|
|
|
Mystic Congregational Church, UCC Sermon from November 7, 2004 “Stewardship Is …” Rev. Patricia L. Liberty and Keith Barker Scriptures: Stewardship is everything that you do after you say, “I believe”. Keith and I have been thinking and talking about that this week. I’m going to share with you some of our ponderings. When I think about what that means for me and how I move it from a concept out there that sounds pretty good to something that makes sense in my life. There are a couple of stops that I make along the way. The first is kind of basic truth that sounds really trite and is easy to sort of run right by but drives me up short on a fairly regular basis. That is life is a gift. Everyday, life is a gift. I first started thinking about that when I worked for a hospice. I would see people everyday for whom that gift of life was drawing to a close. It made me think about how precious time is and how short it is no matter how long we might live. Then, cancer came home to my family. My spouse has had cancer twice and we lived daily in the awareness that life is a very fragile and a very finite thing. It helps us to reshape some of what we think is important. So, life is a gift and being present to that gift in every moment is what makes life rich. But it is also for me the ground of Stewardship. Seeing every moment, every day as a gift from God knowing that you never know how many there are going to be after that backs me up to say, “How am I going to live this day? How am I going to be faithful in this day? How can I be mindful of God and how can I make that a base for my own faithfulness?” Now, it will take me the rest of my life to figure out how to answer that question consistently but that’s the journey of stewardship. The second stop on the way for me is the belief that God truly is the creator of all things—the world, the people, all of us, you, me, everybody, the people I like, the people I am not so sure about. God made us all. God’s fingerprint is on everything in creation. Therefore, everything is holy. Being a steward is about caring for that gift, honoring God’s creation. It means trying to live lightly on the earth. I have this little three-acre chunk of land for which I have a piece of paper that says we own it. But I don’t finally believe that we do. I think that it’s been entrusted to us for a short period of time and while it’s entrusted to us, we are going to try not to mess it up too much. So, we farm organically and we try and live lightly on this little patch of earth that is ours for the moment. We eat lower on the food chain because it’s better for the world, better for the environment. There are a lot of things that we struggle with to say, “Do we really need this?” “No, but I want it.” Well, the difference between what we need and what we want is about Stewardship. Finally, it also means using whatever gifts and abilities I have for something that matters. It is part of what drew me into ministry but it goes far beyond that. All of us, as our Scripture reminded us, are gifted by the Gifter. That is what God does. God gives gifts and they’re at work in all of you. The Stewardship journey is about claiming those gifts and using them for God’s glory. Keith: I cannot claim to be an organic farmer. I enjoy the products of it but I cannot claim to be the producer. Listening to those of you who spoke following the “I Believe” statement this morning, it sounds to some extent that we’re preaching to the choir. Literally, we’re doing that this morning which is a great satisfaction because we know that the message is, in fact, partly there already if not completely there. Let me take you back—I won’t say to my youth because that’s too far, I don’t remember that—a little way beyond where I am now. Those of you who do not recognize the accent will know, perhaps, I come from 3,000 miles east of Boston—from a church in the town of Sheffield in England. Now, at that time, we were pre-decimal and our coinage was silver coins and copper coins like we have here. Obviously, the pound note was the currency in paper form. The largest coin was the half-crown, two and sixpence, an eighth of a pound. It was a fairly large coin, about the size of an old dollar here. People used to give coins, primarily, at our church. That was the largest coin we had and so we used to give half a crown. The whole funding of the British Congregational Church was regional so we did not actually give to our church or give to our minister’s salary. We were giving to the region. Then the whole pot was put together and given back to the churches for their support. It enabled the weaker churches to benefit from the affluence of the larger churches which seemed to be a good idea. But we were giving coins. Now, the half-crown was demonitized and the largest coin then became the two shillings, sixpence less. So you can see, what happened was that the offertory went down because people were giving a coin. They were seeing this as their gift. They didn’t see it in perspective of what the needs were individually, or what the needs were of the church. Eventually, we found paper money and we moved ahead a little bit. But the real change happened when I came here to the United States. Soon, I went to church in East Hartford South Church. One evening, I was sitting in the family room, enjoying the wood stove which we don’t have in England and which is great. Two people came to the door. They were members from the Nominating Committee. One of them said, “It’s my birthday. I thought we’d visit you.” I thought that was an interesting approach thinking, “What’s going on here?” They said, “Well, Keith, we’d like you to chair the Stewardship Committee.” Well, it was difficult to say “No” to two ladies, one of whose birthday it was so I said, “Okay. Tell me what that means”. They told me and I said, “I think I can do that.” That then started a chain of thought in my mind, a growth period where I started to think much more about commitment—the commitment being that we don’t look in our pockets to see if we’ve got a half-crown or two-shilling piece or whatever to put in the collection. One starts to look at one’s income and says, “Well, okay, now I’m going to take from the top of that income what I believe is my contribution to the church.” So, the whole philosophy that changed me, I think, about twenty years ago, was “looking at it from the top down, taking what I felt was my commitment and then applying it, not only in the gifts of money but also in the gift that I had towards that Stewardship Committee through the other things that I did in South Church. Pat: Stewardship is also a journey. It unfolds and it deepens throughout our lives as we grow in our understanding of what it means to be God’s people. My stewardship journey started as a little kid when my parents gave me an allowance. They told me that I had to put a part of my allowance into the offering plate every Sunday. Now, they didn’t tell me how much and they never asked. What would happen is I’d go through the week and I’d do whatever I wanted. At the end of the week, I’d dig in my pocket. Whatever was left I’d plop into the collection plate. I wasn’t really connected to much of anything else. It was years—and I’m sad to say that I’ve been through college and through seminary—when, as a young pastor, I went to Central America to do some mission work. I ended up in Nicaragua working on a hospital that was being built in Nikinomo which was the sister city to Providence, Rhode Island. We stayed with Nicaraguan families while we were working on the hospital. These are some of the poorest people that I had ever met in my family. It was my first real exposure to subsistence level living. Yet, these people were among the most generous that I had ever met. They had very little but they willingly shared what they had. You got the best sleeping place in their one-room hut. What that meant was there were ten people living in the house and they strung up hammocks all over the place and because I was the guest, I got the best hammock. That wasn’t the one an the bottom because the chickens would come in and peck at you from underneath. I got the second hammock which still wasn’t easy to get out but I didn’t have to deal with the chickens. When mealtime came, there was only one place setting. Everybody ate at the same place. I knew I was a guest because I got to eat first. It revolutionized my life in the sense of my starting to think for the first time what it meant to be truly generous. I realized that all of my life I really hadn’t had a clue. I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate that to my days as time goes on. It was a humbling moment in my life and a cornerstone in my own understanding of Stewardship. I don’t know what the Stewardship journey holds for me down the road but I do know that there still are big parts of my life and our lives that are in line with what I believe to be true about Stewardship. So Stewardship is a journey. It unfolds a step at a time. I hope that you’ll think about where your Stewardship journey began and where it is right now. Keith: Clearly, the approach to Stewardship is not chicken food, right? I found that, when I took over that committee back in East Hartford, probably the most significant and important question that was asked of me, mostly by new members or people coming to think about Stewardship for the first time, was “What do I give?” We can give you the message about Stewardship but there’s still the real question of “What do I give? Do I go to my pocket at the end of the week, see what I’ve got left or do I start at the top and take out before I give to other people?” So we start to think about money. Now, I’m practicing “American”—I don’t speak that naturally so I keep practicing and I’m not doing too bad. I do speak the language of mathematics reasonably well. What I was able to do was to try to persuade people to think about not just the coinage that they have, not just the monetary dollars that they have, but to think about it in terms of, perhaps, percentages and where you lie in that percentage relative to your salary, the amount of money that your bring in, what you earn. People say, “Okay, but where do I start? Where am I going?” I would say, “Well, let’s think about where you’re going first?” Are we heading for tithing which means ten percent. Is that reasonable? Probably, it’s unreasonable at this point in time. It was in South Church. How about half-tithing or five percent? That didn’t sound like a bad goal so we started to look at how we could get to five percent. Where do you start? Where are you now? What is half percent? What is one percent? Then people would say to me, “What do you mean one percent? One percent of what? Money I bring home, money I earn, what’s in my salary?” I said, “It doesn’t matter.” Where do we start? We start at a point and we are going to grow. I think the point that Pat is making which is one that we tried to deliver to that congregation is that it is important to grow in giving, in growing Stewardship, not just in the monetary side but in all the pieces of what we do in the church. One of the things I do with my students is to talk about how to prepare them for some of the jobs that they might do after they leave the university. Many of them go into teaching of some form, whether to a research university like UConn, or whether it’s a community college or a high school. Many of them have to put forward some form of portfolio to present to the appointment board to give them the credentials, to show them what they’ve been able to do. And none of those portfolios represents a single point in time. What they represent is a period of time, a growth period, maybe several years, to show how they have grown from what they had several years ago to where they are now; to show what their students, if they’re teaching now, have gone at the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester. It’s longitudinal data. We put this together so that they can present to their prospective employer a pattern, some evidence, some documentation of how they have grown. That is the evidence that they want to show, that the employer wants to see. I think we can apply the same sort of philosophy. We should be looking at where we want to be in a year’s time, two years’ time, five years’ time, and see how we can grow from where we are now to that point. It isn’t just the money. It is where we are in the church, our commitment to this church, our commitment to our faith, and, in some cases, the needs that we see might have as the time goes on. Pat: Finally, I think Stewardship is growing in the grace of giving. I believe that generosity is, seminally, the fruit of a grateful heart. So, whatever I do or I fail to do, whatever you do or fail to do in your own life, as a steward of the gifts and grace that God has given us, is, finally, a spiritual issue, a comment about our relationship with God and about our own journey. So, in that way, whole life stewardship is a very, very personal thing that requires a level of honesty and a willingness to look at our whole life—how we spend our time, how we spend our money—to see what or who stands in the way. It’s an unwavering commitment to God. It’s a daily discipline focusing on God, living in the moment, and responding to God out of gratitude. I have a friend who is a Spiritual Director and her favorite saying is “Everything that you need is streaming towards you from the universe.” Think about that. “Everything that you need is streaming towards you from the universe.” That’s not everything you want, but everything that you need because ours is a generous God. Our God provides for our needs, sorting out between what we need and what we want is a lot of the stuff of the Stewardship journey. But it’s a journey growing in the grace of giving that starts with where we are and moves forward. I’m married to a former Roman Catholic where Stewardship is about a whole different thing: you pay your budget; there are 2500 families in the church; everything works swimmingly. In the first year I filled out our pledge card and said, “Here it is.” The look of shock and terror was pretty much unbelievable: “You’re going to give what? You’re going to give that much money to the church?” It’s been a source of struggle and conversation for us to grow in the grace of giving because we come from such different places. Yet, it’s been good for us as a family to think about it, talk about it, pray about it, and struggle with it. Stewardship is growing in the grace of giving. It’s a journey that starts from where you are at the moment and we can only learn that by an honest assessment. Keith: There’s a sequel to the Stewardship Campaign. We reached Christmas, campaign was over, we celebrated Christmas and in January, we met as a Stewardship group and said, “Okay, what do we do now? We’ve done our job.” We sat down and said, “There really is a lot more things we can do. This church needs to grow. It needs to grow in its understanding of Stewardship. Where do we take what we’ve got now? Where do we take the monetary side of this and expand it?” We formed a committee which became known as the BIG Committee - Building Institutional Growth. Sometimes, the “I” stood for “institutional”. The next month it would stand for “individual”. We kept the acronym and changed what it meant every week, every month because what we were looking at were things way beyond just giving in the stewardship conventional way. This committee grew, as well, and became part of the establishment of South Church. We ran foul of the Nominating Committee over and over again, because everybody wanted to be part of the BIG Committee because it was growing. It was part of the church which became much larger than we had envisaged. We had a core group who tried to drive and encourage people to do things. For example, at one point, we had 200 giving groups or elements in the church. We had a hundred of those involved in the BIG Committee. So what do you need to do? You only need to talk one of the persons to encourage them. That’s how it grew. Some Sundays we referred to as special Sundays. We said every Sunday is a special Sunday. Every Sunday is a special church service. We called everybody in and it became part of the establishment. The commitment then went on. Now, as David read in Ephesians: “Everybody has different roles.” That we respect. Everybody has different concerns. Some people have fixed incomes. There’s an anxiety element here but everybody has a part to play. What I see is the main challenge here. It’s that Stewardship has become a new opportunity for us, a real challenge. We are “Stewards in a new opportunity.” Pat: We hope that
you will think, ponder and pray about the reflections that we’ve shared.
|