Serve with us

You are not being recruited to fill a slot

Most invitations to serve arrive as a gap on a rota. Somebody left, the spreadsheet has a hole in it, and you are the shape of the hole.

That is not what this is. Serving here is how people stop attending a church and start belonging to one — not because the work is glamorous, but because you cannot hand someone a bulletin for six months without learning their name, and you cannot learn their name without a church becoming a family.

The truth is that the coffee still needs making either way. We would just rather you were the one making it, standing next to someone you have come to know.

A place to belong and something to carry

We think everyone who walks through the door has been handed something the rest of us need — an ability, a temperament, a stretch of patience longer than average. Scripture puts it plainly: as each has received a gift, use it to serve one another. Not the gifted few. Each.

So there are two things we hope you find here, and they are not the same thing. Somewhere you are known, where people notice which kind of week you have had. And something you carry, where your absence would be felt by name rather than as a gap.

Connected but not contributing, and you can stay a guest for years. Contributing but not connected, and you are usually finished by spring. It is the two together that grow anybody, which is the only reason we arrange it this way.

Smaller than you are imagining

Most teams ask for one Sunday or two a month. You arrive earlier than you would otherwise, you do a specific thing, and then you go to lunch like everyone else.

There are hosts at the doors and in the lobby. There is the kids ministry, which needs steady adults far more than it needs entertaining ones. There is worship and the tech team, which needs both trained musicians and people willing to learn a camera. There is setup and teardown, which is the least visible and most quietly essential work in the building.

If you have no idea which of those you would be any good at, that is a normal place to start. Say so, and someone will walk you through it rather than handing you a form.

There is no audition

You do not need to have been a Christian for a set number of years. You do not need a skill you can name. You do not need to have your life sorted out, and if you are waiting until you do, we will be waiting a long time together.

What is genuinely needed is that you turn up when you said you would, and that you are willing to be trained. That is close to the whole list.

Nobody is handed a team and left to it

Every team here has a leader, and their job is not to do the work while you assist. It is to give the work away, deliberately, to people who did not think they were qualified for it.

In practice that means noticing you before you have volunteered. Training you rather than assuming you arrived knowing. Putting you beside people rather than beside tasks. Handing you something that matters enough that you will mind doing it badly at first. Noticing when you go quiet. And when you are ready, giving you a team of your own and starting again.

That is more attention than some people want, and you can ask for less. But it is the difference between a church run by nine exhausted people and one where the work is spread thin enough that nobody is carrying it alone.

Whoever would be great among you must be your servant.

Matthew 20:26, ESV