Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Practical Exercises
1. John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), 9.
2. Kotter, Leading Change, 90.
3. Kotter, Leading Change, 90.
4. Michael White and Tom Corcoran, Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, and Making Church Matter (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2013).
5. White and Corcoran, Rebuilt, 142–43.
6. White and Corcoran, Rebuilt, 148.
Imparting New LanguageElements
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, forreproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
—2 Timothy 3:16
I KNEW I HAD to be creative. I was starting my new call in August. The vestry had impressed upon me the need to develop the congregation’s stewardship. The senior warden reinforced their emphasis by privately expressing concerns about being able to pay my salary after eighteen months unless something changed. Nobody, however, wants to hear the new preacher start begging for money out of the gate, nor does a winsome vision for the future start by focusing on financial fears. Most members of the parish had made pledges for the current year in November and were not likely to change them in the middle of summer. Confronting the issue immediately did not look promising.
I knew that stewardship development was more about fostering faith in the abundance of God than running a successful fundraising campaign. I decided that I could begin that work immediately if I approached it creatively. Rather than worry about how much people could give, I inserted topics into the sermons that the congregation would need if they were going to make more faithful pledges the coming November.
My first Sunday, the lectionary epistle reading was James 1:17–27, which contains an interesting phrase that in another context I probably would not have focused on. The end of verse 18 reads, “that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” Understanding this phrase required an understanding of the Old Testament concept of first fruits giving, and I believe first fruits giving is key to faithful stewardship.
That morning, I spent about 40 percent of the sermon explaining what first fruits giving meant in scripture, how the concept is generally used today for tithing, and what that might have to do with us being the first fruits of God’s creatures. From that explanation, I moved onto the central points of the James reading. While preaching the text of the day, I began the process of teaching the congregation the essential vocabulary of the language of stewardship.
The following week’s gospel was the passage about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed by a demon, followed by Jesus’s healing of a deaf man in the Decapolis. This reading is a difficult one to preach. Part of how I handled it, with stewardship in mind, was looking at the way we are challenged to share what we have. Jesus became willing to share his gifts with those who were not his people, eventually trusting that he could minister to all. I related that to our ability to trust in God’s abundance as we share what we have, even with outsiders and those whom society may not deem worthy. That provided me a way to highlight the work of the food pantry and the generous gifts the congregation made to ensure our neighbors had enough to eat. The primary sermon focus challenged people to deeper relationships and conversion of heart toward the other, but I was able to weave in one significant stewardship theme.
I continued this basic approach the next two months.
When the reading from James included, “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly” (4:2b–3a), the verses allowed me to spend about four minutes contrasting churches that ask God for new people to meet the budget and keep things the same versus those that ask God for new people to share our faith with and to prioritize our ability to do mission. Two weeks after that I included “withholding our tithes and offerings from God’s storehouse” in a list of sins as part of a sermon on God’s forgiveness and redemption. The following week’s gospel, on the rich man instructed to sell all he had and give to the poor, was a natural place to talk about money and discipleship.
Intentionality about stewardship throughout the late summer and early fall meant that when the traditional stewardship season rolled around in November, the congregation had already heard more about tithing and faithful generosity than they had over the past few years. I brought this extended sermon focus to its peak with a three-week stewardship sermon series, which was also new to the congregation. That coincided with the annual stewardship letter, inviting people to put their pledge cards for the following year in the offering plate on the last Sunday of the series.
I took three disparate approaches for the three sermons. The first sermon covered the week’s lectionary text on the widow’s mite and focused on God’s abundance. The second