There are a lot of times when an event or production takes place and everything falls into place and all goes smoothly. What is sometimes overlooked or never even seen is what goes on behind the scene. The behind the scene activity is often what we would refer to as the heavy lifting. Without the set up and support the show might go on but it will be a little bit slower.
In church world, particularly JIBC world, those who volunteer to work behind the scenes get a lot of credit for helping the worship service go smoothly. I am referring to those who work in the Sunday preschool nursery. What a great team doing a great service for parents and families. They provide a great service to the families and provide much love to the preschool children. They are the Jesus-like figures who, like Jesus, welcome the little ones to come to them! They love them, teach them, sing with them and play with them. Week in week out they do the heavy lifting.
As you might imagine, it takes a big group of volunteers to successfully run a great nursery. In our case, we have a 9:00 Worship service that provides a nursery: a 10:00 Bible Study hour that requires a nursery; and the 11:00 Worship service that provides a nursery. My understanding is the 10:00 nursery during Bible Study is “covered” by a well- oiled team! We do, however, need a dozen volunteers to help during the worship services, both the 9 and 11. The 9:00 nursery volunteers serve 1 Sunday a month. There are times when there are no preschoolers for that particular service. Perhaps you and a spouse or you and a friend or family member would like to volunteer for the 1X a month team. You could still go to the 11:00 service and not “miss worship” if you chose to.
We also need a larger group of volunteers to serve during the 11:00 hour. We try to schedule the 11:00 volunteers to serve 1 Sunday out of 8. Ideally that would be 6 times a year! Behind the scenes, heavy lifting but with great payoff. You are helping form a preschoolers first impression of “church”. You are assisting parents and families that need the extra help and care. Again, these volunteers are doing the heavy lifting that allows much of what we do in worship to be done. If this is an area you would be willing to serve in a rotation, would you let Pastor Kyle know. We would love to have all these times covered by our people with servant hearts.
See you this Sunday as we look at “Spiritual Conversations: Let’s talk about forgiveness”.
Pastor Tom
