Massive Services #1 - The Church

First in a series exploring the oldest and biggest services

Service, at its core, is moving a person, group, or thing from one situation to a better one. For millennia, the church has stood as the oldest and largest institution dedicated to this principle, aspiring to operate at the highest moral level - not just progress, but transformation. Despite its flaws, contradictions, and controversies, the church remains a monumental force in the history of human service.

In this series of articles on MASSIVE SERVICES I want to explore what happens when the act of service becomes institutionalised into services. This is the first in the series, which focuses on religion. Others will focus on the military, healthcare, education and civil service. I’ve worked on pretty much all of them as a service designer, so I’ll be bringing a bit of that to each story (religion is the only one to have evaded me). In writing each one I’ve tried to reach out to people I know who inhabit each world, to broaden my reference. Thanks to Tom and Nick. If you know anyone who serves in any of the above fields, and you think they might have an interesting take on what it means to serve, please do let me know.

A couple of notes:

1. I’ll be using the word “church” a lot in here. But actually I'm casting a big net to capture any institutional “place of worship” - so don't think just Catholics or Church of England, think Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism etc. Basically I'm talking about religion as a form of service.

2. I'm not religious. I was once. I was even “confirmed” at 13, but I then read an introduction to an Introduction to Religious Philosophy and in crept the doubt and out went all conviction. I'd say I'm an agnostic now, whilst also being a pretty piss poor Buddhist. I share many of the values espoused by various religions, especially as they relate to being in service of others. But I struggle with the dogma.

Service as Transformation: The Church’s Moral Mission

From my reading, I think the church’s purpose can be distilled into one simple idea: the betterment of the human condition. Whether it’s the salvation of the soul, the feeding of the hungry, or the building of communities, the church seeks to bring individuals and societies closer to an ideal state of existence.

At its best, the church serves humanity in three profound ways:

1. Spiritual Transformation: offering hope, forgiveness, and meaning in a chaotic world.

2. Social Transformation: building institutions that educate, heal, and nurture.

3. Moral Transformation: providing a framework for selflessness, compassion, and love.

Walk into any church today and you’ll find an institution dedicated to service across these three areas. Although it’s arguable waned over the years, members of a church are expected to serve in their community, to progress local transformation. Each church is effectively a local service machine, providing food banks, charity to the homeless, help for the elderly, visits to prisoners, and letter writing campaigns. They are outward in intent, recognising the inward value of selfless giving.

Every church has its clear focus on service.

1. Christianity. Jesus said “I come not to be served but to serve.”

2. Islam. The Prophet Muhammad said “The best among you are those who bring the greatest benefit to others.”

3. Sikhism. Guru Nanak said “Seva (selfless service) is the highest duty, and through it, the Divine is realised.”

4. Hinduism. The Bhagavad Gita says: “Work done in the spirit of service, without desire for reward, is truly selfless and leads to liberation.”

5. Judaism. The Talmud says: “The world stands on three things: Torah, service, and acts of loving-kindness.”

6. Buddhism. The Buddha said: “As a bee gathers nectar and moves on, without harming the flower’s beauty or fragrance, just so should the wise serve others.”

Religions don’t merely aim to help individuals; they seek to elevate humanity itself, aspiring to operate on what many consider the highest moral plane. This is the massive service commitment of religion. A space to transform your very soul. Big stuff.

Chicken or Egg: Did Religion Create Service, or Did Service Create Religion?

One question to kick us off. What came first? Was religion organised to encourage humans to help each other, or did an innate drive to help one another become organised into a religion to scale its efforts?

Well, the straight answer is, we don’t know. Arguments have been made on both sides. It seems to depend on your belief about original sin. If you believe we’re born into sin, then it’s likely you’ll believe we need stricture and scripture to keep us behaving well.

I’m more on the side of Daniel Dennett, who puts it this way: "Our moral intuitions are not the result of religious training but are instead a natural part of our biological heritage.”

I believe that humans were helping each other from the start, and that some committed individuals scaled this into an institution. This origin story is important to me, because the alternative suggests we had to be told to look after each other rather than compete. And the anthropological data seems to back this up. The discovery of a Neanderthal child’s remains in Spain, revealed that even a child suffering from congenital malformations (severe hearing loss and balance issues) was looked after, surviving to over six years of age. This would require extensive care and selfless support from the group. But maybe that was kin-level.

Also, studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies offer insights into early human behavior, and reveal that child-rearing responsibilities were often shared among group members, including non-kin. The theory is that these cooperative breeding systems, sometimes known as allomothering, came about as a form of altruism where individuals assist in raising offspring that are not their own, enhancing group cohesion and survival.

So I think that altruism (the drive to serve others) came before religion (the institutionalisation of service in our community). Nevertheless, having a supernatural omniscient or omnipotent being was probably a useful way to keep us in line! As Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff put it in God Is Watching You: "Belief in supernatural agents who monitor human behavior and punish cheaters... may have contributed to the emergence of prosocial behavior among strangers."

The Church as Humanity’s Greatest Service Network

So let’s assume we’re born with innate, prosocial and altruistic drives to serve others, whether kith or kin. And then life does its best to bash that instinct out of us. In this context the church is sin qua non the biggest service sustaining machine we have; the one from which all other services are seeded. Because it was so committed to human progress, it became the cornerstone of what would become our big services:

• Education and Knowledge: the Christian church preserved knowledge during the Dark Ages, built the first universities, and (eventually) championed literacy so individuals could read scripture. (Again - I’d like more reference points, across wider religions here, but don’t have them yet).

• Healthcare and Welfare: Hospitals, orphanages, and charity networks trace their origins to church activities. Religions tend to institutionalize care long before secular governments took responsibility. In many cases it was religious conviction that led the drive for change. Leading us onto…

• Advocacy for Justice: From abolition movements to modern human rights campaigns, the church has often played a key role in advocating for the marginalized.

One could argue that the last two centuries has seen the secular state replace the church in providing these services.

The church has shown a huge capacity to sustain the mobilisation of millions of people toward service, making it arguably the most effective service organization in history. They do this by:

1. Creating an onus to serve - a commitment to others

2. Creating a playbook for service - the scriptures

3. Making it easy to get into service - the infrastructure of volunteering, charity work and local care

From my discussions and reading I’ve heard a repeated refrain: people who serve in their community, often in the name of their religion, often hold that as their most proudest moments. Every modern message tells us that the road to feeling good is selfishness and competitiveness. But when we step into selflessness and service, we feel amazing. This speaks to our ancient wiring and how service runs deep.

The Institutionalisation of Religious Service: A Historical Perspective

Gradually over time, individual acts of service were formalised by religious institutions. There are a few stand out examples:

1. Monastic orders and charity. In medieval Europe, Benedictine and Franciscan monastic orders formalised education and hospitality, basically creating the first structured welfare systems. These monastic groups set up hospitals, preserved knowledge, and developed the model of almsgiving, laying the groundwork for modern social services.

2. Islamic Zakat and Waqf and social care. The Islamic principles of zakat (obligatory almsgiving) and waqf (charitable endowments) created some of the earliest known social safety nets. Waqf-funded institutions supported hospitals, schools, and public works, enabling the poor and sick to be looked after over the long-term. This model cam well before state-funded welfare programs and was an early form of institutional philanthropy.

3. Jewish Tzedakah and mutual aid. Jewish communities developed tzedakah (charitable giving) networks, bringing together communal support in the absence of state welfare. In medieval Jewish societies, formalised charitable funds ensured widows, orphans, and the poor didn’t go without.

4. Hindu Temples as early service hubs. In India, Hindu temples historically functioned as centres of education, healthcare, and food distribution. The annadanam (food donation) tradition still persists, with temples feeding millions every day as an act of dharma (duty).

5. Sikh Langar - radical equality in service. The Sikh practice of langar (community kitchens) is one of the most enduring forms of religious service, feeding people of all faiths and backgrounds. This system was revolutionary in its inclusivity, rejecting caste-based distinctions in service. A major step at the time.

By formalising service into institutions in these ways, religions ensured long-term, structured approaches to education, healthcare, and welfare - they took human instinct and scaled it - paving the way for the emergence of state-run services centuries later.

Moral Aspiration: Serving at the Highest Level

As well as providing day-to-day services, the church goes deeper - it claims to serve not just humanity but god - a higher moral authority. At its best this alignment gives church-led service a sense of transcendence and purpose.

• Altruism rooted in faith: At its best, religion inspires radical selflessness, epitomized by figures like Jesus, who washed the feet of his disciples, and saints like Mother Teresa, who cared for the "poorest of the poor."

• Moral guidance across time: The church has provided a moral compass for billions, offering frameworks like the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes as universal principles for better living.

This moral aspiration pushes service beyond just utility (feeding, clothing, housing), to encompass the higher level (shaping and (re)forming). In the church, service isn’t just transactional, it’s very much transformational, rooted in the belief that every soul is worth saving.

So people who serve others through their church can be said to be serving on three fronts:

1. Others - the promotion of selfless service, of putting love for others ahead of oneself, one’s kith and kin, is put front and centre. (Weirdly the subject of some major online trolling today.)

2. Self - church teachings clearly suggest that the route to personal salvation is through serving others, without expectation of reward. So by helpng others you are indirectly helping yourself.

3. God - by serving in the name of god, one is contributing to universal progress. Transactionally, everyone is following the same rule book, which helps keep “progress” in order, but at a higher level, god is the ultimate arbiter and judge of all the serving going on: one is accountable to him.

Neuroscientific studies have shown that religious experiences activate reward systems similar to those triggered by altruistic behaviour. So it could be said that each religion just found a clever playbook for sustaining those deep-seated neurological rewards, from self through to universe.

The Contradictions of Church Service

It’s worth noting at this point that it’s not all good news. While religious institutions are built on service, history reveals many contradictions too:

• Gender and Service: Women have historically performed the majority of religious service work (charity, education, caregiving), yet religious leadership remains overwhelmingly male. I plan to explore this in a future article.

• Conversion vs. Service: Many religions mix altruism with conversion efforts—sometimes noble, sometimes coercive. Aka “if you want into the club, you gotta pay your dues.” The ethos of service gets corrupted along the way.

• Abuse and Power: Religious institutions have covered up abuses in the name of forgiveness, exposing the tension between moral ideals and institutional self-preservation.

In these ways, the same institutions that have preached love and compassion have, at times, been responsible for immense suffering. Often this is because things are put the wrong way round:

• Shortcuts: All of this serving requires effort. The effort is usually the point. However, as humans we’re also notoriously lazy, and will look to shortcut the system. Also all institutions are prey to greed and corruption, with people open to providing shortcuts. Thus we end up in the “I pay you to serve others, so I can be cleansed” pitfall. Every religion has its example of karmic cleansing in buddhist circles or removal of sins in catholic ones. In all of these cases the work of service is bypassed or shortcut.

• Dogma: There have been innumerable instances where service to god has been weaponized, leading to violence and oppression. Usually this comes about because those doing the serving believe they know what is best for the “other”. In this way service is moved from a healthy horizontal plane (I help you, my equal, to progress in a way that is valuable to you) to an unhealthy vertical plane (I help you the ignorant to progress in a way that is valuable to me).

• Imbalance: Abuse scandals have many roots, but it appears to me that a common thread is a strain on the boundaries of service and forgiveness. For example, the Church of England has a history of moving abusers around the system, in the mistaken belief that individuals could recover and grow given time. In this sense, the church was serving the employee over (in this case) the child. Though superficially well meaning, this has lead to some very wrong-headed decisions.

These failures reveal the tension within the church: an institution led by humans working hard to enact divine service, yet susceptible to human flaws.

It demonstrates that being “in service” of something larger than yourself can lead to both amazing things and also tragedy. That anyone who serves needs to always remain on guard against classic human pitfalls.

And this applies to every service institution. There comes a point where someone steps just slightly away from selflessness towards selfishness, and warps the teachings to fit. That's where loyalty and service start to become twisted, dogma steps in, and trauma starts to build.

Conclusion: A Legacy of Service

The story of religion is the story of service. It has built schools and hospitals, fed the hungry, comforted the grieving, and inspired billions to serve. Its mission is far from complete, and its flaws are undeniable, but its legacy endures because it taps into something universal: the human need to serve and be served.

But as religious influence declines in many parts of the world, one question lingers: If religion disappears, will service disappear with it? And if service survives, will it look anything like what came before?