Even good leaders need to figure out how to lead volunteers better. One of the ways you can do that is to know your volunteers better. Online personality profiles for church volunteers can help.
There are 2 basic approaches to filling volunteer positions at your church plant:
1. Based on the Church’s Need
This is our natural tendency. We all see the freight train of Sunday morning coming and wonder how we’re going to pull it off without letting major balls drop.
But this path can easily turn your volunteerism into a grist mill. Volunteers and leaders fill spots based on where they’re needed most, not necessarily on what their spiritual gifts are. When serving gets hard (not “if”), there is little to keep them connected to that role, so turnover will be an ongoing problem.
2. Based on the Volunteer’s Gifts and Talents
However, if you take the time to find out how the Spirit has equipped the volunteer, you can match them up to a serving opportunity that will complement how God has wired them up.
This more open-handed approach puts the volunteer’s long term growth ahead of the church’s immediate need. It benefits the Kingdom by training up lifelong servants who love what they do and are supernaturally good at it. And when the going gets tough, they are much more likely to stick it out.
You just have to be OK with letting a serving team suffer in the short term until God provides the right person to jump in.
Online Personality Profiles for Church Volunteers
Here are several free and low-cost online personality profiles for church volunteers:
- Free spiritual gifts analysis
- Free spiritual gifts test
- Free gifts test (by The Rock Church)
- Free enneagram type assessment
- Free Meyers-Briggs-type assessment
- Free DiSC personality test
- $20 StrengthsFinder assessment
- $27 Ministry Insights – Leading from Your Strengths profile
With a provocative quote:
…psychology, while a helpful handmaiden to faith, is a fourth-rate substitute for it. Without God’s wisdom and power, it has nothing to rely on but itself, which means when it runs into difficult challenges, it has nothing to recommend but more psychology and more analysis.” 1
1 Shaw, Haydn (2015-10-01). Generational IQ: Christianity Isn’t Dying, Millennials Aren’t the Problem, and the Future is Bright (p. 58). Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Kindle Edition.