Hey Faith Friend,

Over the next four weeks, more new people will step into service at your church than at any other point in the year. Fall ministry starts back. Children's church restarts. The nursery needs hands, the van needs a driver, the youth room needs two more adults, and somebody's cousin mentions she used to teach.

That is a good problem to have. It is also the season your church is most exposed, and almost nobody plans for it.

The wave is real, and it is new

Barna and Gloo's State of the Church research put weekly church volunteering back at 24 percent of U.S. adults, above the pre-2020 level of 18 percent. People are serving again.

But look at who is serving. Gen Z volunteers weekly at 21 percent and Millennials at 19 percent, while Boomers sit at 9 percent. For most of the last generation, the reverse was true.

That flip is the whole story for your August. The volunteers walking toward your ministry this fall are younger and newer than the ones you have leaned on for years. Not less faithful. Newer. And in a small or mid-sized church, "we have known her since she was a baby" has always been the screening process. When the people showing up are new, that process quietly stops working, and usually nobody notices the day it happened.

Your people already believe you checked

Here is the finding that got my attention.

Church Mutual, one of the largest insurers of houses of worship in the country, surveyed Americans who attend organizations that use volunteers. 52 percent said they expect those volunteers to have passed a criminal background check. Only 33 percent of volunteers said they actually went through one.

The sex offender registry gap was wider still. 41 percent of attendees expect that search to be run. 16 percent of volunteers said it was.

Sit with what that means on a Wednesday night. When a young mother hands you her four year old at the classroom door, she is not hoping you screened that worker. In her mind, that already happened. She is extending a trust your file may not be able to back up.

And that gap almost never comes from carelessness about children. It comes from August. The room needed an adult, the person standing there was already a member, service started in ten minutes, and the paperwork was going to get done later. Later has a way of not arriving.

Why "we know her" stopped being a policy

Familiarity feels like diligence. It is not the same thing, and there are three reasons the difference matters more now than it did twenty years ago.

Your congregation is more mobile, so long history with a family is rarer. Your ministry is more public, because a livestream and a Facebook page mean people find you without ever being introduced by anyone. And your exposure is documented differently, because the question after any incident is never "did you trust this person." It is "what was your process, and did you follow it."

That last one is worth reading twice. A church is rarely judged for having a volunteer who failed. It is judged for having no standard, or for having one on paper it did not follow.

"A background check is not doubt about somebody's calling. It is protection wrapped around it, and around everyone they serve."

The volunteer file, set before the first Sunday

You do not need a compliance department. You need one standard, applied the same way to every person, with no exceptions for family, staff, or officers. Seven items:

  1. A written application. Every worker, including the ones you have known forever. The moment you make exceptions, you no longer have a policy.
  2. Two references, actually called. Not collected. Called, with the date and a few notes written down.
  3. A criminal background check and a sex offender registry search. Run both, and rerun them on a set cycle. Many churches re-screen every two to three years, because a check from 2019 tells you about 2019.
  4. Six months in the house before serving with children. A common standard among church insurers, and one of the few rules that costs nothing and screens out the people it is meant to.
  5. Abuse prevention training, dated and signed. One session, everyone who works with minors, a signature on file.
  6. The two adult rule, in writing. No worker alone with a child. Written down, posted, and enforced in the hallway, not just in the manual.
  7. One place the file lives. Not the children's director's laptop, and not a shoebox. One system your board could open tomorrow if the person who built it were not available.

If you can produce those seven items for every worker before the first Sunday of the fall season, you have done more than most churches your size have ever done.

Then call your insurance agent

One more step, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

Abuse and molestation claims are commonly excluded from a standard general liability policy. Churches often carry that coverage through a separate policy or an added endorsement, and many carriers tie the coverage to whether you followed your own stated screening procedure.

So call your agent and ask two plain questions. Are abuse and molestation claims covered under what we carry today. And what does this policy require our church to be doing. Then go make sure your manual and your practice match the answer.

I am not your attorney or your insurance agent, and screening rules vary by state, so confirm your specifics with your carrier and with counsel licensed where you are. But the questions above are yours to ask, and asking them this month is free.

This is covering, not suspicion

I want to be careful here, because I have watched good churches skip this out of a genuine conviction that screening implies distrust.

It does not. A process does not question whether God called someone. It protects the servant as much as the child. The volunteer who is documented, trained, and never alone in a room is the volunteer who is safe from an accusation she could never disprove. Order is not suspicion of your people. Order is how you cover them.

You can love somebody and still write it down. In fact, writing it down is one of the more loving things a leadership table does.

Where to start this week

Two free next steps.

First, take the Continuity Scorecard. It takes about three minutes and shows you where your volunteer records, your governance, and your financial records actually stand right now, before the fall rush hides the gaps. Take the free scorecard here.

Second, come sit with me Thursday night. Every week I host a live working session for ministry leaders, the Pastoral Briefing, Thursdays at 6 PM Central. It is live and there is no replay, on purpose, because the conversation is the point. Bring your children's director and we will build the volunteer file standard together. Register at go.jessicashunta.com/registration.

The wave is coming, Faith Friend. Let it find your house in order.

Decently and in order,
Jessica Shunta

Sources: Barna Group and Gloo, State of the Church (2025); Church Mutual national volunteer screening survey; church insurer guidance on abuse prevention standards and general liability exclusions.