There are new demands for churches

to pay council rates on their properties used for religious purposes. It is perhaps a quirk of the law they don't. The actual amount councils lose is not that great. The amount they might lose if they were allowed to demand rates be paid on these premises might be far higher.

The number of people who now go to church each Sunday is a very small proportion of the population. When I was a mere kitten it was much higher. It may even have been a majority of the population. It was something you just did. I doubt many people even thought about what they were doing. It was a habit. If you didn't go yourself you sent the kids off to Sunday School so you could have a bit of a lie in or time with your partner.

So church going might be a thing of the past for many people but reliance on churches has increased. It sounds unlikely but it is a fact. Anglicare is the biggest social welfare organisation outside government. Yes, it gets government assistance to run the many services it runs but it relies heavily on volunteers. Those volunteers are becoming increasingly hard to find. They are getting older. Like everyone else their disposable income to cover the cost of volunteering is less than it was before. Yes, it can cost more than time to volunteer. There are people who volunteer every week, even every day.

St Vincent de Paul does the same. Our local charity shop runs on volunteers alone. It's a big building. At one end is the space for "Fred's Van" the section which feeds people living on the streets. I go in at times to help with people who have "left their glasses home" - in other words are illiterate and need more than simply a form filled out but I do very little. I am not one of those who turn up day after day dealing with so many people who need so much.

The Uniting Church, the Baptists, the Lutherans and yet still more all have a range of services. They have charity shops (for which they often do pay rent to landlords) to provide clothing, household goods and more.  Almost all those places have people working in them who give still more in other ways.

And they all, even allowing for inevitable waste of resources, run on far less than it would take for the government to take over and run the same services at the same level. What councils lose in rates is more than made up for in what they gain in services. Perhaps it is time they looked at that before making a renewed demand for churches and volunteers to do and pay still more.