well as many other areas, if you're going to do this, you're going to have to make a decision to intentionally invest yourself in this process and to recognize it is a never ending process of recruiting, training, motivating, supervising, and rewarding people who serve in these volunteer capacities.
Jeff Iorg:Now I wanna talk about some practical things now about how to do this more effectively. The first thing is the idea that you're going to get someone to volunteer for something, it may sound counterintuitive, is only diminished when you say, well, we need somebody to volunteer for this role. There's not much involved. You don't have to be very committed. You don't have to do too much.
Jeff Iorg:We just need somebody too. You've already lost most people when
Jeff Iorg:you start out that way. It may be counterintuitive, but the opposite approach is really much more effective. We have
Jeff Iorg:a volunteer responsibility, and it's an important one, and it matters. And because of that, we have certain requirements and certain expectations attached to it, and we like to challenge you to think about taking on that role. And so you start with an intentional commitment to elevate the role,
Jeff Iorg:not minimize the role. Now here are
Jeff Iorg:some things you can do to help do that. First, you have to create job descriptions for volunteers. Now you may say, well, wait a minute now. You're talking about a 20 item lit no. I'm not talking about anything like that.
Jeff Iorg:A job description can be something as simple as one or two or three sentences that just tells the person what you want them to do. You say, well, I I I want them to to show up and and and teach third grade Sunday school. I I want them to be the director of the kindergarten department of our church. I I I want them to take responsibility for teaching seventh grade boys. Okay?
Jeff Iorg:That's a simple statement, but it's putting down a documented statement of what you're asking them to commit to do. This is the job description. This is what you're supposed to accomplish. And then, especially with volunteers, you need to analyze and write down a time expectation. We're asking you to teach the third graders of our church.
Jeff Iorg:And if you're going to do that, then this is the time expectation. You're going to need to commit this time to teaching, this time to preparing, and this time to outreach or to personally investing in the lives of your students and their families. And so you may be talking about a three to five hour a week commitment that you're asking a person to make in order to fulfill the job description that you've written. So a good volunteer position has attached to it a job description and a time expectation. Now I'm gonna talk in a few minutes about scaling, and that means that you scale a person's availability and their commitment level and their capacity.
Jeff Iorg:You scale it to the job at hand and the time that you're requesting, but this is an important part of the process. But before you can do scaling, you have to do some analysis. What am I really asking the person to do? Now you may say, well, can you really ask a person for specific time commitment? Absolutely, yes.
Jeff Iorg:In fact, most people want to know what you're really asking to do and how much time it's really going to take before they'll even commit to something. So job description, time expectation.
Jeff Iorg:And then here's the third thing that goes along with that, and that
Jeff Iorg:is the training that will be offered and the support that will be given to help a person do their job. You know, it's so sad that we think that we can just go out and get a volunteer and say, hey, listen, we want you to to, you know, help with our two year olds, or we want you to, you know, teach high school boys, or we want you to be involved in in this program with our children without any training. We we simply want to put people in jobs and hope they'll figure it out along the way. What what make that makes no sense. What what are we thinking?
Jeff Iorg:No. It it requires some training. Now you may say, well, I don't have time to launch a school or a seminary or, Of course, you don't. No one's asking you to do that. But offering training could be something as simple as saying, I'm going to provide you a video series to watch that will help you to know how to do your job.
Jeff Iorg:Or I'm gonna give you this book to read, and then we're gonna meet together and talk about it for the next two weeks over lunch, a couple of times just to see how you're doing and what you're learning. Or I'm gonna connect you with a mentor, a person who's been teaching in this area for several years, and they're gonna coach you on how to get the job done. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about starting a seminary or launching a school or creating some multifaceted, multi month approach to training a volunteer. I'm simply saying that you may need to have a video or a book or a workbook or a mentor, something that you can put in their hands that says, we're gonna teach you how to do this job.
Jeff Iorg:Now you say, well, I I don't I don't even know how to do some of these jobs myself. That's right. But you can learn because you're the equipper and that's your responsibility. So you'll spend some time researching materials that are available from LifeWay or some other source and finding the training that's needed that you can put in a person's hands and making some phone calls to directors of missions or to employees of the state convention where you are. You're gonna be doing the work to find out what's available that I can use to train the people that I need to volunteer in these roles.
Jeff Iorg:So a person needs a job description that has some time expectation attached to it and some training offered to support it. And then number four, they need to know they're gonna have the necessary resources to do the job. So they're gonna be handed the curriculum if that's what they're going to teach, or they're gonna be given some other resources that are available to them to buy materials or to, provide whatever is needed to get the job done. And then last of all, they need supervisory structures, and that means they need to know somebody they can go to if they've got a question, they're having a problem, or if they need some assistance, or they need some encouragement. We often think of supervisory structures as the person who hires and fires.
Jeff Iorg:Well, with volunteers, yes, there's a hiring and a process, and there might sometimes be an opportunity to say you can't do that here anymore, but that's not really what supervision is about. Supervision is about stepping into a person's life and helping them to understand how to do a job, encouraging them along the way while they're doing it, supporting them in the task at hand, giving them that kind of a of a supervisory relationship that gives them the strength they need to keep doing the job.
Jeff Iorg:So
Jeff Iorg:how do you get people to volunteer for something? Write a job description. Clarify the time expectations. Provide them some basic training that they need. Make sure they have the resources in hand to do the job, and then supervise them by giving them the encouragement, the motivation, the care they need to stay with the task.
Jeff Iorg:Now, I said a few moments ago I was gonna talk about scaling. And that when I say that word, I mean that you scale the person appropriately to the position and the position appropriately to the organization. Now I've been talking about doing this in a church context where you have these relatively finite and limited jobs that you're asking people to take on, But you can up that to leadership responsibilities and even supervisory responsibilities as those leaders develop. You know, when I went to be the executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention, I realized early on that I did not have the budget to hire more people to do more work across the Northwest. And so I developed a very extensive approach to using volunteers in the capacity I'm describing for you today to get the work done.
Jeff Iorg:And when I left as the state executive, I had about 30 employees, but I had another 10 people serving on our staff as volunteers. And some of them working in full time capacities as volunteers. Now that's what I'm talking about when I say about scaling. For example, I wanted to while I was, in the Northwest, I wanted to enlarge the program of volunteerism across the convention by recruiting more people to be involved in mission trips, mission programs, mission projects, and in local church ministry, as well as in on building teams. In order to do that, I knew I needed a volunteer to recruit other volunteers.
Jeff Iorg:And so I worked hard to develop a job description with time expectations, adequate training, necessary resources, and a supervisory structure. And I went out looking for people who would make a full time commitment to this job. And I found them. And over my ten years of serving, I had two or three of these people that came along and worked for two to five years in the role as the director of volunteerism for the Northwest Baptist Convention, helping to facilitate enhanced volunteerism from the churches in projects like building programs, disaster relief teams, and other ministry responsibilities. And you say, well, who would make a commitment like that?
Jeff Iorg:Well, Don and Theta Yeager were a good example. Don was retired from the United States Air Force as a colonel. He had obviously good leadership skills as evidenced by his career. He also had remarkable administrative capacity, that he had developed over the years of service. His wife was his ministry partner in every way, and they had retired at relatively young age from the military and were looking for something to invest their lives in as they moved forward in ministry and life.
Jeff Iorg:Now because of retirement income and some other, resources, they they didn't need a full time job, but they definitely were looking for a very substantial ministry to invest themselves in. When I laid out the dream that I had for them, they took on the responsibility, relocated to the Pacific Northwest, and worked for years in facilitating, heightened levels of volunteerism in churches and then especially in feeding volunteers into these programs like building programs, church construction assistance, summer missions teams, disaster relief organizations, and things like this. Now let's talk about job description time expectations. With them, it was a full time job, and we wrote a job description for them like you would for a full time position. Time expectation, you know, I realized I was asking a lot of them, and so I said to them I wanted them to take two months a year off from this job.
Jeff Iorg:Even though it was a volunteer job, we said there's times when you have to be here, but there's other times when we want you to be away. We want you to take six weeks at the end of the year and go and be with your family for Thanksgiving and Christmas and travel and do other things, and we want you to take some time off in the summer, which they basically later came back to me and said that won't work because summer is the high point of volunteerism for us. And so we'd rather take that time off in the late spring gearing up for the summer, which they did. But I had to quit time expectations, and then I offered them training, helping them to be oriented to systems in Southern Baptist life and understanding how to interface more effectively with them and how to get connected to denominational leaders like associational missionaries and how to work to bring about this kind of movement that we needed. Now necessary resources.
Jeff Iorg:Now listen closely. The Jaeers never received a penny of salary for several years of full time service with the Northwest Baptist Convention, but what they did receive was travel funds, administrative support funds. We put a small amount of money aside and budgeted for their expenses just as if they were employed, and that small amount of money which paid for their expenses made them able to do volunteer work on our behalf without bearing any of the expense of doing it for us. You know, this is one of the things that I've advocated for and I really think churches need to pursue, and that is rather than thinking about hiring more people, think about how you can get much more bang for the buck, so to speak, but how you can use the money much more effectively and use a lot less of it by simply providing your volunteer team the resources they need to do their job. So let's say, for example, that you have a volunteer youth pastor.
Jeff Iorg:A person who's working a full time job or working in the community or in some other way providing their livelihood, but makes a substantial commitment to work in youth ministry in your church. Well, even though you're not paying their salary, would it be possible for you to step forward and say, we're gonna provide you, you know, a $100 a week that you can use to take teenagers out for a a Coke or you can take one of your workers out for lunch? We're gonna provide you some resources to support the ministry you're doing, and just turn in your receipts like you would if you were paid, and we'll reimburse you for those up to a certain level. This is the kind of support that you can provide to volunteers that really enhances what they're doing and communicates value to them, but isn't a salary or anything like a salary, but does give them that little bit they need to be able to do the ministry they're trying to do even more effectively. So creating these volunteer positions includes job descriptions, time expectations, adequate training, necessary resources, and supervisory structures, and then it's scaled.
Jeff Iorg:Now when I say it's scaled, that means you take into consideration the job, you take into consideration the capacity of the person, their gifts, abilities, talents, and interests, all that they can do, the needs of the role itself, and you scale all of what I've just described appropriately for both the position and the person. I think about some of the volunteers I've worked with in church context over the years. A number of years ago, I was, asked to be the camp pastor at a very large church's summer camp program for their children. And I did this for several years for this particular church, and one of the reasons I so enjoyed doing it was because the incredible volunteer team they had built over the years that served in their children's ministry. And one particular duo was so meaningful to me.
Jeff Iorg:There were these two women that were, oh, around 50 years old, and they taught the sixth grade girls in this large church as their ministry. And they had about 20 to 25 girls that were in this class that they taught Sunday school and other ministries that they did with them. I asked them one time, how is it that you're so committed to these girls? I see you here year after year after year, teaching Sunday school, coming to camp, doing other projects and ministries with these girls. And one of the women looked at
Jeff Iorg:me and said, well, this is my ministry. And the other one nodded her head, yes. This is this is my ministry too. And I said, well, I understand that,
Jeff Iorg:but what what and I asked the question again, they looked at me like I had grown a third eyeball, like,
Jeff Iorg:what is wrong with this man? And she said, the first one again, well, pastor, this is my ministry. This is what I'm committed to. This is what I do. And then I got the picture that these two women had banded together, found a mutual passion, and devoted significant hours of their lives to this work because it was, quote, their ministry.
Jeff Iorg:Man,
Jeff Iorg:that kind of work just inspires me. I think about my wife, for example, and her ministry to preschoolers over the years. She has occasionally been paid a little bit for the work that she's done and and occasionally received expenses and other things, but for the most part, for the most part, she has simply devoted herself to training and equipping and motivating and supporting preschool ministries in churches because if you asked her, she would say, well, that's my ministry.
Jeff Iorg:That's what I do. This kind of volunteerism
Jeff Iorg:is at the core of what it takes to build the cadre of workers we need to man up, if you will, to staff up these ministry areas in the vast majority of churches.
Jeff Iorg:Now as we close it out, let me remind you that you will never build this kind of volunteer movement
Jeff Iorg:with the demotivators of guilt and shame. You can't guilt people or shame people into this kind of service. What is it then that motivates people to make this kind of commitment? Well, the self motivators are these. First, personal contribution to a mission.
Jeff Iorg:People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and they'll volunteer to do it. Second, personal satisfaction from using their gifts. Personal satisfaction of knowing that what God has blessed them with, the capacities, the mindset, the resources, whatever he's blessed them with, they're serving him by investing that back in other people. Personal fulfillment through service. Finding a personal satisfaction.
Jeff Iorg:Jesus said, you find your life by losing your life. You find your life by giving
Jeff Iorg:it away. Personal fulfillment through service. And then personal growth through the stressors of ministry. Now, might surprise you, but many people will tell
Jeff Iorg:you that the greatest times of spiritual growth in their lives were through the stresses that were brought about by taking on a ministry leadership responsibility. I've had many people tell me, you know, I learned a lot by going to Bible study. I learned more when I started teaching the Bible study. The stress of the teaching produced the greater growth. And then finally, the personal spiritual depth and growth from loving God through service.
Jeff Iorg:Finding a sense of deep personal growth and satisfaction of giving your life away in serving others. Well, my pastoral survey said, one of the greatest challenges I'm facing is finding people to staff up these volunteer capacity responsibilities in my church. We can't hire enough people to do it and frankly, they're not ever going to be able to hire enough people to do it, but we can find a way to build robust systems of volunteerism, meaning volunteer recruitment, support placement, supervision. We can do it with an intentional effort and an intentional commitment rooted in the theology I outlined at the beginning of the podcast to get this done. And when we do it, we'll find that the motivators of guilt and shame are actually demotivators, and these other positive motivations I've given are the reasons people will make this kind of commitment to voluntary leadership in ministry responsibilities like I described.
Jeff Iorg:Look, most churches are not gonna be able to hire a big staff to get anything done. They're fortunate if they have a bi vocational or in some cases a full time pastor, and that person's responsibility is to equip others. And that means equip volunteers to get the work done. Think about it and put it into practice as you lead on.