As I contemplated my first stewardship campaign as a pastor, this little story came to mind: A mother found her young son crying one morning as he was tying his shoes. “Why are you crying?” she asked.
“I have to tie my shoes,’ he sobbed.
“But you just learned how. It isn’t that hard, is it?”
“But I’m gonna have to do it the rest of my life!” he wailed.
Those were roughly my sentiments. The whole stewardship campaign had been hotly debated by the elders, with the battle lines drawn between the so-called idealists and the so-called hardboiled realists. The idealists saw offering plates and pledge cards as an intrusion into the sanctity and purity of the fellowship. The realists saw it as a like-it-or-not necessity. The idealists were quoting Scripture and saying, “Let God provide.” The realists were mixing their Scripture with Benjamin Franklin and saying,
“God helps those who help themselves.” The idealists accused the realists of having no faith. The realists accused the idealists of not wanting to take responsibility.
Both were wrong, as I later learned. Pledge cards and offering plates are neither intrusions nor necessities, at least in the sense of the hard-boiled realist, but rather an integral part of Christian worship. They’re the proper climax of our response to what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Actually, both groups were laboring under the same delusion. Both saw the stewardship campaign as a fund-raising event. Both were like the little girl in the cartoon who asked her mother as she walked out of church, “Why was the commercial so long?” The only real difference between the two groups was that one wanted to do fund raising with commercials and the other did not.
The Apostle Paul would tell us that the collecting of money in the church is God’s way of keeping worship from degenerating into frothy, empty sentimentality. This is most apparent near the end of his first letter to the Corinthians, where he first writes his magnificent apologia for the Resurrection “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. … If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”
There are some very direct ethical implications when he says, “But Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” That means we too shall share in his victory over death.
Paul brings his argument to a climax saying, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Now about the collection for God’s people”: And what follows is a set of instructions for the Corinthians’ stewardship campaign. We should note that Paul’s original letter was not divided into chapters.
This pattern is typical of Paul and of the entire New Testament. He moves from the most lofty theology and praise of God to the most mundane implications of that theology in everyday life. Here he forges a direct link between the resurrection of Jesus, the hope of eternal life it brings to us, and how this should result in diligent, productive work for the Lord, and in the collection of money. If the movement from the Resurrection to a chart of accounts seems abrupt to us, it can be only because we are given to sentimentalizing the gospel. Paul believed our love and gratitude should be as hard and tough as the coins we drop into the offering plate.
The story is told about a minister being on an airplane that developed engine trouble. The passengers began to panic, and someone cried out, “Why doesn’t somebody do something religious?” So the minister took an offering.
That should not be a joke, but a concise statement of good Christian theology. When I ask my church members to get concrete and specific about the financial dimension of their relationship to God, I’m not doing anything that is fundamentally different from giving an altar call or serving communion or encouraging a parishioner to read the Bible. All are woven into the same fabric of spiritual worship.
It helps me to run all of the above thoughts through my mind each time I get ready for our stewardship campaign. It not only saves me from defensiveness and hype, it reminds me I’m not raising money for a budget, but rather calling my people to faithfulness.
There’s another thing I like to think about too. It’s very personal. The first six months of our marriage, my wife Lauretta and I were in severe financial straits. One month before our wedding I’d been fired from a job I’d been counting on to support. us. Lauretta sold cameras at Penney’s, but all I could find was a commission-only job selling swimming pools. From a mathematical standpoint, there was no way we could meet our obligations. It took more to pay rent and buy food than we actually had coming in.
One of the two pools I sold during that period was to a Christian man who lived near the beach. The day I went to his house to pick up his final payment, I brought my wife along with the idea of going on from there to the beach. He invited us in for coffee and, while he was writing out his check, launched into a discourse on the joys of tithing, interspersed with personal testimony on how God had blessed him since he began to tithe.
Lauretta and I hadn’t even considered giving, let alone tithing. It was impossible for us, we thought. But as we listened to this man, we were both deeplv convicted of two things: One was that the money of which we thought we didn’t have enough, wasn’t ours, but God’s. The other was that we were his too. He was our Father, and it was his responsibility to meet our needs.
As we started out the door, the man told us he’d been praying that morning, and that as he prayed, he felt led of God to talk to us about tithing. He said he hoped we weren’t offended or thought he was crazy for telling us that We assured him that was not the case. On the way to the beach, Lauretta and I talked the whole thing over and decided we should begin to tithe. Then we began to laugh as we thought of how crazy the whole thing seemed. Here we were with not enough to live on, and now we were committed to taking ten percent right off the top of what we did get to give back to God!
For weeks we’d felt cramped and oppressed- suddenly we felt free. We were so low financially what did we have to lose? What did ten percent of nothing matter? Even if we hadn’t believed the gospel, the naked act of giving away what little we had was a declaration of freedom, a statement that we would not be bound by what is. But we did believe, and we knew, to paraphrase out of context the words of a song, that “freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.”
I’ve reflected theologically on that line. Ultimately the brute fact is that we do have nothing left to lose because we will lose it all in death. The Christian has the glorious opportunity to recognize that and let go now; choose, as it were, the time of his death But to let go and die now is to let God have it all, since it’s his anyway, and trust his promise that we’ll receive it all back. Just as freedom is only another word for nothing left to lose, in the Christian economy, life comes from death, and gain from loss .
So I believe in stewardship campaigns because it’s right that God’s people, out of love and gratitude, return to God what he has given to them. It’s my responsibility as a pastor to put that before my congregation systematically and forthrightly But for more personal reasons, I call my congregation to tithing because it’s fun. I believe I’m inviting them to an adventure in trust and freedom.
Yes, it’s true my wife and I have never lacked for our needs since we began to tithe; but more important is the fact that when we began to tithe, we were liberated from anxiety and calculation. That was our deepest need-not rent and food-but freedom and hope. There’s a lot of the gospel found in the command to tithe.
But only the dying can see this. “I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks his host at the door,” writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. … There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.”
Seeing. That’s what it’s all about. Seeing who is really in charge around here. Seeing the freedom of losing it all in the one from whom it all came. Seeing that giving until it hurts is really an invitation to give until it stops hurting.
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