c. 2008 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Here’s a question: How many days of reckoning does it take to straighten out our lives? Whatever your count, you can add one more: a day of reckoning in Christian stewardship.
That’s right. The subject hardly anyone wants to talk about can be added to recession woes. Why? Well, because hardly anyone wanted to talk about it.
Here’s the landscape we’re looking at: A housing bubble has burst, creating staggering losses. A wild run-up of personal indebtedness has crashed to Earth, leaving people owing 20 percent more than they earn. Large corporations are facing the grim consequences of ignoring market realities, padding executive salaries, choosing mergers over innovation, and cutting jobs more readily than rethinking their business models.
With jobs lost or endangered and discretionary cash evaporating, it’s no surprise that charitable giving by individuals is declining. Even in wealthy enclaves that are supposedly insulated from everyday woes, seats at charity dinners are empty. Nonprofits are trimming their development targets.
How does all this affect churches? From a pastoral and program standpoint, this is when faith communities earn their stripes. People need care. They need to be helped over the hurdle of panic at not having much money, and over the larger hurdle of having to rethink their lives and values. This is repentance time for millions of Americans who joined the reckless pursuit of wealth and comfort.
Now is the time for churches to offer career guidance, values clarification, free events that will be just as enjoyable as extravagance, financial and housing assistance, and glimpses of a God whose steadfast love is never tied to prosperity.
Congregations that taught stewardship will have the funds and staff necessary for such ministry. Congregations that lapsed into “charitable giving,” however, will find their budgets barely at survival level.
Biblical stewardship, you see, is grounded in a three-part belief:
_ The first fruits of the harvest are returned to God in thanksgiving. That “tithe” always comes first, because without God’s providence there would be no harvest.
_ It goes to a flawed enterprise that, at its best, is concerned with serving people.
_ It is given in gratitude, because without thanksgiving our souls shrivel.
Church fundraising, unfortunately, has drifted into “charitable giving,” alongside donations to favorite museums and schools. Charitable giving flows from generosity, of course, but within it is a strong element of control, noblesse oblige, and calculation of tax advantage. That doesn’t leave much room for the humble submission of true gratitude.
During flush times, charitable giving is a tide that lifts all boats, including churches. In lean times, however, churches discover that they are last in line, receiving the leftovers, not the first fruits. The harvest has been spent before the church’s annual appeal rises to the surface.
Church leaders are reaping their own harvest. They avoided the tithe as indelicate and avoided serious stewardship education as a turnoff. A few wealthy members were asked to rescue the budget every year, rather than teaching accountability and gratitude. By allowing themselves to be bullied into silence on the topic that dominated the teachings of Jesus, church leaders have fashioned their own trap.
Now we face relentless pressure to cut church spending at the very moment our constituents and neighbors need us the most.
Rather than push through people’s resistance to money talk, church leaders avoided the one topic they should have been addressing.
Now comes our day of reckoning.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
KRE/LF END EHRICH650 words
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