June 2, 2023

Stewardship: Of Money

I am not sure if Jesus was having a bad day or was just being incredibly candid. For whatever reason, at the end of Luke chapter 14 (vv25-35), Jesus offers a fairly stark portrait of what it means to be his disciple. ‘You must make great sacrifices to follow me,’ Jesus asserts. You should hold all your familial ties loosely. Following Jesus may mean saying goodbye to your family. It will require much of you, so much that if you don’t give up all your possessions you cannot follow Jesus.

Ouch!

Our assets, our possessions and our money, define our financial worth. Any way you look at it, our possessions and our finances are, if you pardon the pun, two sides of the same coin. And of the many themes of that are covered in the Bible about faithful living, maybe the most common is the use of money and possessions. A former spiritual director of mine, echoing Jesus’ rather abrupt words from Luke, informed me that the Bible offers two options regarding Christian stewardship of our resources: the Old Testament says we must give at least 10% away; the New Testament says we must give it all away. This spiritual counsel could be considered hyperbole, except this person was a monk. He literally had given everything away.

In the church in Jerusalem shortly after Pentecost, people sold all their possessions and distributed them so that everyone had adequacy, no matter how much they contributed. Throughout church history, from the early Jerusalem church to churches around the world today, there are many examples of our sisters’ and brothers’ radical redistribution of assets. 

So what are we to make of all this? The federal government considers a church non-profit organization, like public television or radio. People attend churches and find them a helpful resource in their lives and so they contribute to the church to keep that resource afloat. This is very much like what happens when someone donates to public radio or television, except that we don’t give out tote bags.

For Christians, the question of the stewardship of our assets should not be ‘are we getting enough bang for our buck from our church?’, but rather ‘how we are growing in our stewardship of the money and resources God has given us to manage?’ Likewise, we as a congregation need to discern together how we best steward the assets our community has gathered from our tithes, offerings, and investments. However much we keep for ourselves—as individuals or as a church—or give away, we need to ask the question of are we becoming the best stewards of God’s resources we can be? It’s not a matter of having met some particular threshold of stewardship. The question is: are we growing in this important area of our spiritual life from year to year, not have we arrived.

Later today a stewardship pledge survey will be sent to each giving unit in our church. This is very important for us as a church because it determines how many resources we will have to steward and what ministries we can do with those resources. The year you are being asked to estimate your giving for is our church fiscal year, which starts in September and ends the following August. I pray in the not-to-distant future, I will have a full-time pastoral colleague sharing Christ’s ministry at First Covenant Church with me. Although I would not expect this person will become wealthy in this role, I would hope they would always have adequate resources without taking on another source of income or leave before their ministry has hit its stride because they could not afford living in Seattle. This is but one stewardship question our church leadership must address. Your submitting these anonymous surveys are a tremendous resource in helping us make our stewardship decisions.

These surveys will not be anonymous to you. You know your financial situation and you know how much you are able to pledge. I pray you take this as an opportunity to grow spiritually in the area of financial stewardship. If anyone would like to talk to me about this, please do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to share my own struggles and successes in this area.

May God grant us all wisdom and courage as we consider our giving for the upcoming fiscal year.

With genuine thanks for your continued generosity as a church,

~ Pastor Todd