Service is in His DNA

Will Giacometti did not come to service through a single defining moment. He came to it the way most things that last tend to arrive, quietly, gradually, and through the people around him. When I sat down with him, he was quick to deflect. "I'm not an expert in anything," he said, laughing a little. What he is actually involved in tells a different story 

At any given point, he is either just out of a committee room, heading into one, or spending an evening with young people at Turramurra Uniting Church (TUC), a congregation on Sydney's upper north shore, where he has been a constant presence for most of his life. 

For the past two years he has been part of the leadership team at Evolve, an evening service at TUC that began in October 2023 as a complete reimagining of what church could look like for young adults. It runs largely on volunteer energy, functions in Will's words like a startup, and has grown to around thirty people each week. He also sits on the church council, bridging the two communities, and has been working in youth ministry long enough to have developed some clear-eyed views about what actually works with young people. More recently, he joined the Synod's Three Presbyteries (3P) Transition Commission to sit with regional congregations and understand challenges that look very different from anything he encounters at home. 

What he has helped to built at Evolve is perhaps where his thinking is most visible. When the group started, the impulse was to strip things back, to get away from structure and liturgy and anything that felt like the church they were trying to reimagine. Over time, something shifted. "We've actually gone back the other way," Will told me. They reintroduced a call to worship. The old rhythms, held differently, began to mean something again. "If you asked us two years ago, we would have hated that," he said. He has watched people get more connected to their faith, more willing to take it seriously. "I think it's a community that values each other but also wants to be better at witnessing Jesus Christ in their lives." 

His views on youth engagement are similarly unromantic. Young people, he says, have a sharp instinct for what is genuine and what is not. They are not looking for spectacle. They are not looking for something watered down either. "How do you adapt it to them in a way that doesn't water it down?" is the question he keeps returning to. He is also frank about where the broader church still falls short, scheduling things at times that only work for people who are retired or work for the church, using language that obscures rather than invites, including young people through quotas without actually drawing on what they bring. 

The 3P work has added another layer to that understanding. Sitting in a meeting in rural Kempsey and hearing congregations describe not having enough people to form a church council recalibrated something in him. "I had to pull myself back and go, well, we haven't really had it that bad," he said. It has made him more convinced that the transition, for all its messiness, is pointing in the right direction. "It's about common life and wealth across the whole of New South Wales.” 

His journey has not always been fun and rewarding. 

On one of the harder days, he picked up his Bible almost at random. The first line he read was from 2 Corinthians 4. ‘Do not lose heart.’ It was exactly what he needed during a deflating period where he questioned whether his work was truly changing people. That, in many ways, is how Will moves through all of it. 

When I asked what drives him, he did not hesitate. "To me, leadership is actually service," he said. "The fundamental role of a leader is to serve the people that they're leading." He traced that conviction back through his family. His parents, he said, are servant-hearted people. His grandfather gave his whole life to service, most recently as treasurer of Hornsby Connect, a charity that provides food to people experiencing homelessness. When his grandfather passed away in January, one of his final acts from his hospital bed was to formally resign from that role. Will did not say much about it. He did not need to. "It's part of who I am," he said. "It's part of my DNA." 

And when you look at everything he is quietly building, that much is clear.