The Volunteer You Can't Fire

She's been running the social media account since before you got here, and she knows the passwords, the voice, and which posts the congregation responds to. She also posts things without checking with anyone, has strong opinions about every creative decision, and takes feedback as a personal challenge. Last month she redesigned the bulletin template because she thought the current one was boring.

You need her, and you also need her to stop doing some of what she does on her own, but firing her was never on the table to begin with.

Why is leading a creative volunteer harder than managing staff?

Leading paid staff is hard. Leading creative volunteers is a different kind of hard, and most of the leadership advice written for church environments treats volunteers as a staffing solution rather than the relational dynamic they actually are.

A volunteer creative has made a choice to give their skill and their time to your church, and that choice came with emotional investment that goes beyond the work itself. For many of them it's connected to their sense of calling, their desire to contribute something meaningful, their place in the community. Which means when you redirect their work, set a boundary around their role, or tell them something isn't working, you're navigating someone's sense of belonging as much as you're managing a deliverable.

Understanding that going in is what makes the conversation possible to have well.

How does a volunteer end up with too much control?

Most volunteer creative problems started as solutions. The person who eventually becomes difficult to manage was usually the person who stepped up when nobody else would, built the system, learned the tools, and took ownership when the church needed someone to. Over time that ownership calcified into territory, and the territory became harder to navigate as the church grew and the role needed to evolve.

By the time a communications director inherits this situation, there's often a history they weren't part of, an implicit set of promises nobody made explicitly, and a volunteer who has been operating with more autonomy than the role should carry. Trying to introduce structure into that without understanding the history is how you lose someone who has genuinely served the church well and turn them into someone who feels pushed out.

Why does the relationship have to come before the role?

Understanding the relationship has to come before defining the role. Before you set boundaries around what a volunteer's responsibilities are, find out why they care so much. What drew them to this work? What have they built that they're proud of? What do they hope the church's communications accomplishes? Those conversations give you the information you need to lead well, and they signal that you see this person rather than just the role they fill.

From that foundation, you can have honest conversations about how the role needs to work going forward, framed as collaboration rather than correction. Here's where we're headed. Here's what I need from this role. Here's where your strengths fit best. That framing gives the volunteer a future to move toward rather than a limitation to push against.

When redirection is necessary, be specific and private. General feedback to a volunteer who's emotionally invested in the work lands as rejection, while specific, private, direct feedback lands as leadership: the bulletin change last week needed to go through the approval process before it went out, here's why that matters, and here's how I'd like us to handle it going forward. Anything vaguer invites the volunteer to fill in what you meant, and they'll almost always assume something worse than you intended.

What do you do when a volunteer won't accept limits?

Sometimes the relationship work doesn't change the dynamic. There are volunteers who have operated with unchecked autonomy long enough that any attempt to introduce accountability feels like a personal attack, who interpret every boundary as evidence they're not valued, who will go around you to the senior pastor rather than work through the tension directly.

Those situations require a different kind of courage. You cannot lead a team, paid or volunteer, where one person operates outside the structure without consequence. The cost of tolerating it goes beyond operations: it signals to everyone else watching that the structure doesn't apply equally, and that the loudest, most established voice wins.

Having that conversation, with the volunteer directly and with senior leadership if needed, is part of the job, and doing it carefully, relationally, and with as much grace as you can bring doesn't make it optional.

What do creative volunteers actually deserve from your church?

Volunteers who give their creative skill to the church deserve honest leadership. That means clear expectations, genuine feedback, real investment in their growth, and honest conversation when something isn't working. What it doesn't mean is unlimited autonomy in exchange for their time, or protection from accountability because they're not on payroll.

The best volunteer creative relationships are ones where the person feels genuinely led, not just utilized, where they know what the standard is, why it matters, and how their contribution serves something larger than their own preferences. Building that kind of relationship takes longer than writing a policy. It's also the only thing that actually works.