Service, volunteering and what a family turns out for
Three questions a pastor asks about a parishioner, each answered from something the parish already knew:
- *What has she given the parish?* — the councils and committees she has served on.
- *Where does he pitch in?* — where he volunteers, and the ministries he actually serves in.
- *What does this family turn out for?* — the events and programs they have shown up to.
They live together on a person's record: Service to the parish on the Details tab, with volunteering and participation alongside.
Service bodies
Finance Council, Parish Council, School Advisory Council, School Families — the four Vianney seeds — plus whatever bodies your parish keeps. A stint has a body, and the years it ran, so "Finance Council, 2014–2019" survives as a fact long after the term ended.
Volunteering
Two things merge into one view here:
- Volunteer opportunities — the fall festival, the fish fry, the counting team. Your parish's own list, which ships empty on purpose, because nobody else's list would fit.
- Ministries — Lector, EMHC, usher, and the rest, together with how many times the person has actually served. That comes from ministry scheduling, not from a second list to maintain.
Ministry positions are deliberately not duplicated into the volunteer list. You maintain them in one place, Ministry Scheduling → Setup, and they appear wherever volunteering is shown.
Participation
What the family showed up for: event RSVPs and accepted form signups, gathered into one list.
It is derived, never guessed
Every automatic entry here requires a person link a human already confirmed. Vianney will not match "J. Doyle" on a signup sheet to Jim Doyle in the directory and quietly write it into his record. If the link was never confirmed, no row is written — an empty history is honest, and a wrong one is not.
Cancelling and then re-confirming an RSVP puts the same record back rather than creating a second one, so history does not accumulate ghosts.
Setting up your own lists: Engagement → Setup
Engagement → Setup holds the two catalogs your parish owns:
- Service bodies — the councils and committees.
- Volunteer opportunities — each with a category: Parish, School, Event, Other.
Tag an event or a form with a volunteer opportunity and signups become volunteering records by themselves.
A body or an opportunity that already has records cannot be deleted — Vianney refuses. Untick Active to retire it instead, so a stint from 2014 keeps the name it was actually served under. Renaming history is not tidying; it is losing it.
A record, never a rating — and never an AI input
A person's page may honestly show "served twelve times this year," because that is a fact your own schedules recorded.
That served history is deliberately withheld from every AI feature. No profile, no search, no assistant answer is ever built from who shows up and who does not. The page is a record for a human to read with judgment; a machine ranking parishioners by attendance is a different thing entirely, and Vianney does not do it. See What the AI can and cannot see.
Tips
- Fill in past council terms as you come across them. Ten minutes with an old bulletin is often the whole history.
- Categories on volunteer opportunities pay off later — "school" versus "parish" is the difference between a useful list and a long one.
- For the dated, everything-in-one-place view, see the Story.