"And with you in all the work will be every volunteer who has skill for any kind of service….. Who then will offer willingly, consecrating themselves today to the Lord? " (1 Chron.28.21 & 29.5 NRSV).

The great Temple of Solomon was classified by the ancients as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It was made possible and built by voluntary service, by men imbued with an ideal. King David knew that the dream of his life would not be achieved by himself. In these words, he told his son the Crown Prince Solomon that there would be an army of voluntary workers at his disposal. He then turned to his counsellors and elder statesmen, he appealed through them to all Israel to give of themselves and their property to help forward this great work.

Our materialistic age looks with some scorn upon people who render voluntary service. The whole idea is out of date. If Solomon's Temple was to be built to-day there would be half-a-dozen big "property development" concerns scrambling for the contract, and no matter which one got it the price would be pretty high. Solomon's Temple was a marvellously ambitious structure. It has been calculated that with the gold and silver, copper and iron, rare woods and hewn stone used in its construction it must have cost the Israelitish king the equivalent of a hundred and fifty million pounds (over two hundred and fifty million dollars) of today's money for material alone. And the labour at to-day's trade union rates would have set him back another hundred millions. Then there would have to be the contractors' profits and the architect's fees and compensation for all sorts of people whose real or imagined rights could be shown by their legal representatives to have been infringed by the project, and of course those same legal men's expenses and some associated court costs. Solomon in later life did most regrettably inflict some heavy taxation on his people but had the Temple been built by modern methods he would probably have had to extract some four hundred millions from those same long-suffering subjects on the Temple project alone before the contractors would hand over the key. King David knew a better way. "Every willing skilful man . . . for any kind of service . .. willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord". That was how the most magnificent place of worship the world has ever known—with the possible exception of Herod's Temple, later erected on the same site was built.

Even among many Christian communities the ideal of voluntary service for the Lord is not exemplified as it should be. How many churches and chapels there are surrounded by a tangled mass of grass, weeds and overgrown shrubs which by the efforts of a dedicated band of amateur gardeners from the congregation could be turned into little oases of beauty in what are only too often drab and unprepossessing surroundings! How many ministers and pastors could intensify their powers for good tenfold with the aid of a small group of helpers devoted to taking the more mundane tasks of ministry off their shoulders! If the local place of worship is an earthly outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven - and it should be - then surely even physically it should reflect some of that beauty which is an attribute of the Kingdom of Heaven. "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ" was the Apostle's admonition. Many of our readers are members of groups where some of these ideals are put into practice—there is room for much extension of this among many Christian bodies. The outside world might even take notice at last and wonder if, after all, there might not be something in the idea of doing something for nothing. The pulpit is not the only platform from which sermons are preached.

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Go, labour on, spend, and be spent,
Thy joy to do the Father's will;
It is the way the Master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?

H.Bonar