Volunteering


A grandson-in-law recently posted an interesting article on social media.  It highlighted some results from a 2025 survey of ‘volunteering’ across 22 different countries.  The report commenced with the startling claim that a key predictor of adult volunteering was the increased frequency of attending religious worship services at age 12.

Of course in our western society volunteering has a long and respectable history.  Australia may well be an outstanding example of the wide scope of volunteering.  Thousands of Op-Shops around the nation are staffed by volunteers.  Many retirees drive a day or two every week for ‘Meals On Wheels’.  In the first two years of my married life in country Victoria I was, together with a brother in law, a member of the local volunteer fire brigade.  For almost fifty years of my life I joined a bunch of other enthusiastic volunteers once every three months – just lying back on a hospital bed or a recliner chair while half a litre of blood slowly trickled into a plastic bag.  These days when I cycle to the shop to get my Saturday morning newspaper I pass a council park where dozens of kids are being supervised and coached by volunteer parents and grand-parents in Little Athletics and a little further down the track there’s more volunteers overseeing junior cricket matches in summer or football in winter.  I could make an almost endless list of Aussie volunteers: from those who hand out ‘How to vote’ brochures at election time, to the Pink Ladies who volunteer in our hospitals.

So while the Christian Church does not have a monopoly on volunteering it arguably makes a wider use of volunteering than any other institution or organisation in our society.  Larger churches may be able to afford paid staff but let me mention some of the voluntary work done in smaller churches that I’ve served.  There are volunteer Sunday School Teachers and Creche carers; bulletin typists and music makers; church treasurers and Church Council clerks; many in the congregation will turn up for a monthly Working Bee.  Volunteers make up the people who run Bible Study Groups and Youth Programs.  Volunteer Elders serve on Church Councils and volunteer Deacons help care for the needy.  And then I haven’t even mentioned those who volunteer to serve on various committees and those who organise craft groups and playgroups for local mums and tots.  The Church is – by and large – a volunteer organisation.

I have on file some statistics from an older survey done by the National Church Life Survey and the Edith Cowan University just before the turn of the century.  It highlights how much church attenders contribute to the volunteer cause in our society.  The following figures are worth noting:

 - 82% of church attenders are involved in some form of voluntary activity but only 66% of non-attenders serve as volunteers.

 -49% of church attenders give two or more hours a week to voluntary activities but only 25% of non-attenders do so.

 - 21% of church attenders are involved in care, welfare or support groups but only 7% of non-attenders are so involved.

So let me come back to those survey results posted by my grandson in-law.  Attendance at least once per week by a 12 year old increased the likelihood of them volunteering by a magnitude of 253% in Sweden and to a 21% increase in likelihood in Germany.  Those results are fascinating – but hardly surprising.  A young person who has grown up in the church has been surrounded by volunteering all his life.  It was probably modelled for him by his parents.  Furthermore the Church is also the environment in which that great parable of Jesus, The Good Samaritan, has become the driving force behind the shared care and concern for others.  But more than that... at the centre of the Christian faith stands the Great Volunteer – He who volunteered to come into this broken world in order to go the way of execution on a cross with goal of voluntarily taking upon Himself the penalty for our failures to live up to God’s standard of perfection.  Nothing quite motivates me to volunteer to serve others than the service that Jesus so willingly gave for me.

John Westendorp
2MaxFM 25/01/2026 

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