The church and volunteers
November 5, 2008

7th March 08

Volunteers play a very important role in helping society to flourish. They are important both for the assistance they give to others and also what such activities do for the people themselves, such as keeping them active and giving them a sense of purpose.

The volunteers at Wesley Mission are very important. They provide (according to an old calculation) about $2 million of assistance per year (by putting a $ figure on the value of the hours donated to the Mission). Probably a more accurate assessment of the 3,300 volunteers would be a figure of about $5 million per year.

Last week I spoke at the Wesley Mission Volunteer Network Meeting on the bigger picture of volunteering. The extensive role of volunteers is often neglected by historians when writing about religious and community organizations.

The history of the Christian church over the past 2,000 or so years is in itself very much a history of the contribution by volunteers. All of the early Christians were volunteers, such as fishermen who left their nets to follow Jesus.

The most famous of the early volunteers was St Paul, who changed Christianity from a Jewish sect to a world movement. The family business was tent making (perhaps for the Roman army). He was taught that trade as a boy. Although he later went on to be trained as a Jewish scholar, he maintained those skills. The skills came in useful as a way of helping him earn a living while he was a Christian evangelist.

The Christian church changed in the 4th century from its lowly status on the edge of the Roman Empire to becoming the imperial faith across the immense Roman Empire. Gradually paid staff became more and more important.

The Christian church set the tone of society. Christian scholars had to devise regulations drawn from their interpretation of the Bible on how the Empire should be governed such as murder and robbery. Many of today’s laws still date back to that era – though many people are unaware of this history.

There were no “God-free” zones. The church had an extensive remit, such as the notion of fair pay for work, a ban on lending money at a rate of interest (“usury”) and strict regulation of the hours of trading (including no “Sunday trading”).

The church also provided a vast network of social services. In Europe the church’s services remained the most important in society until around the 19th century and the rise of “modern government”.

The church, for example, ran the first hotels. Monasteries were set one day’s journey apart from each other so that pilgrims and merchants could sleep in those buildings at night rather than risk attacks by robbers and wolves by sleeping in the forests. They also ran the first schools, orphanages and hospitals.

It would be fair to say that much of this work was assisted by local volunteers who saw such service as part of their faith. This tradition of volunteering has remained, such as the network of volunteers who operate the Lifeline telephone counselling service.

Volunteering is now so widespread that it is taken for granted in all Western countries. Most of the community organizations that now recruit volunteers have no explicit Christian or other religious heritage, such as the environment movement. It is done simply because people want to make a difference.

The Christian contribution to volunteering is, then, not only in the specific acts of volunteering themselves – but also in the broader sense of creating a new form of human activity: people donating their time and effort to make a better society.