By Amy Butler
There’s a bite in the morning air. The leaves are starting to turn brilliant colors. Piles of pumpkins slow foot traffic at the entrance to the grocery store. In a pastor’s world this can mean only one thing. It’s time for stewardship.
Fall is the traditional time that churches undertake campaigns to elicit financial commitments from members. We say we want people to promise they will pray and show up, but what we really mean is that we need to know how much money they plan to give in the year ahead. It’s not that we don’t care about praying and showing up, but we have church budgets to plan, and this is no small task.
Like many colleagues, I have to confess that stewardship season is not my favorite time of the church year. So, as we approach our big stewardship emphasis this year, I began to think about why stewardship makes me sigh with exhaustion and try my best to think of anything else on my to-do list that I could possibly tackle instead.
It’s not that I don’t see the need for stewardship. It’s not even that I don’t like talking about money. I understand the need to plan a budget. My impatience with the season of stewardship is that it has to be a season at all.
Somewhere over the course of every year — in between compelling stewardship campaigns — we tend to lose sight of the fact that everything we have and everything we are belong to God — even our bank accounts.
By planning and executing elaborate stewardship campaigns just once a year, do churches inadvertently give people permission to opt out the rest of the time? Can stewardship campaigns reinforce the belief that our possessions really belong to us and not to God? Does a stewardship emphasis give us permission to hold back, giving just what we think we can afford after everything else is covered?
No wonder each fall when stewardship rolls around we all feel a little bit put out that we have to talk about money in church — again!
Whenever people talk with me about joining the church we have a blunt conversation about what that entails. There’s direct conversation about time investment, worship attendance, the cultivation of personal spiritual life — and money.
We talk about money not only because the church needs to pay its bills, but also because the exercise of being a committed disciple is one that calls for rigorous commitment in all areas of life.
If you want to socially attend church, that’s one thing. If you want to invest your life in the practice of Christian community, to live believing that your life is part of a larger body of believers transformed by God’s Spirit and doing the work of transforming the world around them, well then, that is going to require giving everything to God — who owns it all, anyway, don’t forget.
Since most of us have not mastered the art of living as if everything we have and everything we are belongs to God, I guess we still need stewardship campaigns. But I wonder what a world without them would be like, a place where all give generously and thankfully without any prodding.
May it be so. Soon. Preferably before next fall.