Presbyterian churches and the “M” word: Giving with gratitude

It’s the sermon pastors hate to preach, the ones congregations hate even more to hear.

 It usually comes in the fall, and it’s when they ask, cajole, even plead for  … money

And, theologically, it’s all about God, our relationship with money, and thanksgiving.

“Gratitude is at the heart of our spirituality in the Reformed tradition,” Tim Hart-Andersen, pastor of Westminster church in Minneapolis, preached last spring at a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) gathering on stewardship. “There is no other human response to God more basic than gratitude, a deep thanksgiving that wells up from within . . . Our churches and those who inhabit them need such a rekindling of biblical stewardship, where we learn again what once we knew so well: `The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ “ (Psalm 24:1)

And Hart-Andersen also preached about the ongoing lessons in gratitude that some members of his congregation have taught, from the 96-year-old woman whose body is giving out, who relies on an oxygen machine and speaks daily of her blessings, to the West African immigrant who’s lived legally in the U.S. for 17 years and now is imprisoned, facing deportation, and who wrote a letter giving thanks to God.

“Entitlement is the enemy of gratitude, and our culture is awash in entitlement,” Hart-Andersen said. “We live in this nation as if we had it all coming to us, as if we believed our own advertising. That attitude infects the church as well — perhaps especially we Presbyterians who have had it so good for such a long time. Privilege and prerogative and power seldom yield to thankfulness, which presupposes humility. We cannot simultaneously say, `Thank you’ and `I had it coming to me,’ unless we talk out of both sides of our mouths.”

In many congregations, however, stewardship is a subject rarely preached about — maybe once a year, during the fall stewardship campaign, and then only reluctantly. But there are Presbyterian congregations that have decided to take talk about money out of the closet, places where it’s intentionally and provocatively talked about, and there are Presbyterians who make it personal, who eat rice-and-bean meals so they can present the money they would otherwise have spent feeding themselves as a Thanksgiving offering for others who are hungry.

At St. Luke church in Minnetonka, a wealthy suburb west of Minneapolis, this is a season both of thanksgiving and of worry. A few months ago, the congregation discovered an extensive, inevitably expensive problem with mold in its building — a situation so severe the church offices had to be moved out at the end of August. The exact trouble is still being diagnosed, but fixing it will certainly cost a lot of money.

And since it was founded nearly 50 years ago, St. Luke has always had an unyielding position on stewardship. For every dollar it spends on itself, it tries to spend a dollar doing good somewhere else.

That’s why St. Luke, a congregation of about 250 in an upscale neighborhood, has a building with no air conditioning and a concrete floor, and an unpaved parking lot. When St. Luke repaired its own roof, it put seven roofs on in buildings in Haiti. And when the mold problem was discovered, pastor Kim Smith King, knowing the bill would be high, gulped and said, “Here we go, folks.”

At St. Luke, “we preach about stewardship a lot, about lifestyle, about economic justice issues, about the violence of poverty,” King said. Matching dollar for dollar “gives people a real core sense of identity in the congregation. They are both very eager to tell their neighbors and to help their children understand” why they want to give to others.  “It gives people energy and excitement,” King said, even if they have to stretch to come up with the money.

In some places, the idea of stewardship is directly tied to the earth and the season of harvest.

Carl Geores, 82, is a retired minister who served small congregations in rural Maine — and who remembers when some Presbyterians gave to the church in homegrown produce and livestock, in the bounty of the harvest, not just in cash. For a time, when farming was strong and before the canneries shut down, the church youth group from Wales church — inspired by the Lord’s Acre program out of Asheville, N.C. — grew string beans on a quarter-acre plot and used the proceeds to build a youth center.

Farmers with tractors plowed the land, teenagers from the area, both churchgoers and not, planted and picked the beans. The church held a “Lord’s Acre Auction,” with donated squash and apples and piles of other produce, with a professional auctioneer. Geores recalls one farmer who never made a financial pledge to the church, “but boy he gave to the Lord’s Acre Auction,” offering a calf and bushels of beans.

And others from rural areas recall how the pastor might not be paid in dollars, but directly in food — bags of vegetables and fruit or half a cow, straight to the freezer.

According to David Johnson, the PC(USA)’s associate for stewardship, the idea of stewardship as it’s known now — voluntary giving to support the church, with offerings every Sunday — didn’t exist in the current form until the mid-1800s. Before then, there were other techniques, including tithe boxes and tithe barns and pew rentals (Johnson recalled one congregation where, even in the 1960s, visitors weren’t seated until after the service had started, to make sure they didn’t sit in a member’s pew.)

Those traditions have mostly died away, leaving behind the stewardship drive, and perhaps a less palpable connection to the idea of bounty and blessing and community good. Geores said that in some of the rural Maine churches he served, in places such as Leeds and Hartford and Wales, people sometimes stand up before the congregation when the sermon turns to giving “and tell what the church means to them and what it contributes to their life.”

If he could talk to Presbyterians about stewardship, “I’d talk to them about their commitment to Christ and about the building of community,” Geores said. “There has to be a real personal commitment that connects them to the gospel.” And in many small towns, the church is “the last institution where people connect with the community,” where people come together and set up food banks and clothing centers, throw pancake breakfasts and chili suppers, hand out Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets, band together to help those who are struggling.

In some congregations, not talking openly about money — about the need for it, about whether people give or don’t give or why — is a part of the imbedded culture. It’s not considered good manners to discuss it. It’s too direct, too uncomfortable.

Gary Torrens, the PC(USA)’s coordinator for middle governing body relations, grew up in Nebraska, in a family marked by both strong faith and reticence, where “we didn’t talk about money or sex or politics.”

Torrens said pastors are reluctant to talk about stewardship “because there’s always the anxiousness beneath it that the members will just think they’re trying to increase their salaries.” But for the congregation, “if they don’t hear about it from the pulpit, they assume `we just don’t talk about that here,’ “ Torrens said. So silence about money becomes the norm.

Torrens argues, however, that it’s essential to talk about money at church — because without that conversation, “there are parts of our life that we don’t connect with our religious life,” a scenario that’s especially troubling in a culture driven so extensively by consumerism, advertising and marketing.

The PC(USA) is initiating high-level analysis of the denomination’s overall funding structure — with the underlying premise being that the funding system right now is broken. And Torrens said he sees more conversations taking place in presbyteries and synods around stewardship, as declining membership in Presbyterian churches and shifts in patterns of giving “have created a real financial crunch.”

The Synod of the Covenant, for example, wrote a letter to the General Assembly Council a few months ago in response to the most recent round of budget-cutting and layoffs of the denomination’s national staff. The letter suggests that “we look again at disciplines of stewardship,” particularly of financial stewardship. “Instead of responding to lower levels of giving by cutting back, we might search the Bible, study and pray, examine our giving habits and together discern God’s call for us today,” the synod leadership wrote.

Marie T. Cross, the synod’s executive, previously worked in stewardship education for the PC(USA), and has a passion for its importance.

“We talk about anything else” but stewardship, Cross said. “Surveys have been done that say the majority of pastors do not like to preach about financial stewardship . . . It’s also what parishioners like least to hear about.” There’s also sometimes a tug-of-war between talking about stewardship as fundraising, and stewardship as a spiritual discipline.

But Cross contends that money is exactly what pastors should preach about, in part because of its importance in today’s culture. “It defines who we are,” she said. “It gives us a certain status, certain power, and we hold it very close to ourselves . . . We have made a real idol of it.”

A Presbyterian Panel survey on stewardship, conducted in May 2003, found the most frequently-cited reason for giving money to church was a “sense of gratitude for God’s love and goodness” (52 percent of members gave this answer, when asked to list two reasons that most influence their decisions to give to their congregation). The second most common answer was “a sense of obligation to support the work here,” a response given by 43 percent of members.

The survey was mailed in May 2003, and responses were returned by 525 members (a 47 percent response rate), 749 elders (a 57 percent response rate) and 873 ministers (a 61 percent response rate).

But it was during the Great Depression — a time when many families went without the necessities of food and shelter — when giving to Presbyterian churches was the highest, in percentage terms, with families giving on average about 3 percent of their incomes then, falling gradually through the decades to about 2.4 percent now, said Johnson, of the denomination’s stewardship office.

With increasing affluence, “I think people get torn between obtaining the good life, however they define that,” and their desire to show gratitude, Johnson said. “They don’t feel they can be as generous as they would like to be . . . It’s not that they don’t have the ability to do it. It’s that the attractiveness of the good life is stronger. The temptations are greater.”

For some people, no matter how much they have, they long for more.

“We see so much, with TV and advertising and our mobility,” Cross said. “We think, ‘Everybody has that, so certainly I can too. I deserve it’ . . . We’ve lost that sense of gratitude to God or sense that we don’t own anything” or “any sense that God is the source of all we have. I picture God’s head just shaking, saying `I didn’t mean for this to happen.'”

At Jon Faraone’s congregation, First church in Mayfield, in western Kentucky, people have begun talking directly about the theology of stewardship — bringing it up not by begging for money, but by having lay leaders speak to the congregation about what’s already happening in the church and about what more they hope to do. Over the course of about two months, each ministry team makes a presentation during worship, trying to be both informative and creative — for “buildings and grounds,” children from the church acted out a skit in which they called in the super-hero “Duct Tape Man” to make repairs when something broke.

Instead of asking for pledges, the members are given information in the newsletter each month of what’s needed and what’s being given. Relying on advice from a consultant, John Rickard — now the executive presbyter of Blackhawk Presbytery — the congregation of about 110 moved from talking about not having enough money to telling the story of what they really wanted to do in the world.

“It seems like that’s really helped,” said Faraone, the pastor. “The last three years we’ve never been in the red. The first three years we were always in the red.” Some people still do pledge — about $90,000 of the $150,000 budget comes in that way — but “the rest just seems to show up,” Faraone said. “People believe in the ministry and what God’s doing here, so they support it with their financial resources . . . We give in response to God’s gift to us.”

Rickard, who has experience in church redevelopment, counsels congregations to move away from talking about what they don’t have (not enough people or money) towards discussion of what they do well “and the possibility of even better things happening.”

To some extent, it is a matter of gratitude, not wealth, he said. Some small, struggling Presbyterian congregations basically say, “ain’t it awful,” Rickard explained. But he looks at Christians in Latin America and other areas of the world. “With their standard of living, we’d be dead. And they’re happy, they’re truly grateful,” he points out. “We sit there and gripe and groan, and we still have
money in our 401Ks.”