To be (paid) or not to be (paid)

I’m just starting to do some hands-on youth work after eighteen months of a kind of self-imposed exile. I feel a bit like I’ve been in youth work rehab and I’m making my first faltering steps back into a once-familiar world.

OK, so that’s perhaps a little dramatic, but the basic gist is sound – I used to do loads of work with young people, for the last year and a half I’ve done almost none, and now I’m starting to get my hands dirty again.

The thing that’s different this time, though, is that I’m doing it as a volunteer, after over ten years of being employed by churches, sometimes paid, sometimes not (and, yes, I think there’s a significant difference between being an unpaid employee and a volunteer).

It’s proving to be an enlightening experience.

I realise that since I’m not volunteering in the same churches as I was employed the comparison is not a completely true one, but the experience so far has been striking all the same. It’s got me thinking about the similarities and differences between being an employee and being a volunteer and how those dynamics have developed, particularly in the context of church-based youth work. I’m intrigued by the fact that at the same time that I’ve all but decided not to go back into employed full-time church-based youth work (at least for the immediate future), I’m enthusiastically embracing new opportunities to get involved as a volunteer. That suggests to me that any issues I might have with church-based youth work aren’t fundamentally rooted in a dislike of either young people or church.