How to Kill Volunteer Recruitment in a Church

During the service one Sunday, the pastor announced that the Preschool would be moving into their new building over the following weekend, and they needed as many volunteers as possible on Friday and Saturday to bring hand tools and power tools and help assemble things and get all of their things moved into the building. So a couple that had been visiting the church drove 15 miles to the church that Saturday and walked into the new Preschool building to see how they could help. They wandered around until they located the head of the committee overseeing the project and asked how they could help. The committee chair replied, "Oh, we haven't got our certificate of occupancy yet, so we really can't do anything."

Somehow, somewhere, someone knew they weren't going to be able to move in before that Saturday. It would have been a good idea to send an email out to the church email list cancelling the "move in days". Folks take time out of their weekends to volunteer to work on worthy causes. But they'll only get stood up like this a few times before they'll begin to ignore requests for volunteers.