Generosity Will Save Us

Before I became the senior pastor of KPUMC, the Finance Committee recognized that giving declined during the summer months, which caused an unfortunate cash crunch  somewhere around August. As a result, they started a fundraising campaign which asked individuals or families to “pay” $250 for one day in the month of July. 

The church would publish a July calendar with names of people who had “bought” a particular day of the month, and an invitation to buy the days which were still available.

After I got here, the committee agreed to tweak the idea a little, and now we celebrate Generosity July every year. We invite everyone in the church to set aside $5 per day to give to the church, above and beyond the amount people have already pledged. We still publish a calendar, but now each day of the month specifies a generosity challenge.

This has obviously helped church finances over the past couple of years. But even more importantly, it has forced us all to think about generosity every year.

A lot of us have been complaining about the general mood of the country lately. Recent current events and news bulletins have made us all crabby and cranky. We’re all a little on edge.

Unfortunately, when people are angry and distempered, we also tend to close themselves off from others. We end up clinging a little tighter to what is ours, and we get defensive and reactive.

This is precisely the time for us to practice generosity. I think that it might be the only thing that will save us in these perilous times.

For example, I wish we are all a little more generous in our judgments and conclusions of others. What if we gave more benefits of the doubt, and wished more people well?

I wish our government and society operated out of a posture of abundance and generosity rather than a posture of scarcity and austerity. And I wish our institutions and organizations adopted mission statements that had generosity as a core value and virtue.

Generous organizations and people are open-hearted, warm, and easy to get to know. We like them, and we want to be like them.

So why aren’t we generous year-round? What is it that keeps us from being generous all the time? I always ask myself this question in July, because generosity is fun! It’s a blast to give things away to, and on behalf of, others. 

Perhaps it’s because we find ourselves surrounded by a culture that teaches us the opposite. This is one of the downsides of capitalism; a capitalist economy stresses competition, teaches us that there are winners and losers. Advertising teaches us that what’s important is what we buy and acquire, not what we give away.  Even our politics is now a zero-sum game — everything is all or nothing. Compromise is a bad word, and there is hardly any generosity in governance.

The church is one place where generosity continues to be a virtue. In fact, it is one of our most important characteristics: God is generous, and God’s most generous act was the sending of Jesus Christ. Jesus was generous, and left behind disciples and apostles who were generous. Generosity was the primary ethos of the early church, after all. In the Book of Acts, we read that the first Christians ate together frequently and shared their goods freely among one another. 

Generosity July is supposed to be the prototype of all the other months of the year. It’s the time when we intentionally practice those small and random acts of giving that we ought to be doing all the time.

Because when we finally get it right, it’s generosity that will save us.

A Newbie's Guide to Pledging

If you are new to the church, or have never made a pledge to the church before, this column is for you. Because the church “stewardship campaign” can be intimidating. You might wonder why we spend a couple of weeks talking about money so much.

You should think of it like a public radio pledge drive. It can be annoying to have NPR’s Morning Edition interrupted by pledge requests; and I don’t like hearing about pledges in the middle of This American Life, either. But it’s better than the alternative!

Like public radio, we aren’t a market enterprise. Thus, you’ll never hear commercials in the middle of a worship service. (And no, we’re not going to ever consider it. Even if you’re looking to promote your new pop-up goat yoga studio …)

And we’re not selling anything. If you haven’t heard me say it before, the grace of God is free. That’s the whole point — God’s love is freely given, freely received. We have nothing to sell, and we’re not planning to operate as if we do!

So the primary way the church funds its ministries is through asking people to pledge, just like the radio station. You could call it “crowdfunding.” In other words, we ask our members, friends, and visitors to help us do what we do. We always go through a budget process to plan for the coming calendar year, and attempt to finalize it before the end of the preceding year. The budget includes all the necessary items, such as property maintenance, utilities, office supplies, program materials, and, of course, personnel. Plus, we include strategic pieces and new missions that we would like to initiate.

A key part of the budget process is assessing how much income we can expect to generate in the coming year. That’s why we ask members to pledge. We need to know how much you all expect to give, so that we can plan our ministries and pass our budget.

Every year around the month of October, then, we spend a few weeks asking you to make your pledge. We accumulate the pledges and fine-tune our budget based on the total pledged amount. This is why pledging is important to the church; it is the way in which church leadership assesses how to proceed.

But a church pledge is only that — a pledge. It’s a matter between you and God ultimately. It’s not a contractual agreement. And we’re not going to send a bill collector after you.  We will send you a quarterly giving statement, which will let you know how much you have paid on your pledge year-to-date. But we won’t keep bugging you about it, like a public radio station might.

We can also make giving to the church an easy matter. On our website, you can make your pledge an automatic monthly or weekly payment. Just follow this link to automate your giving.

So far, I’ve described the pledge campaign in a purely functional and practical fashion — we’ve got to pay the bills, and this is how we do it.

As your pastor, I need to let you know that giving is about far more than just making financial donations. When you give to your church, you are not merely helping pay bills, pay the pastor, or even fund a particular mission of the church; you are literally performing an act of service to God. When you give to the church, you are giving to God, and you are giving to God’s mission in the world.

One of the most common images found in the Bible to describe the church is “the body of Christ.” Christ is still present in the world, but he is incarnated in the church; he lives and moves and has his being, in us! That’s not mere hyperbole, either. There is something very real about the concept that Jesus is alive and working through us.

It’s not really like making a pledge to a public radio station at all, in the end. For one, we don't give away tote bags ... I love public radio, and I think everyone should support it. But Kessler Park UMC has a greater mission to undertake, and a greater God to serve.

So I hope you will consider making a pledge for the first time. Let’s kickstart God’s work by Kickstarting KPUMC!

Crowdfunding is for Crowds

On Sunday, I preached about the first crowdfunding project in the Bible — the story of Moses asking the Israelites to bring their goods and gifts to help build the tabernacle. 

My favorite part of the story is the fact that the people gave so much that Moses finally had to tell them to stop! 

But there’s something else about that story that makes me happy. Did you notice that from the very beginning God wants everybody to participate, not just the wealthy few?

That’s the interesting thing about crowdfunding a project — it’s so much more rewarding and fun to have 250 people giving $100 each for something they care about, than it is to have one person plop down $25,000, just because they can. 

I suppose Moses could have gone to just the richest Israelites and asked them to fund the entire tabernacle. He could have gone to the richest one or two folks and asked them if they would pay for everything. Maybe he would have succeeded in such a fundraising approach. 

But he didn’t. Instead he asked everyone to consider what they could contribute to the whole. He didn’t demand; he invited people to consider in their hearts what they might be able to give.

And because everyone participated, everyone felt connected to what was being built. The tabernacle belonged to everyone, not just a wealthy few.

I once served a small country church where there was precisely one wealthy family in the church. This family was probably the wealthiest family in the entire county. And they were generous to the church.

However, this created an unhealthy dynamic for the church. For one, everybody knew that if we got in a bind, this wealthy family would step in and get us out of our hole. This happened at the end of every year, when it was time to pay apportionments. The matron of the family would come into the church, ask “How much left on apportionments do we owe?” and then write out a check for that amount. The problem is that the members of the church knew this happened, and let this be an excuse to refrain from giving too generously.

Furthermore, this wealthy family never pledged or even gave regularly. They simply gave when they saw a problem or discerned that the church needed something in particular. As you can imagine, the church was never in a very healthy financial state.

I have also heard horror stories about churches where a single wealthy donor created havoc. For example, I heard once that Ross Perot made a huge donation to his mother’s small East Texas church, which was in danger of closing. He wanted to help keep it open. Instead, the gift was the source of much conflict, and the church closed more quickly than if it had never received the money. 

The crowdfunding model is a much healthier pattern of financial giving for an organization. Instead of leaning heavily on a handful of donors, whose interests and motivations for giving might or might not be pure, we ask for everyone to participate financially by giving what they are able. Some are able to give more, and others less, but when we all do our part, then the whole benefits.

As your pastor, I want you to be excited about what the church is doing. I want you to be fully invested in our vision and purpose, and thus I want you to give what you feel God is calling you to do. 

When you help Kickstart KPUMC, you’re not just helping the church, you’re also giving your own faith a kickstart. And so, if you haven’t already, make your 2018 pledge today. Just click here to make your pledge.