500 Volunteers in a Church of 1,300: How Community Did It with Lou Pizzichillo

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Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Lou Pizzichillo, Lead Pastor of Community Church in Babylon, New York. Today, Community Church welcomes roughly 1,200 to 1,300 people, with more than 500 actively serving on volunteer teams. Lou is also the founder of TeamFit, a volunteer placement tool that grew directly out of what Community Church has learned about helping people find meaningful places to serve.

How do you create a volunteer culture where people genuinely want to serve? What if the key isn’t simply recruiting more people, but helping them feel known, appreciated, and connected to a shared mission? Tune in as Lou shares how Community Church builds strong volunteer teams, reinforces culture, and removes the mystery from serving.

• Unite people around a shared goal. // From the earliest days of Community Church, serving was part of the church’s DNA. Before launch, volunteers worked together to renovate an unexpected meeting space in just two weeks. After COVID, the church repeated the process while rebuilding its team. Lou discovered that working toward something meaningful together creates connection, ownership, and a sense that everyone is winning as one team.
• Define the win clearly. // Lou believes churches often assume volunteers understand what success looks like in their role. Community Church works hard to turn unspoken expectations into memorable language. Phrases such as “relational before spiritual” help volunteers understand how the church approaches people, while “black shirts stand shoulder to shoulder, not face to face” reminds guest services volunteers to remain open and attentive to newcomers.
• Repeat culture constantly. // Values are communicated through several rhythms. Lou sends monthly team updates that include church news and a featured value. Before every service, volunteers attend a 15-minute huddle where leaders reinforce values and tell stories. The church also uses Slack to share wins and celebrate examples of people living out the culture. Repetition turns values from slogans into everyday behavior.
• Celebrate what you want repeated. // Community Church intentionally highlights volunteer wins because what you celebrate, you’ll replicate. Stories are shared in huddles, online, and through fun recognition such as a rotating team member of the week award. Celebration gives volunteers concrete examples of what success looks like while reinforcing that their contribution matters.
• Lead with appreciation, not obligation. // One of Community Church’s strongest volunteer principles is to motivate through gratitude rather than guilt. Rather than using Scripture to pressure people into serving more, leaders focus on helping volunteers feel valued and genuinely wanted. If someone no longer wants to serve, the goal isn’t to push harder but to care for the person and protect the health of the team.
• Make the first serving day unforgettable. // New volunteers complete a “favorite things” form listing items such as their favorite snack, drink, and restaurant. When they arrive for their first day, they may find a personalized gift bag, favorite snack, team shirt, and name tag waiting for them. Lou compares it to walking into an NBA locker room and seeing your jersey already hanging. That intentional first impression communicates, “We’re glad you’re here.”
• Protect volunteers from burnout. // Community Church uses coaches to help leaders stay connected to individual volunteers and notice when someone is overextended. Lou would rather operate short-handed for a weekend than continually push someone toward burnout. The church also looks for opportunities to add encouragement and appreciation when energy begins to drop because investing in the team ultimately strengthens the entire church.
• Remove the mystery from volunteering. // TeamFit is a tool which Lou developed after repeatedly hearing volunteers say, “I wish I had signed up sooner. I just didn’t know what I was signing up for.” The tool uses a simple assessment to match people with potential serving roles while also giving them access to detailed descriptions of every available position. People can explore privately, understand expectations, and decide where they may thrive before making a commitment.
• Start with the person, not the church’s need. // Instead of asking, “Who can fill this empty role?” TeamFit asks, “Where will this person thrive?” That shift has helped Community Church uncover volunteers for roles it might never have promoted publicly—from sound engineers and photographers to painters and window cleaners. The philosophy is simple: serve the team well, and the team will serve the church well.

To learn more about Community Church, visit communitychurch.net. To explore TeamFit and see how it can help people discover serving roles that fit them, visit myteamfit.net/unseminary. Lou is also offering unSeminary listeners the first three months free with promo code RICH.

Check out Lou’s previous interview, How to Be a Church Your Community Actually Trusts with Lou Pizzichillo.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. I am so glad that you have decided to tune in. We’ve got a return guest today. That means you need to sit up and lean in because this is a leader that I want you to connect with. We don’t really have repeat guests very often, but today I was talking with this guest and really heard about something cool going on in their church and I wanted to get them back on to have a conversation.

Rich Birch — Today we’ve got Lou Pizzichillo with us. He is the founding pastor of Community Church in Babylon, New York on Long Island. Lou and his wife Allie planted the church in early 2020 with the support of Orchard Group 10 weeks before the great shutdown. I know even when I said January 2020, a bunch of you were like, ooh, that’s a time to plant.

Rich Birch — Today, Community is around 1,200 to 1,300 people with more than 500 people actively serving in teams. And that’s a part of what we want to talk about today. Lou also founded TeamFit, a volunteer placement software that grew really out of what Community Church is learning. Lou, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, Rich, thanks for having me. It’s a privilege to be back here with you.

Rich Birch — Honored that you’re with us. It’s been a while since we had you back on the show. What’s what’s new at Community? What’s new since we last talked? An update since it was maybe six months ago that we had you on. So you should go back. We’ll link to the show notes, friends, to their past episode. But what give us kind of an update on where the last six months have been.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, six months have been good. They’ve been a little bit crazy. We’ve had some ups and downs over here. We’ve had a lot of weather issues to start the fall. Um, but yeah things are good we’re actually considering going portable.

Lou Pizzichillo — We’re going to look for a place to rent. Things are a little tough. We just launched yesterday. We launched our a 1pm service. So we’re looking to go portable to hopefully find a bigger place and and then, yeah, we’ll see what’s next. We’re in a season of transition and it’s fun.

Lou Pizzichillo — We actually just started something yesterday with the 1 p.m. service. We started something called the second half. So as soon as as soon as the 1 p.m. service ends. We turn on football all over the building. And on the East Coast, that’s the second half.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so it’s like a big party. And yesterday was the first one, so it was cool. It kind of helped the 1 p.m. attendance a little bit. because we’re competing with football so we tried to get it to work for us. So anyway, it’s it’s an exciting new season, all that to say.

Rich Birch — I’m not like a big football guy. I know that’s terrible. But are people Giants fans? Is that what they are? Is that the Giants fans are am I am I is that a swear word, or what what what are they?

Lou Pizzichillo — No, no. So I’m a Giants fan.

Rich Birch — Good.

Lou Pizzichillo — It’s pretty split, Jets and Giants…

Rich Birch — Pretty split.

Lou Pizzichillo — …over here.

Rich Birch — Okay. Nice.

Lou Pizzichillo — There’s a few Bills fans on Long Island.

Rich Birch — What are they doing?

Lou Pizzichillo — But they’re kind of undercover, yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s my brother. He’s a huge Bills fan. That’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — Really?

Rich Birch — But yeah it’s a yeah, they go to games, sit in the snow, the whole thing. They love it. So it’s that’s like a whole world.

Lou Pizzichillo — Wow.

Rich Birch — So you know one of the things that jumped out to me that kind of captured my attention, and I said it in the opener there. this 500 plus people—a church of 1200, 1300 people—you know, volunteering. We really want to kind of hone in on that today. Lots of churches would kill for that kind of ratio. What’s going on there? What tell me about that? How you know I’ve said this in other contexts that volunteer growth precedes attendance growth, that you know getting people onto thriving volunteer experiences, so it’s not just that they’re volunteering, but they’re actually loving it, is a best practice. It’s a behavior of churches that are going to see a growth season. That’s obviously the case, even in just what we’ve talked about. Things are growing. You’re trying adding more services, that sort of thing. So talk us through ah that but that volunteer number ratio, what’s happening there.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so this really Kind of grew out of something we learned very early on. We’re a church plant, right? We launched in January of 2020. And we built a launch team. So the team was in our DNA from the beginning Two weeks before we were about to launch in our venue, we found out that we weren’t going to launch in that venue and we were going to have to move to a place that was not ready for us. It was like our only option. It was in the basement of the church that we’re now in, but there was mold, like the the building was just falling apart.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we had two weeks. to get into this place before our launch day on January 5th. So in between those two weeks, we also had Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Rich Birch — Oh man.

Lou Pizzichillo — So. So I basically just reached out to our launch team and I was like, hey, we lost our place. We’re going to have to move. Portable Church was on their way. Literally, there was an 18 wheeler that I had to tell to not go to one address and go to another address and drop the stuff off there.

Rich Birch — Love that.

Lou Pizzichillo — But we had to turn this place around over the course of two weeks. And so my wife and I we listed out every single possible task we could think of in this place. And we put it on a gigantic whiteboard. And as for for literally two weeks straight except for the holidays the doors were open and we invited our team members to just come in and just pick a task. So people would come in and be like, all right, I’ll go assemble that thing or I’ll go paint that room. Or I’ll help whatever, change the light bulbs in this, whatever. And It was, my kids were really young at the time. They were literally sleeping on the floor of the basement of that church. Like we were there nonstop and people were there around the clock.

Lou Pizzichillo — But all that to say… It it helped us understand the value of uniting people around a common goal.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — And when we launched on January 5th—launch day was great. It was fun—but our team, it felt like we had just climbed a mountain together because all of us were in it over the last two weeks. And that that like really it created the sense of family. A sense of family that lasted for 10 weeks, mind you. because this was right before COVID.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we did this for 10 weeks. and It was amazing. Our team was fantastic. We loved it. Then we didn’t meet for 52 weeks. Every other church started meeting earlier than we did. And our team had kind of dissolved because so many people said they were going to just help for a little while and then go back to their churches.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we had to rebuild a team and we’re just thinking, how how do we do this? We’re in like just coming out of COVID. People are still wearing masks. We couldn’t meet in a basement anymore because it was just too tight and stuffy, it wouldn’t feel good with like covid world So we had this idea to just run the same play.

Lou Pizzichillo — Like, let’s let’s take a huge construction project that we can all build together and try to like build this team unity again. And so upstairs in the church that we were in was not ready. And we decided we were going to try to remodel that with just volunteers. And do the same exact thing. And it it really worked. ah And again, we saw the value around uniting people around a common goal. So for about 10 or 15 weeks, we would just meet on a Sunday morning. We’d talk about a team value. And then for 15 minutes, we talk about a team value. And for 45 minutes, people would go upstairs and just paint or reorganize or set the room up.

Lou Pizzichillo — And when we relaunched, it was that same feeling, like that team which was now a lot of new people was like we did this together

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — And that vibe has just stayed with us for the like the last six years, like we are in this together. It really feels like like i i feel like The…

Lou Pizzichillo — The definition of a church biblically for us, is probably closer to the people who are on the team than the people that just attend on Sunday because it’s such a tightly knit community where we…

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — …people feel known. And the relationships are are real and it feels like we’re winning together.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. You know, there’s a lot to unpack there.

Rich Birch — A couple things, you know. ah One of the things… I was talking with a very large name brand church you know lots of people know who these people were large multiple campuses uh you know tens of thousands of people that attend. And they have done new campuses. portable where they’re like renting in a school and then just because of the financial dynamics here they’ve been able to do the literally here’s a 20 million dollar campus for a new like here’s the building ready to go, pop, you know.

Rich Birch — And and they just launch in the new brand new building and I was talking to the executive pastor about that. And I was saying like hey what have you learned as you’ve done this multiple ways? And this executive pastor said, without hesitation, they were like we will never do the hand over the building thing ever again. That even if we can afford to just spend 20 million dollars on a you know a building it’s like we are pushing everybody through portable first because of the dynamics you talked about there it’s like there’s something about that what that kind of pushes into the dna that then spins off into all kinds of other super positive you know outcomes.

Rich Birch — And I got thinking about that when you were saying that that hey this I think we can sometimes miss that. We wanna make things easy for people.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yes. Yes.

Rich Birch — And there’s something good about that. That’s actually noble in one way. I get that. I don’t understand why we would do that but actually it could be working against us. So how do we keep that going in our culture? Like you only get COVID once every 100 years, hopefully.

Rich Birch — And, you know, and we’re only, hopefully we don’t ever have to shut down for 52 weeks again and come back. So how have you continued to try to push that into your culture even without that pressure?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, like the the idea of uniting around a shared goal.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — Right. Yeah. So we try to be super, super clear about what we’re trying to accomplish, right? And so whether you call it your mission or your values or your wins, whatever you call it, we try to be crystal clear. I think sometimes especially leaders in the church, leaders in the church that grew up in the church, I think sometimes… just take for granted that people know what you want them to do

Rich Birch — That’s so true.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so we try to assume that people really have no idea what success looks like in the position. So in our our conference room, we have a whiteboard and on that whiteboard we write with permanent marker, which is probably whatever, but whenever like a saying or a value comes up in a conversation, or there’s an issue that we keep running into and we’re able to give language to the value there that’s felt but hasn’t been articulated, we write that on the whiteboard. And what that becomes then is it becomes a way to continue to shape and refine the culture. So I’ll give you an example.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — And what these values do is clarify what the win is, helps us define the win. You know, like this is what success looks like. So we had a guy who’s like super ambitious, super enthusiastic and he was on our parking team. And he was giving out tracks in the parking lot to people who are entering in and it was like his enthusiasm was 10 out of 10 is fantastic. For us that’s not really the approach we’re going for you know the people are already here at church they’re going to go to the service you know and so we’re trying to figure out how do we like not crush this guy’s enthusiasm. But we all knew there was an issue. But we needed to figure out why.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so in our staff meeting. the way we were able to phrase it. is that we want to be relational before we’re spiritual. And so we’re like, that’s going on the board.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so we write it on the board: we’re relational before we’re spiritual. So then we go talk to this guy and the value becomes the way to solve the repeated problem. And we’ve had that problem again and again, where people like they come in strong with their spirituality.

Lou Pizzichillo — And we’re just like, hey, love the enthusiasm. Like Let’s affirm what you’re trying to do here. For our strategic approach in our culture not every culture this isn’t the right way just our way of doing it we’re like we want to earn trust first we want people to feel like these people are like me. You know what I mean let’s like go for the relational common ground and then we’ll like lead them hopefully to the spiritual.

Lou Pizzichillo — So anyway that’s just an example of how an issue led to like a clarified value.

Rich Birch — Yeah I love that.

Lou Pizzichillo — Which then became, that’s now the way that we teach with that that phrase. And that happens over and over again.

Rich Birch — I love that. Well, and the thing that you’re doing there, that’s genius, that I think we miss as leaders too many too too often, which is those things that are implicit, it’s our job to make them explicit. Like, we you understand that kind of at a, like you said, kind of a visceral level. Like, it’s like, okay, I get this.

Rich Birch — But I’ve got to do the work to get it into a sticky statement like relational before spiritual. What would be another example of one of those to kind of help flesh that out for folks?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, sure. So we had an issue with our guest services team members talking to each other instead of talking to the people who are coming in.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yes. And so we’re talking about this and we’re like, okay, there’s a tension here because when you join the team, there’s an element of connection that is super valuable and we don’t want to stifle that.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Lou Pizzichillo — But they’re also ignoring brand new people, which is a big deal for us. And so we went back and forth and we’re like trying to wrestle through the language and what we landed on was like so our volunteers they wear black shirts with the church logo it says how can I help and the the like the phrase is like: black shirts stand shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. Meaning like, you can talk, but you we’re talking shoulder to shoulder. We’re still like facing the people that are walking. And that clarified for us like Okay, talking is cool. Connecting is cool. But if it’s me and you face to face, then we’re closing out the new people that are walking in and we can’t miss that.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so I was like, okay, cool. That is now how we correct that problem that comes up over and over and over again. And it helps…

Rich Birch — So that’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — …again, for those people, they don’t know. Like, am I on the team here to get to know other team members? Or do I ignore them? or So we’re just defining the win. Like here’s it is cool to connect with people, but don’t forget that you’re here to serve the new people as well.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. That’s so good. I know it’s a friend of mine’s in a similar value in their church, they talk about their guest connections team there. They talk about how their body posture is open to the door that it’s like they all have to face the door like the incoming door that’s you know it’s and it’s trying to do the same thing. It’s like you know as people walk in, we should all, we should be facing where people are coming from.

Rich Birch — That’s great. I love that. So how does, how do these phrases and really not just the phrases but the culture under that how does that impact someone’s initial serving experience with you. So maybe it’s like their first day of serving, volunteering on a team at community. What are what are you guys doing to try to help someone you know kind of onboarding and understand all this you know and get kind of catch all this culture?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah. So the culture is communicated on a pretty consistent basis and this is formed slowly over time. But it’s we so I’d say there’s three main things where we’re communicating these values. We have monthly updates where I am right here on my computer. And if you’re on the team, we try to let you in on what’s happening before everybody else knows.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so I’ll like give people news, but hey, we’re talking about going portable, whatever. And then I’m like, okay, here’s the news. And then there’s here’s the value of the month. And this is where I’m repeating like, hey, we talk shoulder to shoulder, not face to face.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — Or we’re relational for we’re spiritual or whatever the value is. So people are consistently hearing that and then that goes out. What? At the beginning of the month. Before every service, we have what we call team huddles. And they’re 15-minute meetings, this is really where the culture happens. like If you’re serving, your time starts at the huddle. not when the service starts because the person who’s running that service in that department is that’s where they’re communicating the value and they’re telling stories to reinforce the value.

Lou Pizzichillo — Like hey did you see you know so and so the value this month is go over the top did you see Vince jumpstart that guy’s car in the parking lot. That’s the example of going over the top, you know, and so so the the huddle is really where that’s that’s being reinforced. And then then we are looking for opportunities to intentionally celebrate over and over and over again, right? You’ve heard the phrase probably like, well, it gets rewarded, it gets repeated, or what you, we say what you celebrate, you’ll replicate. And so we share the stories at our team huddles.

Lou Pizzichillo — We alsog et everybody on Slack. So everyone who’s on the team is on Slack and there’s two there’s like department specific channels so like guest services kids like they all have their own departments. But then we have a wins channel that everybody’s part of we used to call it stories but it’s wins now, and we have a main so main is mostly staff posting big announcements.

Lou Pizzichillo — Wins, anybody can share a story. And these stories reinforce the values. Like, oh, you know so-and-so invited a friend and that person came and then they saw this person in the hallway and they did… and it’s just like reinforcing yes this is what winning looks like, this is what success looks, this is what we’re going for here over and over and over again.

Lou Pizzichillo — We also do something called the team member of the week. And that with that has gone through different phases as the church has continued to grow. When we had two services, what we would do is we had one team, we called it Team Rally. Team huddle we have to team huddle now because we don’t have a chance to all get together as team rally. But there was a time where the whole team got together before the two services. We would tell a story that reinforced the value and then announce the team member of the week who was usually part of the story. And then we had a WWE championship belt that the person would get and they would wear for the week, and they would keep it for the week. And it became like a thing where whoever got it would do something to it like decorate it in some way like they put a sticker on it or…

Lou Pizzichillo — By the end of it like that belt now it’s got lights it’s got battery powered lights on it it’s got all sorts of sparkles and stickers because it keeps getting modified. Now, I will say that the team member of the week that does like pause because you do get to a point especially with the huddles where now the team the groups are smaller we’re just like okay i think we’re just cycling people now.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we’ll pause it for a little while and then bring it back so it’s fresh again. But these are all ways to reinforce this is this is what it looks like to succeed here. Your picture of success may not be what we’re actually going for and it’s important that we get on the same page with that.

Rich Birch — I love that. I love the the wrestling belt. That’s hilarious. Is it literally like a WWE belt or did you get like a custom one made or what what is that? That’s that’s so fun.

Lou Pizzichillo — Nope. It was WWE. And now it’s custom I mean, that it’s got all sorts of Community Church paraphernalia.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. Well, and I love, I also, I you want to double click on the the Slack thing. That that’s really cool that’s that’s a non-trivial expense to to have 150 people in your Slack channel. But what a cool way to kind of draw people in. And I love that because it blurs the lines between staff and volunteer.

Rich Birch — It like that’s kind of the thing that lots of churches would do for their staff, but not necessarily for their volunteers. I love that. I think that’s you know that’s really cool. Is that like what give me a sense of what’s going on in the wins channel is that like every week people are posting a couple different things, you know it’s a pretty wide variety of you know things that are people are posting in there?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, it’s a pretty wide variety. You know We have to stay on top of it. There’s some maintenance there you know because every once in a while, people get to they get a different idea of what’s supposed to go in what channel.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Lou Pizzichillo — Um, but um yeah The staff uses it. We have a staff channel.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Lou Pizzichillo — and we have different departments that use it but then people just they just tell their stories and…

Rich Birch — Yeah. That’s good

Lou Pizzichillo — …it’s yeah, it’s exciting. We also we use a DAKboard. If you’ve heard of that, but it’s like basically it…

Rich Birch — No, what’s that?

Lou Pizzichillo — It’s cool. It’s a TV display that you can customize. I mean, you can put it in your home and have a calendar. You put the weather. You could also display Slack channels.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so if you walk into the place where the team walks through, you’ll see like cycling stories of wins. you’ll also see the latest message of the main channel.

Rich Birch — That’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — So it’s cool. It’s fun. But we’re actually it’s probably helpful to say we’re on a free plan. So we don’t have to pay for it.

Rich Birch — Right, because it doesn’t you’re not storing after 90 days, right?

Lou Pizzichillo — Correct.

Rich Birch — That’s the thing with Slack, right? The messages don’t go beyond 90 days.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s right. I forgot about that. Yeah, that’s fun.

Lou Pizzichillo — But there’s like, there’s 500 people n it that are all seeing some see it more than others, but yeah, they’re all seeing the wins which is huge.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s fun. And their point is they could access and it’s one more channel to get in front of them. And, you know, and a lot of these things, it’s like the keeners are the people we want to be in front of anyways, the people who are, you know, are the most interested, the most leaned in, they’ll, they’ll access it, which is great. That helps us propagate culture.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah.

Rich Birch — You do some kind of cool stuff on the onboarding side. Actually, as people are coming, you know, joining the experience, like their kind of day one experience. Talk through that. What does that look like?

Lou Pizzichillo — Okay, so, yeah. Our big thing is that we we leverage appreciation and not obligation. And this is hard and it is a discipline. Because you can take scripture and make people feel like they really should be doing more. Right. But we we resist that like crazy.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — And we find that over time, it just, it makes a much better culture.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — When people show up the the feedback that we get most often from like people on our management team or people from partner churches, they’ll come in and they’ll just be like, it just feels like everybody wants to be there. The team is so happy.

Lou Pizzichillo — And the reason is because if they don’t want to be there, they’re not there.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so that is like a huge thing. We leverage appreciation. Now that starts on day one. So it’s in the onboarding process. When we bring people on, when they agree to join a team, one of the first things they do is fill out something called the favorite things form. Which just tells us all their favorite things. It tells us their favorite drink from Starbucks. It tells us their favorite snack, their favorite food, their favorite restaurant.

Lou Pizzichillo — And what’s amazing is that it sets ah it gets stored in their Planning Center profile. But it sets us up to appreciate them in very specific personal ways. And people forget that they did it.

Rich Birch — It’s so true.

Lou Pizzichillo — But you have somebody like six months. into serving someone will build a wall or go over the top and spend a whole Saturday doing something at the church. And we’ll be like, we gotta we gotta give this guy a shout out. And we’ll send him a gift card to his favorite restaurant. And he’ll be like, How did you know that I love this obscure restaurant 30 minutes away? And we’re like we knew.

Rich Birch — Magic.

Lou Pizzichillo — You know? Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Lou Pizzichillo — But it just, it it helps people feel valued and it is it’s a really big deal.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — So that’s on day one. And when somebody joins the team, they fill out that form. They fill out that form before they show up. Then when they show up we try to make the first day unforgettable. So Chip and Dan Heath, hey wrote the power of moments, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s a great book.

Lou Pizzichillo — They talk about how we remember beginnings and endings of things. Your first day is an opportunity to make an impact on people. So we try to leverage that. When somebody walks in, like if they join our kids team, they will walk into our area where the kids team meets and they’ll see like on the table, they’ll see there’s a gift bag with their name on it. It’s got their favorite snack ready for them.

Lou Pizzichillo — It may have their favorite drink. I’m not totally sure. It’s got their t-shirt laid out for them. They’re Their name tag is pre-printed on the t-shirt. We try to make them feel like they’re walking into an NBA locker room and their jersey’s hanging up. You know what I mean?

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — And it just makes them feel like you care that I’m here.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — And that that sets the tone for the culture for the rest of the time they’re on the team.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good.

Lou Pizzichillo — It’s a big deal to us.

Rich Birch — I love that. you know Too many times you know, people just they slink in the back and there’s like a circle of people standing and they end up kind of standing on the outside of the circle. And it’s the exact opposite feeling that we’re wanting to give them.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But what we just need to actually design that moment. I love that. Even just a few simple things like that. That’s a great that’s a great takeaway. When you think about you know anything else you’re doing to sustain… So I I think one of the, I think the first steps are critically important, but what are you doing to kind of keep on top of making sure, and it could be like, what are you doing to keep huddles fresh? What are you doing to stay on top of the culture, making sure it, you know, things. continue to feel great and they don’t lose energy. What have you done on that front to keep things great overtime?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah. It was not always easy to keep things fresh, but we try to tell a lot of stories you know people like love celebrating each other – that’s a big deal for us.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Lou Pizzichillo — We also have recently, within the last like two years, we have… We call them coaches. So we have our kids department head, but that person who’s charged the kids department is actually in charge of the kids coaches who are then in charge of the different services So everybody is known by name. And everyone is is kind of like We’ve got our finger on the pulse of every volunteer, or at least we try to have our finger on the pulse of every volunteer.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we have frequently tapped people out and been like hey, you’ve been now serving two services every weekend for eight weeks in a row. We need you to just like take a break, like just come be be part of the church. And we like tap it very intentionally tap people out.

Lou Pizzichillo — We will try like one of our things we’ll try to we will go short-handed before we’re overextended. That’s like a value somebody’s gonna burn out Like, okay, we’ll have one less volunteer that week, but it’s not worth that person feeling like I’m just being pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. And so we try to make sure people feel fresh. And when somebody’s you know when somebody’s starting to struggle a little bit, we jump we jump all over on that. There are times where you’ll hear our guest services person say, like, I feel like we need some appreciation. We need to do something. Maybe we do donuts.

Rich Birch — Pour some more on.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yes. Yeah. Let’s do donuts.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Lou Pizzichillo — Let’s do ah egg sandwiches. Let’s like, and these are all, you know our finances are tight. We are not like… rolling in it over here.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — But every dollar invested in the team is a dollar invested in the church. Like when you are investing in people’s encouragement level. It just I mean it pays for itself multiple times over. So it’s a big deal to us.

Rich Birch — yeah That’s cool. Now, you’ve actually put together a tool called TeamFit, which kind of sits at the hub of all of this. Talk us through what is TeamFit? Where did it come from? How, you know, how did you, you know, kind of the genesis of this, I think is a really cool story for people to hear.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so people people have loved most people they can’t say every person but most people have really loved being on the team. And it’s been a cool experience. People feel connected. They feel known. They feel like they’re united around a shared goal. However, what I’ve heard over and over and over again is like, I just wish I had signed up earlier. I had no idea what I was signing up for.

Rich Birch — thank That’s great.

Lou Pizzichillo — Again, this is one of those things where we assume people know. We assume they know. And so they’re like, okay, so if I sign this up now, like sign up for this, am I going to be there all day on Sunday from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m. at the end of the last service? Am I going to do this every single weekend? What is this going to look like?

Lou Pizzichillo — You know, if you if you apply for a job. You’re going to get a pretty detailed job description around what you’re signing up for you know, and I think There’s if you just sign up to to join a kid’s team, there’s there’s a lot of trust there. Like people are being very vulnerable when they’re just saying, okay, I’m available. Because then it’s like, what are you going to ask me to do? Is it going to be weird now if I say no? is it there’s so much mystery in joining the team. And so people have been resisting.

Lou Pizzichillo — And for us, it’s like how do we close that gap? So maybe about a year ago I was thinking about honestly, I was thinking about dating websites. I’ve got some friends who have…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Lou Pizzichillo — …like have gotten married because they met on dating websites, which are great. I’m like if you can match two people romantically, which is like the most complicated thing ever, right?

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — There’s got to be an easy way to match people to positions at a church. And so I like drew this thing on a whiteboard. I’m like, maybe we can do like cards or whatever, but things that just make the the roles crystal clear so people can know, they can get all the information before they have to make any kind of commitment or expose themselves they could sit in the background no one keep like no one has to know they’re looking at it they don’t have to ask questions, but they could see every possible position at the church. And then step in and at a rate that they feel comfortable doing it.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so so yeah, so this was an idea for a while. Eventually, it was around maybe April, like right after Easter, I was like, all right, let’s let’s like try to make this happen. And so I made it like custom for our church. I made an assessment where it’s simple like 25 questions where it’s like scale one to five agree disagree and it’s it’s all about like assesses different categories like do you have, do you want to learn about new things? Like do you want to learn how to do new things? Do you like spending time with kids? it like Stuff like that.

Lou Pizzichillo — And then it gives you five matches. It’s like, okay, here’s your top five matches for spots on the team. So all the positions are scored. Then we got these like thorough job descriptions. But what’s been cool is some people see those five results and they’re like cool. I’m gonna pick number one, you know, I got matched a parking team. I’m gonna do parking team. But what’s cool is that? The test is really like a hook. People want to take the test because they want to see what they get.

Lou Pizzichillo — But then right after they take the test, they’re like, all right, let me see what else is there. And then they click the library and they see like every possible position. This has allowed us to create positions we would never have announced from the front.

Lou Pizzichillo — So as a church we don’t we don’t pay a cleaning service at the church because we have so many people that do random things. Like one of the roles there is we literally have a guy who loves to clean windows.

Rich Birch — Right

Lou Pizzichillo — And he shows up And that’s his thing. He like shows up on Tuesdays at like three in the afternoon and he comes with his squeegee and he cleans all the windows. We’ve got people that love to vacuum. We’ve got people that like to paint.

Lou Pizzichillo — And we’re never going to advertise from the front. Hey, we need some painters for when we have random paint jobs.

Rich Birch — Right. We need a window cleaner. Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — You know what I mean? But people find them and they just it has been so cool to see people emerge and volunteer for positions that I don’t know how else we would have advertised them. The cool thing about it is that the all the positions are they’re like the job descriptions are AI generated, and they’re they’re pretty clear. It’s like, here’s the win for the role.

Rich Birch — Right.

Lou Pizzichillo — Here’s the hardest part of the role. And then like here like the basics of the role. You know it’s a pretty clear job description.

Rich Birch — Kind of what to expect or whatever. Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — Exactly. Exactly.

Rich Birch — Huh. That’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — And…

Rich Birch — How is this fit in your flow with, I love it. It sounds great. And we want to send people, we’ll we’ll put a link to that in the show notes, friends, if you can check it out yourself. But how are you finding, is it are you using it best like in your kind of new here process hey click here you know as you’re coming on in that flow. Or using it on Sunday mornings okay everybody take out your phone we’re going to do this. Are you emailing it out to people? What are you finding kind of the best? And I don’t know it’s early days so you’re still probably you know, learning, but tell me about what you’re finding kind of the best success and actually people using the tool and that ultimately ending up on a team.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so we announced it one time from the front. We were like, hey, we tried we got this thing for you to try if you’re like thinking about what’s involved with the team? You want to take some of the mystery out of it? Check it out. We announced it on a Sunday, not in a message, just during the announcements. We had about 60 people just go on and they’re like, all right, let me try it. And then they see their match and or they see something in the library and right away, they’re like, all right, I want to do this. And there were a ton of people that joined instantly.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Lou Pizzichillo — From there, we just have it on our website where it’s like, want to join the team? Then you click this button. And it’s just an ongoing way for people to plug in at a rate that they’re comfortable plugging in.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so since then I think so far we’ve got about 120 people who have just, on their own, just went and found it. And they’re like, cool, I want to do this. And we’ll randomly get just, you know, like somebody wants to paint, you know, oh we got another like sound engineer that we had no idea was attending on Sundays and he found it. And now he wants to do our sound, or our photography team has grown because people are finding this. And so it’s like if you want to join the team Here’s how you do it. And you get to see everything that you can see like everything that there is to offer.

Lou Pizzichillo — So we did it. Like I was shocked. And uh I showed it to one of my friends. I was like hey look we’ve like made this and it’s been like pretty radical for us. And he was like, I want that. And I was like, well I can’t really help you because this is it’s like made, it’s connected to our Planning Center account. But then I showed it to someone else who had the same exact response.

Lou Pizzichillo — And then I was like, okay, maybe there’s something here, but maybe this could help other churches. And so that’s when we went and turned it into a, like I went and turned it into a platform that people could sign up for where there’s like there’s an AI bot named Leon that helps you customize all the positions in your church and gets things going. So there’s a church right next to us. It’s a couple, like 10 miles down the road, they’ve got a bunch of campuses called Centerpoint Church.

Lou Pizzichillo — And the lead pastor is a friend of mine. He saw an email that we sent out that had this link in it. And he saw it and he’s like, I will, you know, somebody, we got to find out about this thing, this like TeamFit thing. Then he calls me personally. He’s like, I asked my campus pastors to find out about it. And he said, this is something that that you made. And I was like, well, yeah, you know it’s been helpful for us. And so he’s like, can you set me up with it?

Lou Pizzichillo — They did it in the context of like a serving weekend. Like we’re trying to get people on board and they did it and on their first week they had 129 people join their team.

Rich Birch — That’s amazing.

Lou Pizzichillo — Um, But it just, it takes the mystery out of it and you don’t have to.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Lou Pizzichillo — You don’t have to commit to learn more. You know, you can.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Lou Pizzichillo — And I’m sure people are checking things out and deciding not to join.

Rich Birch — Yep. That’s cool.

Lou Pizzichillo — But for us, this is the thing that that we’re going to use to be super helpful for us

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. And and there is you know I think there’s lots of good insight there, the the insight around, like people are interested in assessments and there’s they’re fascinated with themselves and like the idea of like hey, you know tell us a little bit about yourself, like that’s a great approach to it as opposed to like the other way around. You know tell me about the roles that you know, you know, I’m interested in searching a role for the church. That just isn’t in people’s orientation. It’s like, hey, help me. I want to tell you a little bit about myself and then you’ll custom connect those two, I think is a great a great way to position that. That’s… ah

Lou Pizzichillo — You’re also like just… Like, kind of… jump on that for a second. We’re starting with the person.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Lou Pizzichillo — We’re like where where do you want to serve, like where are you going to thrive? Rather than being like the church needs this. The church please somebody, somebody be our sound guy. Please please please. It’s like where are you going to thrive? And that’s like, you know, at the end of the day, that’s…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Lou Pizzichillo — …that’s the philosophy we’re trying to reinforce that we’re here to serve the team and the team serves the church.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. And how does this connect? You mentioned this, how does this connect to our database, like Planning Center? What does that how does all that work together? So we’re not just another data silo of like, here’s an independent more stuff just out there.

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah.

Rich Birch — How’s that work?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so we are big on Planning Center. We use all the Planning Center workflows to get people onto the team. And as soon as, if somebody fills this out, it connects to your Planning Center account.

Rich Birch — Great.

Lou Pizzichillo — And so it figures out whether that person is in Planning Center or not. If they are it matches them and it triggers a workflow. And so it just like, it starts your process.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Lou Pizzichillo — Or if they’re not in it, it creates a new account and then it can contact the people that are responsible for reaching out to them. It also works without Planning Center.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Lou Pizzichillo — Like you can just set it up to alert whoever you want like it can alert a department head with all the results. But it’s cool because we we do like the connect form. Like, hey, if you’re new here, fill out this form. Nobody does that on their first like, try. time and then a lot of people a lot of people just don’t end up ever doing it for us. And this has also become another like lead generator for lack of a better term.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Lou Pizzichillo — Like people who’ve been here for months, but never filled out a card get their information in our database because they end up filling this thing out.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. I love it. So the the web address to check that out is myteamfit.net. We want to send people over there to check it out. I think this is a great tool. And I love it because it’s based. it’s come out of actual need at your church. I love that, you know, it kind of just fell out of like, Hey, check out this thing that we’re doing. And then people are like, Hey, that solves a problem that we’re facing. I love that. That’s, uh, you know, that’s fantastic. So we want to send people over there to check it out.

Rich Birch — Just as we’re coming to land, anything kind of final words you’d have for us as we as we close up today’s episode?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah. So if if you want to sign up for TeamFit, I’d love to like set up some kind of promo code, you do…

Rich Birch — Oh great.

Lou Pizzichillo — …the first three months free if you put it in the promo code. We’ll do RICH. So…

Rich Birch — Nice.

Lou Pizzichillo — RICH

Rich Birch — That’s so kind of you. That’s amazing. R-I-C-H. Yeah, again, we’ll link to that in the show notes, but that’s that’s super kind. Great. chance to check it out, try it out, see how it goes, kick the tires a little bit before it you know before you start getting charged. So that’s that’s fantastic. I really, really appreciate that. That’s that’s fantastic.

Lou Pizzichillo — Absolutely. Happy to do it.

Rich Birch — Well, this has been great. It’s been so good to connect again and I’m honored that you would take some time to be with us today, Lou. Thanks for for being here. If people want to track with you or with the church again, where do we want to send them online?

Lou Pizzichillo — Yeah, so the church is communitychurch.net. I’m on Instagram. I’m Lou Pizzichillo or @loupizzichillo. It’s L-O-U-P-I-Z-Z-I-C-H-I-L-L-O.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Lou Pizzichillo — That’s a mouthful. Yeah.

Rich Birch — That’s easy. That’s easy. That you pick people will pick that up. No problem. They’ll they’ll spell that. So thanks so much, sir. Appreciate you being here today.

Lou Pizzichillo — All right. Thanks for having me, Rich. This is great.