Saint John’s Abbey Volunteers
Volunteerism is about hospitality at its core and makes us all the better in who we are and what we do through our common ministries in expanding our generosity and showing our gratitude.
The volunteer program meets a number of valued needs both for the volunteers themselves as well as the monastic community. It provides a link of maintaining relationships with the abbey and participants while responding to specific opportunities for helping out. In doing so, the bond of relational support deepens in a shared goal of strengthening monastic apostolates and personal spiritual well-being.
The long and expanding list of help includes at least thirty volunteer opportunities:
abbey retirement center, driving, preparing bulk mailings, maple sapping and cutting wood for firing the syrup boilers, computer tutoring, overseeing the abbey gift shop and gift shop attendants, vegetable and flower gardening, donating flowering plants, woodworking, assisting the oblate program, guest house receptionist, lawn mowing, typing, general handyman, baking and cooking, abbey archiving, schola singing and liturgy, leading yoga and tai-chi, barbering, tailoring, quilting, candle making, cleaning, photographing, entertaining, accounting, English as a second language instructor, twitter account manager, and coordinating prison subscriptions to Liturgical Press publications.
Altogether over twelve months, about 80 lay volunteers contribute over 8,000 hours of getting things done with their hands and heads and voices and hearts for our common benefit. This effort is in addition to lay supervisors and support people and as many as 40 monks!
Many of the volunteers are our neighbors, some retired University faculty and support staff, and others come from as far as the Twin Cities, and even beyond. Over a dozen students are numbered among them and share time with the elderly monks in the Abbey Retirement Center, learning their stories and singing in the Abbey Schola.