Minister’s Column
Volunteerism has suffered a decline in recent months and years, as I often hear from my colleagues in ministry. On social media this week, one Unitarian Universalist minister was asking others of us what to do when no one volunteers to lead the Board of Trustees. Several of my colleagues had advice to offer because they had been through that situation in a UU congregation themselves. In this congregation, the UU Fellowship of Central Michigan, we have some volunteer fatigue as well. Although the nominating committee was able to find people willing to serve on the Board next year, some other committees are un-staffed or under-staffed.
In my sermon last Sunday, I offered my annual reflection about the stewardship drive: the yearly effort to ask members and friends of the congregation how they can support the Fellowship financially and through their volunteer time. In retrospect, I think my message was more about the financial contributions and less about volunteering time.
The wonderful thing about volunteering time in this Fellowship is that it tends to bring you into closer contact with others who also love this place and the work we do. Volunteers set up and clean up on Sunday morning and at special events like the monthly potluck dinner. Volunteers help with Sunday morning worship, with garden and building maintenance, with our children’s program, with workshops and discussions for adult members, and with committees including social justice and communications. In most cases, the volunteer work is collaborative rather than individual—causing you to spend more time with fellow seekers from this congregation.
When it comes to committee work (a subset of the volunteering that is necessary to keep UUFCM thriving), I don’t love emails, or Robert’s Rules of Order, or the other formalities of committee work. What I try to see, however, is that committee meetings are a chance to connect with others in the context of a shared goal. Recently I had a meeting with some people in the Fellowship about a topic we were disagreeing about. Even in that challenging context of disagreement, I looked forward to the meeting because I truly like the people I was meeting with. The same could be true of any kind of volunteer work that we engage in here: the members and friends of this Fellowship are people whom it is enjoyable and enriching to spend time with. Believing in the mission behind the work, and enjoying the people engaging in the work, volunteer work becomes a good way to spend time: a joy and not a chore.
At the spiritual level, doing volunteer work connects us with the deep truth that we need one another to survive. I serve you, you serve me—we each give what we can to an institution that serves us both. We work together and we are interconnected. To me, this is expressed in the following prayer, written by Matt Alspaugh:
PRAYER:
Breathe with me.
Know that with each breath we take in molecules of air
that were breathed by every person that ever lived.
Breathe with me,
and breathe the breath of Jesus, of Moses,
of Mohammed, of the Buddha.
Breathe with me,
and know that we are all interdependent,
that the spirit of life
flows through us all.
Breathe with me,
as we come together to do the holy work
of interconnection and relationship,
that our work here may be blessed.
Amen
Blessed be the words of Matt Alspaugh. May we all lean into our interconnectedness.
Rev. Drew Frantz
April 16, 2024