If Half Your Church Disappeared Tomorrow, Would Sunday Still Run?
It is an uncomfortable question worth asking honestly. In a lot of churches, the honest answer is no, because the same fifteen or twenty people are quietly carrying every team, every week, while everyone else attends as a guest in their own church.
The Benchmark
The Unstuck Group and Ministry Architects put a healthy Monthly Unique Volunteer Rate, the share of average attendance that serves in some capacity at least once a month, at 40 to 50 percent. Since the pandemic, the average church has settled closer to 34 percent, and plenty are running well below even that.
The Argument
A church where roughly 15 percent of people serve is not really a church in the fullest sense. It is closer to an audience with a volunteer committee attached. Belonging in a congregation gets built through serving alongside other people, not through sitting near them once a week, and a low volunteer rate is usually a quieter version of the same problem that eventually shows up as low overall engagement and, later, as declining attendance.
Where To Start
Raising this number rarely starts with recruiting harder for existing roles. It usually starts with lowering the barrier to a first serving experience, since the biggest gap in most churches is not a shortage of willing people but a shortage of easy, low-commitment ways for someone to try serving for the first time. Track the unique number of people serving each month, not just the number of shifts filled, and the real picture tends to be more sobering, and more actionable, than most leadership teams expect.
Find your real number
Your Monthly Unique Volunteer Rate, calculated for you.
The free Church Health Scorecard calculates this in under two minutes and benchmarks it alongside five other numbers from the same research base.
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