During my time in the army I was given a lot of advice. I remember one bit of advice in particular; "Never volunteer for anything!" A volunteer is a sucker! In the army there was always a lot of work to be done, so they would "volunteer" hapless individuals and form them into small groups they called "details" and march them off to work. Old timers were smart and alert. Rarely were they caught in a "detail." In the army I learned that work was to be avoided at all cost. Never volunteer or worse, never be volunteered!

Today's young people are learning the same lesson from their society. Don't volunteer; it just means more work. It isn't that we are teaching that volunteering is wrong or hard work is bad. It's that we are showing them that smart people don't volunteer; smart people don't work! Intelligent people get paid well for using their brains not their brawn. It's the sucker that has to work for a living, and only a real sucker would volunteer for more work!

Times have changed haven't they? America was built on a work ethic! That was back when work wasn't something of which to be ashamed. When labor wasn't seen in shades of black and brown. Work is what we all did. We did it well and we were proud of the job we did. The boys saw their fathers working, and they looked forward to the time when they would also work, so they could be proud of a hard day's work and a job well done. In the old days, volunteering and a work ethic went hand-in-hand. So much for the "Mayberry moment."

I don't often look back. I don't often look at things comparing them to the way they used to be. One reason is that the comparison scares me. The world has changed, our country has changed and unfortunately the church of Jesus Christ has changed. "As the world goes, so goes the Church." "Ouch!"

In my youth I was fortunate to belong to a church that taught me a lot about work and volunteering. It was small, about two hundred people. In that church I had some great examples of saints who were willing to volunteer, work hard, work faithfully and strange as it might seem, didn't burn out. Our pastor was a postman. He delivered mail all week. He preached Sunday morning and evening and taught a Sunday school class and taught the Word again during week nights. He wasn't paid. In fact the director of our choir wasn't paid. She volunteered. She and her family attended church regularly. Our pianist wasn't paid and she and her husband taught Sunday school. Several of us as teenagers were teaching Sunday school at the ripe old age of sixteen. There was no Christian education budget, that came out of the teachers pocket. There was no youth budget; that came out of the youth worker's pocket. We didn't have a custodian; we all pitched in and kept the church clean. When we left our neighborhoods Sunday morning for church, we would pick up kids and families and take them with us. For fifteen years I was a mechanic that worked with youth weeknights and weekends. It never occurred to me that this was anything but normal.

As I look at the paragraph above I note that I have used the little word "we" a lot. Maybe that was the secret. All of us were volunteers working together, working hard together for the Lord. We worked. We volunteered! We paid our tithe. We did a good job and the church was healthy, not perfect but healthy.

Somewhere down the road our doctrine took a turn, a twist and the simple Gospel or maybe our gospel became the entrance to a confusing maze. We turned soft and academic. Messages had to become more eloquent, more relevant to where we were, rather than where we should be. We became more efficient, more professional. Nickels & noses ... noses & nickels! Working in the church was gradually replaced by sitting in the church. Old fashioned workers and volunteers got the picture. They became obsolete. Join the crowd!

It's true, we can never go back, nor is it necessary to go back, but the lessons we can learn from looking back are many. God was the creator of the work ethic, and it's been with us since Adam. God worked. He rested, and it was good! He created the servant and serving relationship. It was His idea to have His church full of excited volunteers, hard working servants for the sake of His Kingdom. It looks to me like this is the way He had it planned all along.

In every church, we find a small core of volunteers, almost always an overlooked and an overworked minority, but faithful! The twenty percent of unpaid and unsung heroes that keep the church running. The little "suckers" that do the work. Saints that God caught, and put to work in His vineyard. I would like to hug them all! These are the people we need to encourage. Truly an endangered species, a vanishing breed. Do volunteers have to die out? Can a Godly work ethic be revived? Will there again come a time when we will be caught working hard for God, committed to taking a task and seeing it through? Can the Church once again become fueled by the Spirit of God combined with the energy of a committed people? Yes, it's possible! Not only is it possible but it is absolutely essential that the church reverse itself from the indolent, top heavy pyramid it is today to a people-proportioned body of working believers, whose vocation is church building and whose avocation is keeping bread on their own table! What a healthy reversal that would be!

Where did all God's little servants go? They were quietly buried one by one.