DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT – Lean Times/DisciplesWorld April 2009 – DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT

This could be the best time ever for a stewardship campaign.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

True, this is not the best time for fund raising or asking people for money. But at risk of horrifying some of the church treasurers among us, a stewardship campaign isn’t about fund raising. No matter what you call it . . .

Fall is usually the season for financial campaigns in our congregations, sometimes called a “stewardship emphasis” or “pledge drive” or almost anything but fund raising.

The hard fact is that avoiding the term “fund raising” makes sense, because the problem is less that there needs to be an annual emphasis on giving from congregants, than that these matters should be discussed year ‘round, but rarely are.

Once a year is better than never, though. One time a year is sometimes as often as church leadership’s nerves can take the strain of talking out loud about one of the few no-go-zones left in a culture where sexual habits and personal failings are the stuff of reality tv shows and coffee shop unembarrassed outloud conversation, but wallets and income and spending are kept in secret.

Check out Mark 4:22 on that.

Here’s what is important for religious people in general, Christians in particular, and potentially of benefit to anyone about the practice and discipline of stewardship. Not as a code word to avoid saying “money” out loud in church, but to see being a steward as a central image for what it means to be a Christian. Stewardship as care for what we’ve been given, the responsibility we have for what’s on loan to us for a little while, not what you call the little tablet of envelopes you get when you join a church.

Stewardship is a mindset, an expression of a worldview, which may be why Jesus came back again and again to stewards as a way of pulling us into a parable. In Luke 16, I imagine that many of his first listeners grabbed at a spot more nearer their wallets than their hearts when they imagined the awful feeling of being called to account by the boss (or, The Boss).

Stewardship, a sense of relatedness to what’s under our control that isn’t actually through our own autonomy, but by way of another’s interests that take priority. We hear over and over how now is our moment, we deserve a break, and it’s time to pamper ourselves a little (the “a little” is usually meant ironically, I think). So it takes a bit of counter-programming for us to step back, take a deep breath, and regard our stuff and our savings, our excess and extravagances, and realize “this isn’t really mine.”

Because it isn’t. Not even close. We have stuff, for a while, but it’s either going into a landfill, a museum, or fueling the hyperexpansion of the sun during its final stages of existence in a few billion years. Or it may spend time in all three.

But nothing is, in an ultimate sense, ours.

Not to make light of a truly awful situation for many people, but the whole 401K business is one aspect of a perfect teaching opportunity (I know, I know, you don’t have one anymore, you have a 201K, yeah, I’ve heard that one). There were stretches where lots of people thought they had lots of money in “an account” which was at “the fund” managed by “Wall Street,” whatever those three things actually are themselves.

Then suddenly, you had – well, something different. Candidly, something less. And for many, a question: did I ever have something there to start with?

For even less fortunate victims of certain funds that shall remain nameless, but You Know Of Whom I Speak, it turns out the answer is “No,” you didn’t have anything starting the moment you deposited with that gentleman who “made off” with so many people’s money.

We have our work, the income we generate that is paid at what we all know is less than we’re worth, and then we use symbols and numbers to trade that effort, the “sweat of our brow” as God told Adam, for stuff like food and mortgage payments and a newer exercise machine we won’t use, either. Now, that’s ours, isn’t it?

Except the good steward knows that even their ability to earn a living is due to the provision of tools and fields and opportunity that came from someone else (Someone Else?), so they are humble even about that. We acknowledge that reality, in a way, every time we raise funds to help those who can’t work for their food, for orphans and grief-stricken widows, for the differently abled and the utterly destitute.
In other words, we’re always stewards. We’re always beneficiaries of those who have gone before, of advantages enjoyed by our families and fellows often before we were even born, and much of what we labor over will truly be enjoyed most by those who come long after . . . or at least I hope so.

That’s the tough challenge that stewardship education faces, to re-vision our sense of ownership and entitlement into a perspective the Good Steward would recognize. It is a hard truth in lean times that we might be more ready to start seeing and thinking . . . and acting that way in our financial disciplines, now more than at any point in the recent past.

How do we get there?

The Lovely Wife and I have had a practice since the beginning of our marriage. We have a budget, based on projected income. That budget starts with giving 10%, saving 10%, and then we look at what’s left.

What’s left is shaped by the fact that almost 30% of our “gross income” goes to taxes, the good and worthwhile work of larger institutions, and a bit of waste here and there (yes, some, but that’s not our topic today). When our household adds up income and payroll taxes, my self-employed quarterly estimated to SocSec and various local taxing bodies, our property taxes, and the chunk of spending that goes to sales tax, just about 30% of our income goes to local, school, county, state, and federal taxes.

Since most years we actually put more than 10% in savings, that means, if you’ve been doing the math, that we live on less than half, under 50% of what we earn. My point is not that we’re dreadfully frugal (we are, but not so terribly), but the order you figure this out in, and the fact that the last thing this method takes you to is how much you can spend on whatever.

The budget, with that 48 or 49% we’re looking at in the final stages, has to list house payment and utilities and groceries and some clothes and such, the Little Guy’s amusements, and . . . there’s usually some amusements left for us, mainly aimed at a vacation trip or two.

If you start with that, and work backwards to how much you can “afford” to give, I can pretty much guarantee you the number will be 1 to 2%, tops. Given that our national savings rate is effectively in negative numbers these last few years (the hidden engine of our current economic mess), unless you give to your church on your credit card, it won’t be there.

Oh, and household debt is now at 130% of household income, so let’s not run that number up any higher in God’s name.

So starting with what you give isn’t about how much more your church needs the money than you do. It’s about how much you need to look at your income more as gift and opportunity and responsibility than as “what I earned,” which is why I know most folks would flip out at the idea of living on less than half of “my income.”

A gift you can give yourself is to stop seeing it as “my income,” and seeing yourself as a steward of what comes into and through your household at any given time. I’m willing to bet most of my readers aren’t paid what they ought to get, and who of us says “no, I haven’t earned it” to a raise? Pay is rarely equal to value, or daycare workers and kindergarten teachers and OB/GYN nurses would make more than anyone.

Start with giving, which says to God and your own heart and anyone else paying attention (like the children in your family who don’t miss a thing), “this is just what I get to manage for a season.” Prioritize some savings, which says to a future you and yours “I know that me, right now, isn’t all there is.” Write down your fixed costs, and make sure to account for taxes, because sooner or later you’re gonna pay ‘em.

And have fun with the rest; if you do those other things first, I’m not really all that worried with the choices you’ll make with what remains. For many of us, there’s not much trouble we could get into with that amount, anyhow!

Keep Luke 8:17 just in case.

Jeff Gill is a member of Central Christian Church in Newark, Ohio, and an ordained minister who provides licensed/commissioned ministry programming for the Ohio region when he isn't working as a juvenile court mediator, facilitating a Consecration Sunday program, or just out storytelling at a camp somewhere. E-mail him at knapsack77@gmail.com.