Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It was a comedy of errors admittedly – I was still relatively new to my position as a parish administrator and the person in question had been out of town and out of email communication. Unfortunately, we were also less than 48 hours to Christmas Eve when I got an email informing me that I had one less usher than the minimum needed for one of the Christmas Eve services. The head of the ushers was also out of town and I had no idea who else might be able to jump in and help out. Last minute phone calls and emailing ensued.

Is this a familiar scenario to you?

Even on an ‘ordinary’ Sunday, these situations are stressful and can lead to crossed lines of communication in search of someone to help out at the last minute.

I had great success in using Doodle, www.doodle.com, for meetings and wondered about using Doodle for scheduling liturgical ministries. After talking to one of my administrator colleagues, he decided to try and implement this at his parish. He described the tremendously positive impact and great help it was when he switched his parish over to using Doodle for liturgical scheduling.

Although Doodle was not setup to do scheduling of the acolytes, it can still be a highly effective tool with a little workaround. If you’re not familiar with Doodle, please read the first post on using Doodle for scheduling meetings to better understand how Doodle can be used for scheduling liturgical ministries.

How it works

There are two approaches to using Doodle for scheduling your liturgical ministries:

1. Ministry Specific

This is most useful if you have multiple leaders for different ministries or if you are at a larger parish where there may be 20 or 30 people to a specific ministry and/or service time.

• Title an ‘event’ as a particular liturgical ministry. For example: Lay Eucharistic Ministers for Fall 2012 or at a larger parish, 11AM Ushers for Fall 2012.
• The administrator or leader of this ministry enters into Doodle all the Sundays (and don’t forget special weekday services that might be in between such as All Saints Day) with the date and service time.
• Doodle will generate a link that you can then copy into the email that you will send to your group when soliciting availability. Ask that each person click on the link, enter their name, and check which Sundays (or dates if there are weekday services) they are available.
• The generated list will show the availability for that specific ministry only.

2. All Liturgical Ministries

This is most useful if you have one person, such as the parish administrator, doing all the scheduling. Another is that all availability is in one place and people don’t have to enter their availability more than once. On the downside, there is no indication of who serves in what capacity.

• Title an ‘event’ for the time frame you are scheduling for: Fall 2012 Liturgical Rota.
• The administrator or lay leader enters in the dates for all services taking place in the scheduled time frame and sends this out to everyone who participates in a liturgical ministry.
• The generated list will be a large master list showing who is available for any given Sunday.

Why this is an advantage
As with meetings, Doodle helps take some of the leg work out of compiling availability, which can get particularly complex with many members involved in one area or in multiple ministries. Particularly useful, you will have a working template showing when people are available. If someone needs to switch or can’t serve on short notice, you can view the Doodle link to see who else has said they are available. No more mass emails or having to wait for individual phone calls or emails to find out if someone by chance can fill in.

Know your people and be flexible

Try using Doodle for a meeting to begin introducing people to this tool for liturgical scheduling. I found that after people used it once, they found it easy to use and were interested in using it again.

Also remember that this is putting a new system into place and you’re asking people to change their routines. Be patient and allow time to teach and integrate a new system. If you have members who are not online at all, reach out to them to make arrangements to add their availability to the calendar for them and consider printing and mailing a hard copy of the availability for each person in the group.

I learned of this resource from a fellow lay administrator and have always relied on my colleagues for great advice. What tools or resources have you used in your parish to be more adaptable to 21^[1] century realities and run more smoothly? Share yours in the comments or click on Your Turn to post your tool or resource.