“GUIDED by the Spirit, [priests] are to discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people.” This is Ordinal language for what most people call “volunteer recruitment”. It is one of a myriad of skills — which also include being able to unblock a photocopier and fold a Gopak table — for which most of the clergy are inadequately trained and temperamentally unsuited. It can be exhausting, dispiriting, and, at times, guilt-inducing. And, in the past few years, it has become substantially more difficult.
“Volunteer numbers have dropped” is a sentence on the pages of almost every parish profile, it seems. A Church Times survey this year revealed the extent of the volunteering crisis (Features, 15 March). So, what is going wrong, and how should we respond?
Before we blame the pandemic — a convenient scapegoat for pretty much everything — we need to consider the huge societal shifts of the past half-century.
In the Home Counties suburbia of my 1980s childhood, church life was powered by housewives and the recently retired. Today, the Office for National Statistics reports, three-quarters of mothers with dependent children are in employment — and many of the recently retired, if they are not working longer, are doing the childcare. This, coupled with the general decline in religious affiliation, means that a vast reservoir of volunteers has almost entirely dried up in the space of a generation.
As significant has been the massive change in attitudes to volunteering and commitment. The baby boomers are the last generation of people who committed themselves to something for life.
Largely gone are the days when you signed up to be a churchwarden and carried on in post until decrepitude (perhaps) or death (certainly) prevented you. Indeed, so bountiful was the supply of volunteers at the turn of the millennium that the Church of England introduced legislation disqualifying a churchwarden from election after six consecutive years in office, unless the annual meeting of parishioners resolved otherwise.
Millennials, in stark contrast, volunteer for only a season. I learnt this a decade ago when starting a soup kitchen in Finsbury Park, in north London. Altruistic young professionals were falling over themselves to volunteer. Supply outstripped demand so much that I had to scour the streets of north London for homeless people. After a few months, however, volunteers began to drop off. “What are we doing wrong?” I asked one of them. “Nothing,” she said. “We’re just moving on to something else.”
WHEREAS older generations have been characterised by loyalty to the institution, millennials want to do things under their own steam. Rose Anderson, from the think tank NPC, says that “volunteers now have more ground-up, entrepreneurial reasons for wanting to get involved . . . as opposed to engaging with a top-down structure, whereby charities dictate roles to people and train them to carry out those roles in a specific way”.
The pandemic has, of course, exacerbated the crisis. Many of the long-serving boomers were unwilling or unable to return to volunteering after the lockdowns. Some had tasted freedom and enjoyed it. The working-age generations have reprioritised. If anything, the licence to work from home has struck a further blow: if my employer is willing to give me more flexibility in the working week, why on earth would I want to tie myself to the Sunday-school rota?
The Church is not alone. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Community Life Survey reported that, in 2021/22, only 16 per cent of the respondents said that they had taken part in formal volunteering at least once a month in the previous year. That figure was 27 per cent a decade earlier. The sharpest decline — representing an estimated drop of four million volunteers — was over the two years of the pandemic.
The effect that this has on those who recruit volunteers in our churches — primarily, but not exclusively, the clergy — must not be underestimated. My longest-serving predecessor recruited four churchwardens between 1950 and 1981. I have had to recruit the same number in just six years.
ONE solution is to reconcile ourselves to having a volunteer base that is smaller and less willing to make a commitment for the long haul, and includes people of good will from beyond the community of faith. But this means changing our systems and structures. Is it still realistic to expect all but the largest parishes to have a complete set of two churchwardens, secretary, treasurer, and electoral-roll and safeguarding officers? In a culture in which flexibility is sovereign, how do we make it easier and less daunting to volunteer?
Another contrasting but not necessarily contradictory solution is to rediscover that we are not, in fact, in the business of recruiting volunteers. Our call is to make disciples. Christians do not volunteer: they serve. They do not “give something back to the community”: they are members of the body of Christ.
This requires a change of approach when it comes to “getting people to do things”. Churches made up of disciples, not volunteers, will be churches made up of people who live out their baptismal promises by giving freely and joyfully of their time and talents. To cultivate such a church is, after all, exactly what the Ordinal demands.
The Revd Daniel Sandham is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Winchmore Hill, in the diocese of London.