Roles & Responsibilities

Washing up at Hare Street

It isn't until you try living community life that you realise how much careful thinking and planning is involved in making sure things happen.

One of our activities at Hare Street last week helped hammer this point home. Vron split us into two groups and gave us the task of 'designing' a community from scratch and drawing up plans for how the roles and responsibilities would be shared out.

I'll leave the description of our plans for a community of traveling musician evangelists for another day – it suffices to say that it was a real challenge to try and create and plan from scratch something that would be able to function harmoniously.

Here at SPES each student is given a particular role that is their own specific duty and very much a part of keeping the community working smoothly. For example, Mirela is housekeeper and gets to give the orders of who does the cleaning and when they do it. Allen is sacristan and makes sure everything is prepared for daily Mass and Adoration. Marcus is in charge of organising our weekly community outings; Jenny takes care of the Music, and so on.

You might say that the community is very much a living body where we rely on each others' different gifts in order to get things done - like a microcosm of the Church. But we also have to accept and respect each others roles even when we have our own ideas about better ways of doing things.

At the start of our next term in January we'll all rotate responsibilities - then will come the time for putting our own slant on things. At the moment we've been given jobs that we're fairly well suited too, but we know that being given a job we find challenging (or boring!) could be on the cards in the future and that this can be a real area of growth.