Does following Jesus mean you just pick up a lot more volunteer hours?

As someone with a master’s degree in nonprofit leadership, this question has haunted me for a long time. In this article, you’ll find how I’ve been grappling with the subject, followed by a story about a girl who attends church for the first time and gets more than she bargained for, followed by some of my favorite Dallas Willard quotes. Take from it what is encouraging to you. :)

The day I discovered I was a fake

I remember the specific time when I finally understood that Jesus came not to make me someone who acts like a loving person, but someone who truly is a loving person.

One is a manufactured behavior. One is a natural expression. One is stressful. One is natural.

For much of my life, I had tried and tried to act like a good Jesus follower “should”, and just ended up exhausted and angry. I would almost count the “good” things I had done that day, trying my hardest to see whether I measured up. Not just did I pray, but did I pray enough? Not just did I read, but did I read enough?

I’ll be brief:

Jesus didn’t come to put you into a behavior modification program.

Jesus didn’t come to take off the rough edges and make you more palatable to church folk.

Jesus didn’t come to help you “act” loving while you scrape by.

Jesus didn’t come so you can log more church volunteer hours.

Why did Jesus come?

My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. — John 10:10

He came to give YOU—you, sitting right there—a rich and satisfying life.

It doesn’t have to look this way.

And no, that life does not mean: an affluent, suburban life of stylish brunches with Christian concerts and conferences on Saturdays. Church volunteering on Sundays. Attending small groups and team meetings during the week. Excelling in your high-powered job. Winning spiritually through life-hack podcast episodes and self-help books. Sprinkling in Christian t-shirts and worship music into your high-impact gym times, hair, and fake lash appointments. Postable and encouraging Bible times during the week.

Goodness, I’m tired from just typing all that out. That’s not even all we expect!

What the heck are we even doing?

None of those things are bad on their own. Obviously. A lot of that can be good when done with discernment of God’s heart for you and others, your unique season and all that.

But a lot of it also sounds similar to our culture’s expectations of us, with a few Jesus-platitudes sprinkled in.

So…basically, what we’re saying is: Jesus died so we could be busy in churchy places and with churchy people? So we’d have more Jesusy options for where to volunteer? Seriously? How do we think that?

So there’s more to it?

There’s more to that rich and satisfying life Jesus wants for you. If you feel a longing in your soul for something deeper, richer, fuller…there’s a reason.

You’re created for something that makes a real and living impact where? In the quietest, loneliest, most desperate part of your soul. (Not that you struggle in particular, of course;)

The hard part of it

The hard part?

It is absolutely, 100% the opposite of what we’ve come to expect in other areas of our lives.

It is transformative, but not fast.

It is simple, but not easy.

It is real, but not visible.

And how are we supposed to invest energy into something slow, focused and hidden when we are constantly told that only what is right-now, controllable and visible truly matters?

In a word? It’s hard. I’ll be honest. It is.

It’s not glamorous. Not every valley will end with a book deal. Most will never see the progress you make, at least, most will not recognize it.

But maybe that’s part of what it means to follow Jesus in 2022.

That’s completely unproductive

In a time of influencers and quantifiable significance in the form of followers, Jesus still asks us to go with him into the hidden and invisible places where he is working. He asks us to slow down to really see others in a time when most are just clamoring to be seen.

He is asking us to abide with him and simply be with him—activities that don’t have any productive value or advancement potential at all. Sitting in silence. Enjoying time together. Nothing visible produced. No fresh insights to preach. Nothing to show, but time “wasted”. Together.

He is asking us to elevate others. To look not only our own interests and those like us, but to the stories, pains and struggles of people we can’t relate to at all. To listen to the people who tell us they don’t feel accepted fully at church. To sit in silence with people as they grieve. To slow down and sort through the burdens of our lives in this complex world together.

My favorite quote these days?

“We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

Summing it up

Volunteer at church. But only do it if you actually want to. Whether from a sense of appreciation for what they give. Or maybe just because you love Christ and passing out a bulletin is the most practical way to show him right now.

Post and share your journey. But remember everything you do matters to Jesus, in the most loving way possible. If you’ve been sick on your couch for two weeks, he sees you. If you are showing up to a dead-end job to keep food on the table, he is proud of you. If you feel estranged from faith communities that once meant everything to you, he is still with you.

So to wrap this up, how would we answer the big question?

No: Jesus did not come so we would pick up more volunteer hours.

He came to give you a rich and satisfying life. Volunteer all you want, but don’t stop looking until you find it.

A Young Woman Walks into Church for the First Time…

A young woman just out of college comes to Jesus. She doesn’t know much about it but she knows her friend goes to church.

Imagine with me her experience at church:

This young woman messages her friend and they ride to church together. She didn’t grow up in church, so the whole thing is nerve-wracking to her. She’s just been to a few Bible studies in college but has mainly done some reading in the Bible on her own. She walks into the church and sees friendly faces. That’s a relief. She must not stick out too much, even though she feels completely out of place. The service is encouraging..She doesn’t understand everything going on, but she knows she feels something genuine and real here. It’s hard to change her Sunday routine of yoga in the park, but she likes it enough to continue attending with her friend and learning more. She likes learning more about Jesus, even if the church stuff weirds her out at times. She typically goes to the first service and then catches up with her family after for the rest of the day.

After a few months of attending, the church does a big push for serving. Serving? Like, volunteering? She thinks. She likes volunteering sometimes and signs up for the next-step class they host for newcomers like herself. She attends the group the next Sunday. She assumes it might have different booths where she can see what opportunities are available to volunteer, like a volunteer fair in college. She’d love to help teach kids dance or coach a kid’s basketball team. She’d done those things in the past. And if she can learn more about Jesus while doing it, even better. At this point, her fascination with Jesus keeps growing and she loves learning more about him.

She arrives on the day to a bunch of tables set up. But not like a volunteer fair. People are mingling and sitting. Coffee’s going, which she’s thankful for. She stayed up too late watching her show the night before. There are about thirty people. She recognizes someone from service and asks to sit with them. Each table contains little booklets. She picks one up. Flipping through the booklet, she realizes there might be a whole lot more to this Jesus-following than she thought. She starts skimming through the pages to see what they’ll be discussing over the next few weeks.

The first pages are encouraging. She recognizes the same story she’s come to understand about who Jesus is. He made it possible for her to be accepted by God. He’s making her into a new person. She loves that. It talks about how church is a big part of the story. How Jesus brought her to himself and also to the Church, like this one here. She doesn’t know what that means fully.

Moving on from there, she sees there’s something called a small group for “fellowship”. That seems like the studies she went to a few times. She usually liked those in college. And then she sees the booklet goes on to talk about how it’s good to attend one service and then volunteer at another one. She looks down the list…people can be greeters, be on the music team, make coffee, work with kids or teenagers, do media stuff, or help with set-up. None of those things really sound interesting to her. Plus, that will decrease the amount of time with her family, so she’s not sure about that.

Further down, the booklet discusses blocking out time every day to read the Bible and pray. Then fasting…She thought she remembered an article about how that wasn’t healthy. She made a mental note to check. Later on in the pages, she sees quarterly give-back events where it’s good to “love on” people…Strangers? What does it mean to “love on” people? Do I just talk to them? Is that loving them? She thinks. She also sees they have some partnerships with a couple of nonprofits in the area. One is a homeless shelter, where volunteers can help make/serve food, and the other is a domestic violence shelter, where vetted people can help lead Bible studies and collect clothing and household goods for people staying there. Neither of the times works with her work schedule, but she’s not exactly excited about them anyway. She wants to help people, but those seem out of her wheelhouse.

They also list service trips where you “love on people” in new cities and even countries. Do they not have churches there that can do it? She wonders. She would need to take vacation time for that, and she was already planning to go to Florida with her family. That could be a problem. She then scans further down and sees some information about donations..Or, at least, she thinks it’s a donation. They call it “tithe”. It’s 10% of her income given back to the church. She likes donating places and there’s a verse next to it, but 10% seems kind of arbitrary to her. If that’s what she has to do, she’ll do it, although she has some questions. She gets that nonprofits need funding to operate.

Checking back into the room, she hears the people in the class say something people at the college study would say: “It’s a relationship, not a religion.” She’s not 100% sure what that means, but she’s feeling a little overwhelmed by looking ahead in the booklet. They say you don’t have to do this stuff, but they also say this is how people “grow” in Jesus. Was what she’s been doing not enough? Is God frustrated with her? She started to feel a little anxious.

There’s a lot more to all of this than she thought. So, all of these people do all of these things? This is following Jesus? She’s feeling a little more stressed than when she came in. So far, she had enjoyed reading about Jesus and listening to podcasts her friend suggested. She had started praying about things that are stressful for her, and it helped. It’s been amazing.

But she didn’t realize she’d been doing it wrong this whole time, and there was so much more she needed to do. She really loves Jesus, but she doesn’t really want to spend all of her few hours of time off from work, household and family responsibilities volunteering and doing all of this stuff with these people she doesn’t even know. She thinks: I mean, yeah, they’re friendly, but I’d rather see my family. Maybe this isn’t the right thing for me after all.

Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors. He is both a Stanford philosopher and a spiritual pragmatist, with a knack for wrangling the abstract principles of Jesus into the realm of everyday life. I’ll leave you with some of my favorite quotes below.

“Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.”
― Dallas Willard

“We are flooded with what I have called ‘gospels of sin management,’ in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now — right in the midst of work, business, and profession — remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.”

― Dallas Willard

“The command is “Do no work.” Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don’t have to DO to BE. Accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship