Jones 1 Manasseh Jones Megan Keaton ENG 111-06 8 July 2013 The community of church and workplace Many

communities are used to appeal to certain audiences if not all. A community that uses a genre of writing to shape its purpose to communicate with an audience is known as a discourse community. Many of the communities a person can find can be recognized as a discourse community depending on the reasoning on why a certain community is gathered. I am involved in many communities that do not use a genre of writing that shapes our community such as, living at home. Whenever my parents need each other for something, they just call each other and they may leave a voice message if they are unable to get in touch with each other. The communities that most people are involved in that are considered discourse communities are church and the workplace. Just like many other churches, the church, Sugar Creek Church of Christ, is open to anyone who wants to worship for God. The members, visitors, and the preacher make up the community of the church and they try to make every opportunity to bring in new members to the church. Leslie James is the preacher of the church. His role is to provide guidance to the church within context of the Bible by preaching, and being an example by teaching the gospel to an open audience and creating teaching programs. Each member has his or her own role in church as well, and the roles vary from time to time for each person. The men are head over the directions of worship which involve who leads singing, reading scripture, opening and closing prayer, the Lords Supper, collection, and reading prayer cards. Some men are also involved in

Jones 2 teaching Sunday and Wednesday Bible class to children and teenagers as well as some women. Their role is to teach within the Bible as well as delivering the message where the children and teenagers will understand it. The church also has different ministries to expand outside of the church community to bring in new members. One ministry in the church has the role of ongoing contact with visitors so that it will not be a persons only time visiting the church and will one day become a member. This also gets the visitors involved in the communitys purpose by letting other people know about our church through word of mouth. One of the churchs genres of writing is its response cards, or in other words prayer cards. The response cards give every member a chance to communicate with the entire church any request for prayers for anything he or she may be going through in his or her life or someone elses life. After the preacher is done with his sermon, he gives everyone time to fill out response cards if needed whether it is a request for baptism, prayer, to speak, or to learn more about the church. After everyone is done filling out his or her response card, someone is assigned to read the response cards out loud so the church will know what each member is requesting prayers for. Each member is recommended to write down his or her name on the card and raise his or her hand when called out to match the face with the response. That way after worship other members can go to that person to give encouragement. Depending on what a member writes on the response card determines if it is appropriate to be read so that it does not cause any division or conflict within the church. Someone has also created a ministry to give each person who filled out a response card a call for encouragement throughout the week if the person writes down his or her number down on the response card. Sugar Creek Church of Christ has a lot for a person to get involved in as far as bringing new members to the church; although,

Jones 3 it is very different compared to the community of the workplace as far as the purpose and communication. Connextions is a call center which focuses on customer service; hence, its main purpose in the workplace is to provide satisfactory customer service. The workplace is made up of human resource workers, operations manager, supervisor, and agents. The human resource departments role in the work place is similar to other workplaces as far as updating an agents schedule when he or she is tardy or no call no show. A no call no show means that a person has not called the job to verify if they are coming to work or not. If a person does not call in, he or she is not allowed to work that day. The operations manager has the duty of watching over the entire department he or she is assigned. An operations managers role is to watch for any system issues agents may be having and get them fixed, document and take action to any reports on agents the supervisors give to him or her, and to provide any disciplinary actions to anyone who steps outside of the workplaces standards and regulations. The supervisors duties are similar to an operations manager. Their role is to watch over the agents to make sure they are in compliance with the workplace standards. They make reports on agents who are not following his or her schedule, who has or has not called in, who is tardy, and who is in violation of the rules of the workplace and provide them to the operations manager for any disciplinary actions. The agents are the back bone of the company. The agents main purpose is to deliver exceptional customer service to the customers and clients of the company. Even though the agents are the lowest of the company, without the agents the company would fail. There are also different departments Connextions has in order for the companys agents to satisfy their clients. Everyone in the community is able to communicate with each other through emails. Most emails are sent between the supervisors and the agents regarding schedule changes and certain updates. It is

Jones 4 important for each individual agent to take advantage of the emails in order for the workplace to be more organized and not cause any confusion on why there are any changes as far as schedules or policies. The schedule changes that are usually discussed between the supervisors and agents are when the agents are requesting overtime or if their time punches need to be fixed due to miss punches. The updates the supervisors send to agents are regarding any changes to certain plans, the companys policy, or a departments work operations. The discourse communities do not just stop at each community appealing to a different audience than the others. Each community can appeal to the same audience just in a different way. These are just examples on how each community can differ from each other.