⭐ Premium
The Volunteers feature lets members of your congregation express interest in joining a ministry team directly through your website or the Our Church app. A team contact receives an email notification for each expression of interest and can approve or decline it from the dashboard — turning the often informal process of recruiting volunteers into a managed workflow.
Step 1 — Configure each ministry for online volunteering
Go to Church Admin → Ministries and review which ministries you want to accept online volunteer enquiries. For each ministry you want to open up:
- Click Edit on the ministry
- Tick Online volunteering to make this ministry appear on the volunteer form
- Set a Team contact — the person who will receive email notifications when someone expresses interest. This should be the ministry leader or whoever handles volunteer enquiries for that team. If no team contact is set, notifications go to the site admin instead.
- Save the ministry
Step 2 — Customise the introductory message
You can edit the message shown above the volunteer form to explain what people are signing up for — what to expect, how the process works, and that someone will be in touch. Go to Church Admin → Settings → General Settings and find the Volunteer message field.
Step 3 — Add the volunteer form to your website
Create a page on your website and add the shortcode or the Church Admin block:
[church_admin type="volunteer"]Or search for Church Admin in the Gutenberg block inserter and select the Volunteer option.
Members need to be logged in to use the form — they must have a WordPress account linked to their directory record. Logged-in members see their household details and a list of all ministries with online volunteering enabled. They can tick the ministries they are interested in joining and submit the form.
Step 4 — Approve or decline volunteer requests
When someone submits the volunteer form, an email is sent to the team contact for each ministry they expressed interest in. The team contact reviews the enquiry and contacts the volunteer to discuss the role.
Go to Church Admin → Ministries → Volunteers to see all pending volunteer requests across all ministries. For each request you can:
- Approve — adds the person to the ministry as a member. They will now appear in ministry dropdowns on the rota and in Ministry Chat for that team.
- Decline — removes the request without adding the person to the ministry. It’s good practice to contact them personally to explain why and explore whether another team might suit them better.
In the Our Church app
The volunteer form is also available in the Our Church app — members can express interest in joining a ministry team without needing to visit the website. The same approval workflow applies. See Getting started with the app.