EDITOR'S NOTE: Stephen McSwain served as the keynote speaker for the Virginia Baptist Historical Society's stewardship convocation and annual meeting at Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond May 20. Donald J. Campbell, stewardship director for the Virginia Baptist Mission Board, sat down with McSwain to pose a series of questions to help readers understand his latest book, The Giving Myths: Giving Then Getting the Life You've Always Wanted, published by Smyth and Helwys. Royalties from the sale of the book go to Modest Needs, an organization which aims to prevent otherwise financially self-sufficient individuals and families from entering the cycle of poverty, which might be avoided with a small amount of well-timed financial assistance. After serving as a senior minister for more than 20 years, McSwain joined the consulting team of Cargill Associates Inc. in the mid-1990s and continues with them as senior vice president. A gifted communicator, McSwain inspires audiences across the nation with his message of generous giving and living. McSwain's first book, Spiritual Living, was distinguished by Broadman and Holman Press as one of the top five best-selling books at the time of its publication. McSwain, his wife Pamela, and their four children live in Louisville, Ky.
CAMPBELL: What were the circumstances or underlying issues that led you to write The Giving Myth, or, as you mentioned in the book, your eureka moments?
McSWAIN: Well, I had a number of eureka moments, Don. When I got into the ministry of stewardship development 12 years ago I went right from the pastorate into this work with Cargill Associates. I was not in this work very long before I made a number of discoveries.
Number one was that what I had thought I understood about giving or stewardship was not on point—most of it was wrong. I had been raised in the church and so I had to kind of go back and rethink a lot of things and concepts. My first eureka moment was … the number of times the Scriptures talk about giving. And when I thought about that, an interesting question came to my mind and that was this: why is it that the subject about which Jesus spoke more than any other is the least discussed subject in the church? That was my first theological crisis issue that I had to deal with, and it impacted me personally. I went back and relearned (or learned in many respects for the first time) what the Bible taught about giving—particularly what Jesus taught about giving.
The second major eureka moment for me came from the people I met all across the country in virtually every Christian communion in the church. I've been in virtually all of them. I would meet people, not many, but I would meet people who for me sort of embodied a most extraordinary kind of living. When I started looking at what it was that was driving these people, they all shared one thing in common. And that was what I've ultimately come to call a philosophy of life by which they lived to give themselves away.
CAMPBELL: That's a good place to move to the next question because it covers that. One premise of the book, the subtitle, is that in giving you will get the life you've always wanted. On the surface, this sounds like “God wants you to be rich, prosperity theology.” Could you explain what you mean for those who haven't read the book.
McSWAIN: Well, it has been interesting because that has been the automatic conclusion of a lot of people looking at the title. Some of that is because this is where our culture is. Our culture is really into what you can get for nothing. You know, that's what drives the sale of lottery tickets in every state. People want something for nothing. It doesn't take long in reading the book before you quickly discover that I don't mean that at all. Giving, then getting the life you've always wanted refers to my understanding theologically and personally that at the heart of who we are as human beings, is a fundamental truth. It is that we find meaning in life by sharing of our abundance, our resources with the world. That's not just your pocketbook, but it certainly includes your pocketbook.
CAMPBELL: In other words, if you want B, which is getting, it's got to be preceded by A, which is giving.
McSWAIN: Exactly.
CAMPBELL: It is interesting that you are a vice president with Cargill which is one of the major companies in the world in the area of fund-raising. How do you deal with the paradox of raising money for an intensive campaign, or short-term approach, while still holding to the long-term, more desirable approach, which is giving yourself away?
McSWAIN: Well, it is a paradox. It provides a place to live out my ministry because there are times when I'm in places where personally I feel that maybe the church could better utilize its resources in ways other than what they've decided to do. Of course, being hired by a church to do a job I have a fiduciary responsibility to my company to be there to do my work and help them raise money for a new building or whatever it is they're trying to do. But I almost always try in the training of my leadership teams of the laypeople out of that church to use those opportunities to give a broader picture of Christian stewardship from a biblical standpoint.
CAMPBELL: So what you leave with them is more than they contracted for?
McSWAIN: That's correct. You stated it a lot better than I did. That's what I hope to accomplish.
CAMPBELL: You've compared living a life devoted to giving yourself away to taking “the road less traveled,” in the words of poet Robert Frost. How has taking the road less traveled made a difference for you? What you are advocating is counter-cultural. Is it not radical?
MCSWAIN: Well, it is—totally radical. And it's totally contrary to our culture, even the culture in the church. When Robert Frost wrote those words I'm sure he did not have in his mind what Jesus said about the road to life is narrow and few people will ever find it. But the analogy there, for me, is fundamentally the same and that is that the great paradox of the human experience: that what you would think would give your life meaning is in reality almost always just the opposite.
So when you go out looking for life, fulfillment, meaning, happiness, our culture is going to tell you you're going to find that in the right job, being married to the right person, making a lot of money, having a big retirement account. It's the same old stuff that Jesus gave us in the story of the man he called the rich fool who wanted the bulging barns and he got them. He had to build more barns to accommodate his abundance, all because his ambition was, “I'm going to find that life. One day I'm going to be able to recline, drink iced tea, and just enjoy my retirement years,” and this is the world we're in. Most people live and die and never find the secret to life.
CAMPBELL: In the book, you talk about the secret to life but you also talk about what appears to me to be the rhythm of life; the giving, the getting. You get in order to give; you give, you get. In the book, you paint the ego as the main culprit and the enemy of good stewards. In discussing the ego and fear you wrote, “fear is the mistress of the ego.” Why?
McSWAIN: In the story of the rich young ruler the fundamental question becomes, what motivated him to want to build, to amass this fortune? What was driving that? Historically, I've always said it was greed. He was just a very selfish man, and certainly greed does drive people to want to see how much they can accumulate, how much they can amass. But I think that the more I thought about that story, fundamentally what was driving him was fear. Fear of the inevitable, fear of not having enough, and when I think of most people who sit in the pews who have resistance to generous living and giving, at the heart of a lot of it is a lack of faith and a “drivenness” from fear. We're afraid we're not going to have enough. Jesus said “Seek first the kingdom and the kingdom is within you.” When you seek the kingdom go within and find your connection with God. Everything else God has promised to provide. Now that's either true or it's not true.
CAMPBELL: That's a good place to insert the next question and that is, you use the phrase about God's divinely given giveability, by which you mean the ability to give. Is that your phrase?
McSWAIN: If not I'll claim it. Yes, that's grace. To me that's what grace means. You know Frederick Buechner once beautifully defined grace. He said, “You know when you can acknowledge the fact that even the capacity to receive a gift is a gift you've got it.” That's when you get it. And that's what I mean by God's divine giveability. God gives us even the capacity to recognize everything we have as gift. Even the capacity to recognize our gifts is a gift.
CAMPBELL: Following up on that then, what you are saying is that giving should come not just of necessity and not certainly by conscription but as gratitude for grace.
McSWAIN: It is what happens when people experience the depths of God's grace. This is why Henry Nouwen said, “Fundraising, fundamentally, when it is really Christian fundraising, is a call to conversion. It's the transformation of human life.”
CAMPBELL: Based on your research and observations in the book you seem to imply that some of today's stewardship practices are equal to Tetzel's less-then-sanctified ways of motivating stewards. Luther certainly found Tetzel's ways distasteful. It certainly supports your observations that people, as a rule, are not giving in the attitude of grace.
McSWAIN: We say to people that we don't want them to give out of compulsion, but many of our practices are such that we get caught up in guilt giving, in comparative giving. Like what is everyone else doing? And yet it takes all the joy out of it. I'll never forget—I was talking somewhere about giving and making these points about grace being the real motivation for genuine giving and gratitude giving and how God wants cheerful givers. And after I had finished this guy ran to me and he said, “Well, God may prefer cheerful giving but my church isn't nearly as particular.” But what he was saying was, “My church has missed it, because in my church it doesn't matter what the motivation is. They just want money.” This, I think, is the culture we have created; that church people feel like they are giving because we have created a self-perpetuating institution, and if we're not helping by giving, it's going to die.
CAMPBELL: It's whether we support the cause or the institution.
McSWAIN: Yes.
CAMPBELL: And you are right. I recall a statement that suggested that stewardship has been kidnapped and held hostage to the tyranny of the urgent. Which is basically that it is institutionalized giving.
McSWAIN: Which is another way of saying that a lot of us get caught up in this system and then our interest is on seeing people converted to the church and not converted to Christ. Because the church has become now this entity it's got to save itself.
CAMPBELL: Based on what you have learned in writing The Giving Myths, what would you have liked to have included in it or if you were to revise, would you include?
McSWAIN: Well there are probably quite a lot of things, but most prevalent in my thinking I wish there had been a way I had included a study guide approach for a group study. At the end of each section of the book I have kind of a suggestion for implementing some of the ideas in the book and I try to get at that a little. But had I the opportunity to do this over I would have made that a bit more specific to group study because I have had a lot of pastors call me up and tell me, “Hey, this book has touched me; I'm going to use it to teach on Sunday nights” or “I'm going to be using it in small groups.” I even had one pastor say, “This book is so important to me personally that I'm having it put in our church budget next year to buy every family in our household a copy of this book. I think it would be as important for them as it has been for me.”
CAMPBELL:What would you like to leave with Virginia Baptists as you have been through the state? Hopefully, you will return!
McSWAIN: I would leave with you my mantra for living—I leave this everywhere I go—and that is, “Learn to receive everything that is God's gift to you.” Period. “Learn as your gift to yourself.” Period. “Then, give what you learned and give what you received as your gift to the world.”
CAMPBELL: Thank you, Dr. McSwain, for your insights and your excellent and challenging words shared in today's interview.