This post is adapted from Episode 58 of Kids Ministry Calling: “58. Building a Thriving Volunteer Culture: Fun, Training & Mentorship” with Crystal Mazzuca.
If you’ve spent any time in kids ministry, you already know: recruiting, training, and keeping volunteers is one of the hardest, and most talked-about challenges in the role. But what if the secret to solving your volunteer problem wasn’t a better system or a slicker pitch? What if it was simply more fun?
Crystal Mazzuca, content editor and resource specialist for Hyfi, joined the Kids Ministry Calling Podcast to share practical, experience-tested strategies for bringing energy and engagement to every stage of the volunteer journey. Here’s what she had to say.
Start With This: People Join Things That Are Fun
Before diving into tactics, Crystal set the foundation: people are drawn to teams that look like they’re having a good time. If your kids ministry feels like a burden to be part of, recruitment will always feel like an uphill battle. But when your team is laughing, connecting, and clearly invested in something meaningful, you create natural FOMO and people start asking how they can get involved.
Fun doesn’t have to mean silly or goofy. It means engaging, interactive, and worth showing up for.
Volunteer Recruitment: Don’t Ask People to Serve. Invite Them to Learn.
One of Crystal’s most practical shifts: stop leading with the ask.
Instead of saying, “I really need a new first-grade teacher—would you consider it?” try this approach:
“We’re growing our volunteer team. We’re hosting an informal hour where you can come to learn about what kids ministry at our church actually looks like. No commitment is required. Just come and see.”
People are far more likely to say yes to learning than to committing on the spot. And once they experience the ministry firsthand—the kids, the leaders, the heart behind it, the “yes” often comes naturally.
What to include in your recruitment experience:
- Always have food. It signals care and creates comfort.
- Share the why. Don’t assume people know why kids ministry matters. Cast vision for what God is doing and why your church invests in it.
- Give a live tour. Walk potential volunteers through rooms while ministry is happening so they can see kids and leaders in action—not just empty classrooms.
- Let a current volunteer share their story. Hearing “this is why I serve” from a peer is more powerful than hearing it from you.
- Show the range of roles. Not everyone is a natural small group teacher. Some people are great with tech, some can prep materials during the week, some thrive in the nursery. Make sure there’s a place for everyone.
Pro tip: Ask your current volunteers for names.
Crystal challenges her existing volunteers to each give her a list of 20 names broken into categories like “someone who’s served before,” “a friend of yours,” and “someone you think would say no but I’ll ask anyway.” That last category is where some of her best volunteers came from. People who would never have said yes to serve said yes to learn more and showed up ready to commit.
Volunteer Training: Make It Hands-On, Not Just Informational
Training is where a lot of kids ministry leaders lose volunteers, not because the content is bad, but because the delivery is. Crystal’s guiding principle: if your training is someone standing up and talking for an hour, you’re missing an opportunity.
What makes training actually work:
1. Let volunteers share with each other. Your volunteers have years of experience, hard-won wisdom, and real questions. Build in time for them to talk and not just receive. This builds community and surfaces insights you might not even have.
2. Use role-playing. Have volunteers act like the kids they work with while others practice leading a small group discussion or handling a difficult scenario. It sounds silly, but it works and it’s memorable. Crystal describes watching leaders fully channel specific kids in their class, which makes the practice both hilarious and genuinely useful.
3. Think board game, not lecture. Crystal once ran a cross-ministry training where participants rolled dice, landed on scenarios, and everyone at the table responded. The result was an 80-year-old volunteer and a 14-year-old teen leader learning from each other on equal footing, because they both cared about kids.
4. Keep it short. Provide childcare. Volunteers are giving their time. Honor that. Aim for 60–90 minutes max and offer childcare on-site so parents don’t have to find a babysitter just to attend training.
5. Theme it. If you’re doing VBS training, lean into the theme. One church with a bug-themed VBS turned their training dinner into a themed spread—celery bugs, ants on a log, themed drinks. It doesn’t have to cost much. It just has to show that someone thought about it.
Don’t abandon in-person training for video.
Short, encouraging videos are a great tool for monthly check-ins and quick practical tips. Crystal recommends keeping them to 2–3 minutes, something a volunteer could watch in a school pickup line. But research consistently shows that every generation still values in-person connection. Keep hosting those gatherings, even if attendance feels low at first. Build the FOMO, and they’ll come.
Volunteer Retention: Seen, Known, Celebrated
Here’s something Crystal says gets overlooked: strong retention actually fuels better recruitment. When people feel genuinely appreciated and connected, they stay and they tell others. Your culture of care becomes your best recruiting tool.
The three levels of appreciation:
Public
Call out volunteers by name in front of their peers. During your Sunday morning huddle, say: “I just want to recognize [name]. Last week, she stayed with a struggling kid the entire morning and it made a difference. Can we give her a hand?” Brag on people in the moments that matter.
Private
One-on-one, personal appreciation. A text. A handwritten postcard. A face-to-face moment where you say specifically what you’ve noticed and why it matters. Crystal built a system where she set aside the first Monday of each month to plan which volunteers she’d personally reach out to—and she worked through her entire list over the course of the year.
Behind Their Back
This one is underrated. When you’re in a staff meeting and someone asks for wins, bring up a volunteer by name. Tell your pastor, your worship director, your student pastor. When that volunteer later hears that their kids ministry leader was bragging on them in a room they weren’t in—it means everything.
Host at least one annual appreciation event.
Bring your whole team together just to celebrate them and not to train, not to plan, but to honor. Give out awards. Play games. Let them bring their families. Make it something they look forward to every year. (Hyfi even provides a ready-to-use volunteer appreciation event each year. This year it’s music-themed and called “Volunteers Rock.”)
The Bigger Picture
At the end of the day, what Crystal is describing isn’t a set of tricks, it’s a posture. It’s the decision to treat volunteers like people who matter, not resources to be managed.
When your ministry is a place where people feel seen, known, loved, and celebrated, you don’t just retain volunteers. You build a team that can’t stop talking about what they get to be part of and that kind of word-of-mouth is the most powerful recruitment tool you’ll ever have.
Listen to the full conversation with Crystal Mazzuca on Episode 58 of Kids Ministry Calling.
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