I do not like this noun

I love to volunteer to help, to serve, to minister, to use the gifts God has given me to bless another. Volunteer is a verb in this sentence.

I hate to be called a volunteer. Noun.

When I was on staff at a mid-sized evangelical church, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fill slots in our org chart, especially in the children's ministry, cleaning and lawn mowing areas. Some of the people used words like "recruit" and "volunteer" A LOT. We brainstormed lots of creative ways to get people to volunteer for the grunt work of the church. (Of course, we never quite put it in those sort of bald terms, but really, that's what it was.)

On a recent visit to the Letters From Leavers website, I found a couple of points in one person's letter that seemed to capture what it is about the noun "volunteer" that cranks me a little. He (or she) wrote: "IC’s establish a hiearchy within the church. Paid staff know the answers and the average Joe believer takes their orders from them" and "IC’s promote believers to identify themselves by what they “do” at church and assign value, higher and lower, to their areas of service. A praise singer is awesome while a stage hand is trivial. They may say that “all” service is equally important but they treat them with high/lower values in mind."

So what is it about the word "volunteer" that bugs me? Two things - First, though no one quite puts it like this, it seems to me that often "volunteers" are the blue-collar laborers, doing tasks assigned by the white-collar staff. Second, most of us know that there is certainly a lot more church social currency given to someone who can play a killer guitar solo than the person who mows the lawn.

And though there are lots of good reasons for the former (and not a single valuable one for the second) - big churches ARE institutions and organizations, and need manpower (people power?) to keep them running at max capacity. And good leaders make sure to try to help plug people in to their org charts by using their gifts and talents, not just by finding someone with a pulse.

But I think there is a kind of non-profit business paradigm embedded in the word "volunteer". Scripture never uses this sort of image to describe the body of Christ. As a matter of fact, the idea of a volunteer kidney or tibia is absurd.

Every believer is called a priest. This is not a volunteer position. Our ministry of offering praise to God comes in the offerings we bring to him, and the way we love one another in the body. This can mean volunteering to watch poopy kids in the nursery, cleaning the toilets, or singing on a worship team - because we've been empowered to minister, not because we've been drafted (or conscripted by guilt) to BE A VOLUNTEER at a church.

P.S. - If any of you are blogger users and can explain why this wacky site doesn't show my line breaks between paragraphs, HELP! :) I don't like reading solid walls of text, either - and haven't entered it this way, so I'm not quite sure what I"m doing wrong.