These relationships are important for practical support. They provide an important part of the network of social relationships which comes into play when people need help. The Australian Community Survey asked the following question:

If you or someone in your family had serious financial problems, do you think you could count on any of the following people for help?

A range of options were given: close friends, neighbours, relatives, people from a local church, from a charity or from a community group.

Most people turned first to their relatives, then close friends. Comparatively few people turn to their neighbours. Many Australians will turn next to an organised charity.

As might be expected, church attenders were much more certain they could draw on other church attenders and on charities in a time of serious financial need.
It was notable, however, that church attenders had significantly higher expectations that they could count on their neighbours and on community groups to help them and higher expectations that they would receive help from one source or another.

There was also a tendency visible in the graph, that they were more confident that relatives and friends would help. However, these trends were not statistically significantly.

Nevertheless, people who said that most or all of their friends went to church were more likely to expect they would be able to receive help from those friends than those who said that none or only some of their friends went to church. The proportion expecting their friends to help rises from 52% of those who said none of their friends went to church to 71% of those who said all their friends went to church.

It is interesting to note, however, that church attenders were a little less likely than non-attenders to have loaned money to friends in the past twelve months. Only 26% per cent of church attenders said they had loan money to someone outside the family compared with 35 per cent of non-attenders.

However, church attenders were more likely to have helped in other ways. Significantly more church attenders said they had helped people in a personal crisis, visited someone in hospital, or cared for someone sick or elderly in the past twelve months than had non-attenders. They were also more likely to have donated money to charity or given money to overseas aid.

The Australian population sees the Asked about the functions of churches in community life, the function most strongly affirmed as important for churches was 'encouraging good morals'. Ninety-three per cent of the sample of Australian adults identified this as an important function of churches and 47% of Australians saw it as the MOST important function. This compares with 40% of the sample who saw the churches' primary function as providing opportunities for worship .

Furthermore, the encouragement of moral values was the area in which people felt the churches had contributed most. Thirty-six per cent of the sample reported that the churches had contributed quite a lot in this way in their local area and an additional 29 per cent affirmed that churches had contributed a great deal.

Certainly, the Australian Community Survey found that church attenders affirmed more strongly the values of helpfulness and altruism. It would appear from these results that those values do translate both into the behaviour of church attenders, and what other members of the community expect of them.