Two friends of mine (brothers, actually) got laid off from their job at a megachurch here in Austin. We met through a mutual friend that started attending their church. Our kids hang out on Roblox, so we’re connected through dadship and games. They oversaw a lot of the music and arts work that went into the weekly service. I wasn’t involved in the church so their unceremonious departure doesn’t impact me as much as folks in their community, but friends losing work is not fun and I feel for their families.

[Smash cut: my son on stage playing in front of pretend groupies]

My son is learning to play the guitar at School of Rock. One cool aspect about the School of Rock program is that you go from knowing nothing to performing a rock show in ~4 months after signing up. Recitals are nothing new when learning an instrument or a performing art, but those in my experience tend to be on longer annual timescales. School of Rock throws you in the deep end and that rock show commitment adds a lot of positive pressure to learn your instrument.

[Smash cut: me journaling in a coffee shop in my twenties]

These coinciding events got me thinking about church, music, and the relationship there of improving your craft through regular opportunities to perform. I thought about my past, my friends’ pasts, and my son’s potential future and I realized something that one thing faith-based communities do well is that they offer an endless series of opportunities for people to improve and show-off their talents.

At the heart of that is a not-so-secret ladder system. Nearly every faith community I’ve been apart of has had a buffet of special interest groups to rope newcomers in and get them involved at a level that matches their skill. They ask you about your interests and then encourage you¹ to use those in service of the community.

• Play music? You can play for a small group. Prove yourself and move onto the Wednesday service. Ready for the big Sunday show? Start as the fifth guitar. Then the third. Then lead.
• Artistic? You do art with kids in Sunday school. Move on to making artsy b-roll videos. Your art in front of everyone in the big church: a painting, a solo, a poem, an interpretive dance!
• Make websites or graphics? You can manage the WordPress, make the PowerPoints legible, make the weekly pamphlets, improve the signage, and spruce up the walls.
• Like to talk in front of people? Go to a small group. Lead a small group. Lead a mission trip. Get on stage during the Sunday service. Lead the Sunday service when the pastor is out.
• Have a knack for organizing people? Join a special interest group and invite friends. Encourage people to volunteer for the local Habitat for Humanity outreach. Be the greeter who connects people to special interest groups.
• A closeted queer kid that loves theater? There’s the big Christmas show –sometimes with live animals!– that happens every year. Churches and youth groups love skits (for some weird reason). And the technical queers can run the soundboard or manage the lights. You may even get a headset.
• Know a lot about a particular topic (bible, finance, history)? Lead a Sunday school class about it. Host a weekend seminar. A whole week seminar.
• Handy? Join the church cleanup. Volunteer to fix that leaking window. Fix the broken A/C. Organize a shed or barn raising. Run the Habitat for Humanity group. Be the knowledgeable one on the mission trip.

There’s no shortage of jobs in a thriving community. And while some jobs skew business (the treasurer), administrative (the secretary), or mechanical (the maintenance crew); the bulk of jobs fall under the umbrella of the performing and visual arts. I find this curious in a world where getting a degree in fine arts is often chided or joked about as being non-contributing.

I assume other religions across the world have different flavors of these ladders of opportunity. And I assume secular volunteer organizations might have these kinds of ladders, but I imagine they have way less acoustic guitars. The “speaker circuit” in tech sort of functions like this; local meetup, to regional conference, to national, to international, to keynote speaker, to giving a TED Talk ladder is familiar.

Why would a church provide this service? What is this platform for the performing and visual arts worth? Well I can tell you we pay ~$400/month for School of Rock, so it’s somewhere in that ballpark. It’s possible this social apparatus does return dividends in the offering plate, but I think the key benefit this provides is a place of belonging. A place to exercise talents publicly and regularly that might otherwise remain dormant. Creating that ladder of opportunity is effective at keeping “involvement” –a community’s most important metric by which it lives and dies– at an all time high and engagement keeps the machine turning.

[Smash cut: an announcement board with a hand-drawn thermometer that’s half-filled and renderings of a new building mounted with poster putty]

In most of my experiences at a certain point (when money exchanges hands) and at a certain scale (over ~150 people), the church ladder begins to posture itself towards being another capitalistic corporate ladder with patriarchal undertones. The eternal growth model and the innate desire to build ever larger buildings replace vision and connection. The work becomes about managing real estate and optimizing to keep the pews full. Efficiency rises, the arts and music morph into a Live, Laugh, Love poster with mass appeal.

Anyways, if you were trying to build a new community (or replace religion with something more compassionate)… I would think about building these kinds of ladders. I have no doubt you’ve encountered someone who has developed their gifts or skills in an incubator like this. You may even be reading a person-like-that’s blog right now.

1. “Encourage you”, or “extract from you”, depending on your perspective or experience ↩