“The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus told us (Matt. 26:11). But will we ever have enough volunteers?
That question feels particularly pressing now, as political change in Washington is reshaping the provision of many social services in America (and beyond). Many ministries rely on congregants freely offering to be the hands and feet of Jesus, and as program needs grow due to policy shifts, I worry that not enough people will sign up.
I understand why many don’t, of course: We all have troubles of our own. We are busy, and it’s difficult to give away our time. Yet I write as someone who does sign up, someone who has become a kind of “church lady,” albeit a sometimes-conflicted one.
Since my kids went off to high school and later left home, I’ve held off seeking paid employment so I can write, rock climb, travel, and volunteer at church. I’m constantly asking myself whether this is wise. Shouldn’t I be making money to contribute to our household? Plenty of people work full-time and still serve at church. Yet for me it comes down to this: I’m less likely to volunteer my time if I have full-time work.
My husband’s mom, Sue, was my role model in this mode of life. She volunteered at their parish and my husband’s Catholic school when he was young, and that led to both paid and unpaid work at church and charitable organizations when he grew older. She helped open an apartment building for single mothers, a Christian health care center, and a home for people with AIDS—and those are just the things I know about. She died in her late 50s before I realized I needed to ask her about all this.
When I was a 20-something considering my own future, Sue’s way of life seemed bold, so different from “just” staying home with the kids or “just” getting a job if you didn’t have a specific career to pursue, as was the case for me. I wasn’t aware of the strong charity arm of the Catholic church, within which Sue found her volunteering and working opportunities. I simply knew there was something here I admired—something I hadn’t seen modeled in the very small, very conservative, and very poor denomination in which I was raised.
Practical charity was not a strength at most of those churches, and my own mother couldn’t spend her time as Sue did. My dad was a pastor with a meager income, and my mom worked to supplement what he made. When my boys were little, we were able to live on one income, and I seized the opportunity my mother hadn’t had, focusing all my time on mothering and teaching my kids. Even my writing took a back seat to raising and homeschooling them, and the most I did for the church was put together the bulletin.
When the boys grew older and needed less of my time, I cautiously began to say yes to opportunities to help. We’d left the denomination of my childhood and joined a large Anglican church, the church where I remain a member today. I realized I could no longer ignore the call to volunteer at church, and the calls kept on coming.
At first, I read Scripture or helped serve the Lord’s Supper during the service on Sundays and, of course, contributed to the meals ministry, as a good church lady should. Eventually, I found the courage to take on a more demanding challenge: the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, a good fit given my teaching experience. I’ve been teaching adult immigrants English for three years now. I love it, and I love them. They desperately want to learn in a way that many children don’t, and I am privileged to help them.
Working with the international population in ESL classes brought me to a second opportunity: managing a small Christian immigration legal clinic that operates out of our church. The clinic is open just one hour a week at the church, where a volunteer attorney speaks with immigrants and helps determine what legal options to pursue. I respond to emails and schedule appointments, mostly from home.
For a bit over a year, I’ve also been volunteering in our refugee ministry, which has needed much more support since the Trump administration came to office. This work is wild and unpredictable, and walking alongside these families—going shopping or helping them navigate getting a driver’s license or driving to health appointments—often takes twice the time I expect. To plan a simple trip to the grocery store, I need to hold half the day loosely, because I never know what else might come up.
Truthfully, I mention all this not to put myself forward as a great example to follow. I’m a reluctant volunteer, especially with the refugee ministry. I worry about helping too much. Am I doing it right? Am I walking these refugees toward independence and dignity? (We Americans hold independence dearly.) Am I finding ways for them to experience joy in this new land? Am I building a meaningful relationship with them? I worry my “good enough” isn’t good enough. I see other volunteers in this ministry doing so much more than me to befriend the people they support.
And those other volunteers aren’t only people who, like me, don’t have formal employment. Some fall into the classic church volunteer demographics: retirees and women who have school-age children and don’t work full-time. But not all. My term church lady is outdated now, as church volunteering looks different today than it did in the 1970s and ’80s, when I was a kid.
In decades past, many churches would have relied in a way that they can’t today on women who did not work outside the home. In 1972, Pew Research reports, husbands were the sole earners in half of American marriages and the primary earners in another third. By 2022, only 23 percent of husbands were sole earners, meaning wives contributed some (or even all) of the household income in the vast majority of these families. Marriage rates are also lower than they used to be, meaning there is a growing number of single people who support themselves as well.
Realistically, then, the volunteer mix is different, and the numbers may be fewer, particularly in the ministries that require significant time commitments. At my church, volunteers are both men and women, various generations, people who work full-time jobs and those who don’t. Yet it seems like a pretty consistent mix, at least in the areas where I help. The people who volunteer are the people who volunteer. Many of the refugee-ministry volunteers are also ESL teachers or serve at church in other ways. Many are repeat volunteers—it’s what we do.
But we can only do so much. If the volunteering needs were to grow, who would bear the burden of that added work? If our church wanted to develop or expand more ministries, would there be enough people to volunteer enough time? Our church has the physical space and the money for these current ministries and more, but will there ever be enough volunteers to support them?
As it is, I worry about burnout. “Many hands make light work,” as they say, but compared to the numbers that show up on Sundays, the more difficult ministries don’t have that many hands at work. This seems especially true of the intensive ministries that serve communities outside of our church.
Again, I understand all the reasons people don’t sign up. I’ve given those same reasons in the past myself. I still wonder how much time I’m called to give to volunteering—after all, God calls us to other things too.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37–39). At my church we are reminded of these two greatest commandments every week. I’m caring for my neighbor by volunteering at church—but also as a writer (I hope) and by taking care of my family. Aren’t I? I love the Lord and enjoy him when I do all the things he has called me to do, and that abundant love shapes other areas of my life beyond volunteering. So how much time do I give to church? How do I divvy it up? What gets priority?
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Since January, I’ve been supporting one refugee family in particular, one of the nine that arrived in Pittsburgh through this refugee organization that month. It’s a large family, and they’re located in an inconvenient part of the city. I have to go over a bridge and through a tunnel to get to their house, for crying out loud! Sometimes, when a need arises, I wonder, Can’t someone else take care of them this time?
There are few other regular volunteers for this family’s needs, so I’m usually the one to drive them to appointments and grocery store runs and even urgent emergency room visits. And though we don’t speak the same language, I’ve been getting to know them. I’ve begun to care about them, which both alarms me and complicates things. Caring takes up more of my mental space than I’d like. It bleeds into those other spaces that I try to wall off from ministry responsibilities. It makes me feel panicky, as if I’m losing control over my life.
And I am, in the best sense. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9:23–24).
I was compelled, encouraged, and humbled by my associate rector’s words in a timely sermon on this passage earlier this summer: “There is so much more to being a Christian than this one verse,” he said, “but there is never less. Everyone who follows Jesus must begin here. … No one who follows Jesus ever moves beyond this radical call.”
Sometimes I wish I could do this work without caring so much. It would be easier. I’d get better sleep. But isn’t that the point of volunteering, of charity, of loving my neighbor? Isn’t that the point of signing up?
The calling is to do the work, yes. But more so, it is to care: “If I give all my possessions to feed the poor … but do not have love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3, NASB1995). Caring is messy and causes anxiety. Caring is laying your life down for your friend. It’s following Jesus. It’s death to self. It’s picking up your cross.
Little by little, my heart is changing. When I see this family in need, I am moved with compassion for them. I hope in a Jesus-like way. Now, even if I drag my feet on my way to the car to go to their house, even if I feel that anxious squeeze in my chest, by the time I knock on their door, I’m no longer thinking of myself.
Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basement on Substack.
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