Most of the congregation are afraid to sing, and it's like pulling teeth to get people into the choir. And when they get there, they're still afraid to sing. We have 14 sopranos and you can't hear most of them.
You need at least one staff singer per part. Two if there's not a strong volunteer in that section.
I'm persistently recruiting singers from our former ECUSA parish. We need 'em badly!
Our entire choir is 12 people - 3 for each part. Yet, we are singing Perosi's Missa Pontificalis for Easter.
When I say hiring leaders I include staff singers. My former episcopal choir director took that one step further and started hiring all of his students from his university job until there were 15-20 staff people, and they weren’t necessarily any better than the volunteers. The attitude seemed to be if they could just get the volunteers (said with a bit of a sneer) out of the way everything would be great.
The music is so bad that I don’t want to hear it. There’s no way I’m going to sing it.