All Hallows is a church where everyone is welcome to have a share in our ministry and worship. It’s not just Heston Groenevald (or whoever presides when they’re not here) who leads worship – lots of us non-priesty people take part too, by doing things like welcoming, playing music, reading, leading prayers, and other tasks up front and behind the scenes.
If you’ve already done things like that, feel free to skip to the ‘practical stuff‘ below. Otherwise read on …
If you haven’t already done something like that at All Hallows, but would like to, now’s your chance! It’s literally open to anyone, you don’t have to have been coming for ages, or be really good at something (though it’s fine if you are 😁).
You can:
- explore possibilities
- think and pray about what gifts you can offer to the community
- try things out
- get help, advice or training for the tasks that need specific skills
In short, you can do as much or as little as you choose. And that includes the choice not to do any of these things but just to come to All Hallows and take part by being there. No one should feel pressured to do a task they don’t want to or don’t feel comfortable with.
Now for the practical stuff …
The rota system works like this:
- Before you’ve signed up, you can access pages like this that explain the system and describe the tasks you can volunteer for.
- Then, if you decide to give it a go, you start by registering on this site as a new user. At this stage you will be asked to enter your name, email and password; other fields will be generated automatically.
- Next you choose which tasks you’d like to volunteer for – you can change your choices at any time. For each task you can choose how willing you are to do it, either ‘definitely’ or ‘only if no one else is available’. You can also ask for advice or training, or if you’re experienced at a task you can offer advice or training to others.
- Finally, you set up your settings, which consists of your preferences and other rota-related options you can choose from.
- After this the rotavator (currently Phil Gardner) will upgrade your user role to rota volunteer. You can then log in at any time (Log in on the menu) by entering your username and password and solving a simple Captcha question. Logged-in volunteers can see all the pages on this site (except the admin pages).
- Every month you will be asked to confirm your availability – which Sundays in the following month you will (or may) be available for. You will soon be able to do this by going to the availability page on this site, but for now this is done by email.
- The rotavator works out the rota for that month and sends a draft out to all the volunteers. If something doesn’t work for you, you can let the rotavator know and if possible the rota will be revised. The final rota version will then be sent out and an editable copy uploaded to the All Hallows Google Drive rota folder.
- If you find you can’t do one of your rota slots, you should find someone else to take your place, or swap with someone, and edit the online copy of the rota accordingly.