Volunteering
Yesterday was the Order of Niagara Part 2 at the Cathedral. Listening to the long list of volunteer commitments each person who was celebrated engages in got me thinking.
It is truly amazing and worth celebrating, you know. People give years of their lives to helping others in an incredible variety of ways, not only in churches but through work organizations like associations, through church-like organizations for charity, and so on.
I have thought a lot about volunteering since I was a teenager and began to give my time, first to church, then over the past 30 years of my career to the independent franchisee associations I helped build and guide.
It is only recently that I have come to a place where I was not spending nearly as many hours in a year volunteering than I was working for money. It happened first through taking a break for a few years from involvement in church, and also through a change in how I work for the association.
However, it was only after I began attending the Cathedral at the end of April this year that I finally understood that there are two types of churches.
One is the kind I spent most of my life in, the parish church that tended to be small and under-served in terms of volunteers. This meant that each committed volunteer wore many hats. The hats might change from time to time, or like Bartholomew Cubbins in the Dr Seuss story, you might desperately try to shed them one, but they were still a lot of them.
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Then there is the Cathedral kind of church, or you could call it a magnet church, or destination church.
Well, no, not exactly that kind of destination. Destination more in the sense that it attracts a large number of people from all over the city and even beyond (I understand that some members drive from Burlington or Oakville, which is interesting). Of course, a lot of it has to do with the energy of the Dean in charge, which is tremendous and inspiring, and all of the involvement in Art Crawls year after year, whereby 1000s of people each year come into the church to see how beautiful it is, and some end up becoming members. There is also the Cathedral Cafe, providing hundreds of meals 6 out of 7 days each week to people in need, and the week day services and Bible studies people who come initially for food but discover there are spiritual hungers attend.
What’s fascinating about being part of a magnet or destination church is that people still do a lot, of course. In fact, there is a whole lot more happening, both because it is the seat of the Diocese as well as a parish, so there are all the Diocesan events, usually once or twice a month, like the two Order of Niagara services, ordinations, confirmations, and so on, and because many more people are eager to volunteer and support all this activity, so it can continue to flourish and grow.
So people do a lot, but here’s the thing: the pressure on each person to do so many things and wear so very many different hats all the time is significantly alleviated because there are many more available volunteers.
In previous churches, I had regularly read Scripture on Sunday mornings, led prayers, preached, been a soloist and cantor, organized Silent Retreats. When I was younger, I taught Sunday school, helped in the nursery, and led youth group. I was a church warden twice (no, nothing to do with being a prison guard for those unfamiliar with Anglican church terms, it’s another way of saying a church board member), which in itself comes with being willing to do just about anything that has to do with church life as one is always filling in when volunteers cannot help.
This time around, my main impetus was singular: I wanted to sing in the choir. I missed it so by Lent of this year that I was inexorably drawn in, and discovered to my happy surprise that the Cathedral is a warm, vital community.
Have I gotten involved in other things as well as choir? Well, of course, I do a number of other things related to music ministry including Taize, and I also have become involved with meditation and Being With.
But I haven’t needed to do any of the long list of things that I was involved with in the past. In fact the Cathedral doesn’t even have Sunday School or youth group, but it does have four teams of volunteers who take turns assisting with various things to do with liturgy and hospitality in the parish.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not four volunteers but four teams of volunteers.
Wow.
So now I can just do the things I really feel are mine to do, the things only I can do, and cheerfully leave all those other things to everyone who is doing such a fantastic job with them, because they don’t need my help.
Do you have any idea how freeing that is?