Prevent Church Plant Sign Team Burnout

Putting out road signs and then picking them up after service every week can be a big job for your church plant sign team. You need to figure out ways to make that job manageable so that you don’t burn your workers out.

church plant sign team

I remember the initial excitement of being on the church plant sign team and putting out the street signs every week. I knew I had an important job.

Then came the drudgery; it took a couple of months, but leaving the house early every Sunday and driving all over town putting out signs from the trunk of my minivan wore thin.

Here are some lessons I learned from my own stint, along with a few I’ve learned from one of my church planters:

Work Out a Rotation

My biggest burnout factor was that I was the sign team. It would have been great to have even one other person to share the load.

Here are some common rotation schemes:

  • Every other week
  • Month on, month off
  • Someone puts them out, someone else picks them up

My friend Brent Captain planted Salt Christian Church in Utah. He told me that he was wrestling with burnout on his church plant sign team, so he ordered a big batch of yard signs. Then he disbanded the sign team and gave everyone on the setup team a handful. They each plaster one major intersection that’s on their way in when they serve. Then they grab the signs on the way home. Many hands make light work: they only have to make one stop on their route to and from the gathering each Sunday.

Buy Lightweight

You lower the recruitment bar if the signs are light enough to be lifted by anyone. Heavy signs may give you longer life or more ‘real estate’, but beware you don’t get one that takes a body builder to lift in and out of a vehicle. The A-frame signs I heaved stood almost 4 feet tall and were made of plywood (too bad I didn’t end up looking like a body builder…).

Read more pros and cons of various sign types on my previous post How to Design Church Plant Signs.

Be Strategic

Brent offered me another fantastic tip: measure the effectiveness of which intersections to hit by watching your website analytics. All other things being roughly equal on a Sunday morning, if you change which intersection(s) the signs are on and you see a relative increase or decrease in web traffic that Sunday morning, it’s a clue to the effectiveness of the location. But only change one intersection at a time!

This is a great way to keep your church plant sign team engaged and always improving. Experiment, research and adapt.

I consistently hear from my church planters that street signage is one of the top reasons people give when asked, “How did you hear about our church?” Keeping your church plant sign team engaged and in it for the long haul is an important key to helping people in your community find you.


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