Your church plant is gearing up for the launch of weekly worship services and it’s time to start building your serving teams. How many people do you need to pull this thing off? You won’t know until you create a volunteer matrix.

Call it a list or whatever, the volunteer matrix is just an exercise in writing down every serving position and every team you’ll need to host weekly worship services.

Start with Teams

Make a list of all the teams you’ll be building for Sunday worship. The teams you create say something about your values as a church. They also need to support the way you’ll “do church” based on your context.

The typical suspects include:

• Children’s Ministry Team
• Hospitality/Greeting Team
• Worship Team
• Host/Usher Team
• Set-up/Tear-down Team
• Media Team
• Finance/Counting Team

People or Roles?

Instead of thinking, “How many people do I need?” a better question is, “How many roles do I need to fill?” Here’s the difference: one person can fill several roles across multiple teams on a given Sunday. For example, a woman could be on the Set-up Team, Greeting Team, and Counting Team all on the same Sunday morning.

It’s going to be different for every congregation, so you can’t really copy this 1-for-1 from another church. Sit down and do the hard work; this becomes the precursor to your serving schedule/rotation, so the effort won’t be wasted.

More than a Skeleton Crew

The first number you need to come up with is the irreducible minimum headcount you’ll need to pull off a Sunday worship service. Let’s say for argument’s sake that you have 72 roles to fill and could cross-coordinate people to get everything done with 40 people. But if you use the same 40 people every Sunday, week in and week out, burnout is coming. Fast.

So you need to set an expectation that  volunteers at your church don’t have to serve more than [X] times per month, and maybe even fill no more than [X] roles each Sunday. This honors your team members and puts healthy boundaries in place. But if that’s the case, then you need to recruit more people than the 40 skeleton crew. Your ultimate goal should be to have more volunteers than you have roles.

Deputize Team Leaders

You’ll never be able to recruit, train & coordinate all the teams. You need to build up leaders and get them doing the important work of running the teams. Did your initial role count include team leaders as needed roles? How about apprentices to each of the team leaders?

And now that you’ve done the work to create a volunteer matrix, you have a tool to put into those leaders’ hands as a recruiting tool. And you’ll find that they can easily turn the matrix into a serving schedule.