Two Yanks In Oz

Hi everyone!

Just thought I'd share a little bit about fieldwork and church life. Hillsong mixes classes with practical experience. For example, I have a class in music excellence and woship band, AND a worship band workshop where we actually divide into bands and play together. Actually, right now we're working on our "culture group" assignment- we're split into groups of 4, and each group has a different culture to create a 20 minute worship set for. Next week we have to perform it. And this past week, we performed songs that were assigned by our trainers. So, since HILC is all about working in real ministry environments, every student is assigned two/ three ministries within the church to serve in throughout the school year. There is one ministry during the week, and on weekends, one ministry per church service, for two services. For some people, they serve in the same ministry for both services. For me, they're different.

Your fieldwork is a ministry that has something to do with your "field" of study. For me, and a lot of other vocal majors, that's choir. Many instrumentalists get placed in production for their fieldwork. Pastoral students get placed all over the place- people doing pastoral studies with an emphasis in events get placed in the events team, youth emphasis people serve in youth, etc. Some people's fieldwork happens during the week (like the youth services) and some happens on weekends (like choir for main services). My fieldwork is on Sunday nights. I get to church at 3:30 and we all warm up together, then we go into the auditorium and get up on stage, arrange ourselves and rehearse with the band/team. We are usually done rehearsing at 4:45, so we go upstairs to the green room and there's another team of students doing THEIR church life/ fieldwork making food for us. So we eat and then go down to start service at 5:30. We sing on stage behind the band and help engage the church in worship. Then, once the set is finished, we exit the stage to enjoy the service. Pretty easy field work! Your field work has to be signed off for each week in a little booklet they give you called a passport. Your "specialist" (a core church member in your ministry assigned to keep track of you, basically) signs the boxes for each week so you can get credit, then evaluates your performance at the end of the semester.

Church life is different- this ministry or ministries can be in any area of the church. I think each ministry that needs volunteers lets college office know, and they randomly divide people up. For example, even though Robin is a vocal music major here, her church life is college sales. She calls people all over the world who have expressed interest in HILC and talks to them about college life. On weekends, her church life is choir, and so is her fieldwork (she's a lucky one who got two services in the same ministry!).
For me, my weekend church life is Stage Managing. I help make sure everything going on on the platform happens smoothly each Saturday night service. I've carried things on and off, gotten water for people, etc. I get to wear a radio, so that's awesome. And it's a learning experience because I can hear everyone who is working behind the scenes to pull of the service talking to each other.
During the week, my church life is Youth Alive. Youth Alive puts on the biggest youth conference in Australia each year, right here in Sydney, called Big Exo Day. It's happening tomorrow in the Sydney Olympic Park, and everyone in the office has been working really hard to pull it together. They're expecting around 15,000 youth from all over the state! I'm in charge of the merchandise team, so I've been getting myself in gear to keep track of products and money and volunteers- I had my "training" last night and I feel pretty good about it. I've got my spreadsheets and price lists and I got to help choose some of the merchandise we're selling, so that's cool.
With church life, it's something you're placed in that you may not really have a heart for. So it's really important that we learn to have a servant mentality and humility about us, because we can all learn even if we're not in the place we think we want to be. I kind of freaked out when I got stage managing because I thought I couldn't do it, and now I'm actually really enjoying it.

No one signs off on your church life, so technically it's not graded like fieldwork is. But trust me- it's just as involved and people will keep tabs on you, their volunteer! It certainly makes for a busy week/ weekend. It's pretty awesome to look around on any given weekend and realize that Hillsong Church ministries really depend on college students. Half or even all of every team I'm on is comprised of students. It makes me feel very needed, and for me, need= value. So I feel valued here.

I hope everyone at home had a lovely week- in other news, I just got a job as a nanny! Pray for me! :)


Cheers everyone!
Aislinn