Generosity of More than Spirit

Scripture: Psalm One
Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of Love,
and on God’s law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in due season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they give life.

—

I love a topic most pastors hate, stewardship. I love it so much that I think the weekly report to the conference, called Vital Signs, should have a block for first time givers to be recorded and celebrated the same way we celebrate a new baptism. I say this because, I believe when folks make that choice, the hard choice of giving, it is a moment of ownership, commitment, and care. Folks are in, when they make a gift. It amazes me when you do.

I stand in awe of the practice and those who explore it, try it, and commit to it. It is, frankly, such a weird thing to do. There is little in the world around us that says giving your money away is a great idea. Our resources, most of the time feel like ours and we hold them tightly. We invest in them, we earn them, we save them, we spend them…sometimes we spend more than we have. Our money is something we keep private even though money, the way we spend it and the way we earn it, has an impact way beyond the private. We often look at what is before us and think of it as ours, created by our energy and efforts; but what is before us, if we are honest, is rarely just the fruit of our labor alone. Giving as a practice counters all of this, it says first, this is not mine alone and second, it looks at the web of connection by which we are woven and says, “let me invest in this thread. Let me strengthen this strand.” Giving is a radical act of connection. It is a work of caretaking and nurture and it’s not measured by the world’s measures of zeros and commas, it is measured by percentage and intention. I have been amazed by and surprised by it, there is no way to predict who will give what. I have watched folks driving a Lexus pledge the same yearly gift as a cognitively impaired adult who lives in a group home. In fact one of the largest gifts we ever received was from a near homeless woman, who put $20 in a giving envelope in our second year. I tired to give it back to her, my intentions were good and I was as nuanced as I could be, but she saw right through me. How dare I not honor her sharing. She was right, I had judged her the way the world would and decided she shouldn’t participate in nurturing the web of care that we weave in our giving. She knew more about giving and abundance than most people and was gracious enough to forgive and teach me. I have watched people grow into the practice of giving one step at a time and folks jump in…head first. It is strange practice that counters the norms of the world and I love the way it illuminates our values and forces to reconcile who we are with our own budgets and with our community budgets. Money reveals, even if we wish it to be hidden, our values and that’s probably why Jesus spent most of his time talking about money and countering the structures that kept some people poor and elevated the wealthy.

The early church shared everything in common. Jesus names, “Today salvation has come to this house,” when he encounters Zacchaeus and it has nothing to do with him saying a prayer and everything to do with Zacchaeus giving half of everything he owns away and then repatriating to the people he had wronged, with interest, in his work of collecting Roman taxes (Luke 19:1-10). Zacchaeus didn’t need that any more, salvation was about the now, his stuff didn’t define him, he was liberated and he was setting the structures right that kept others poor. Latter in the Gospel of Luke a rich young lawyer or ruler asks Jesus is he is all right, if he is in on the Kingdom of Heaven and then gives him his resume of not committing the big sins (Luke 18: 18-30, Matthew 19: 16-30 and Mark 10:17-31). Jesus tells the young lawyer or ruler to give everything he has away, but he can’t. In three Gospels, just so you don’t miss it, the rich young one can’t let go of everything he has and how it defines him. At least not in that moment and then Jesus names to the disciples watching closing just how challenging salvation really is. I am probably a lot like him, a recovering rich young person. Which is also why, I like to imagine a second half to the rich young man’s story that just didn’t make it in Luke or Acts.

I came to love the practice of stewardship early in my ministry, it wasn’t because I had taken a class on it. That class was offered at the same time as advanced feminist theory, and I wasn’t going to take a class on church administration. When I started seminary, it was as though I had no idea how churches were run or fueled. I didn’t think there was a magical money tree but I just never thought about it. I knew people gave and I didn’t think much about the logistics or the reasons behind any of it. I’m not really sure a class would have mattered to me even if I had taken it. I wasn’t ready to practice giving and sharing, it was never a strength as the oldest child and only girl in my family. Of course, I had watched my dad and mom practice generosity. They gave to the church, to the community, and to the school; they gave with both their time and their resources. They were generous to my friends and our family, they were generous with their support when people had questions or needed connection and they were generous in sharing their home. I knew what generosity was, but practicing it was something I was waiting to do.

I had classmates in seminary who gave to the church. I thought it was so strange, these graduate students with hardly any money, faithfully giving five or ten dollars a week. I thought, how could that matter? I never gave, I passed that basket right along, in two different churches. Giving was something grown ups with full time jobs did, like my Dad. Of course, I had time and money to shop like a grown-up and I went out to dinner with friends like a grown-up. I bought birthday gifts like a grown up and I purchased chai tea while I studied like a grownup. I went to movies and concerts like a grown-up. Perhaps I imagined generosity as something you do when you have so much money you can put your name on a building but am glad I grew up, at least a little.

I remember my first gift. It was to the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas where they were building an Interfaith Peace Chapel. They had a history of inclusion and set a vision for this beautiful, sacred space to share and I wanted to be a part of it. They were entering their 37th year of ministry and they asked folks to pledge $37, $370, $3,700 or $37,000 and I rolled that pledge card around my hands. I wanted to be a part of that building and that effort and so I pledged. Thirty seven dollars didn’t feel right, I had shoes that cost more than that. It didn’t mean that much and it wasn’t hard. At the same time $3,700 or $37,000 were totally out of reach, but $370 was a lot and it mattered and so I pledged it. I gave it. And that gift taught me to take a first step and it was good practice. Two years later, I was entering my first appointment as a Methodist pastor, and the bishop told me and all the new pastors, “I expect you to give, I expect you to tithe. I expect you to lead. You can’t invite people into something that you do not do.” It’s true, I have met my fair share of pastors who don’t give to their church. They have a number of reasons, like that they so undervalue their work that they in a sense give by not requiring a higher salary; but I think it’s probably because they don’t really want to take ownership in the ministry, like it’s everyone else responsibility or a nice spiritual practice…for others. Or maybe they also skipped the class in seminary for Advanced Feminist Theory and still imagined that a giant money tree was planned on site at every Methodist Church.

I set out to make my bishop proud. I made a big pledge, at least for me. I just didn’t make a plan on how to give any of it. I put it off, I didn’t break it down week by week or month by month. I spent plenty of money, just not so much on my church until at the end of the year I had to catch up. It was overwhelming and when I looked at what I had spent on just about everything else, most of which was not really necessary, I knew I needed to make a change. My budget didn’t say what I wanted it to say. To be honest it wasn’t so much of a budget as it was a rough estimation of having enough money to buy this or spend that. I had not put my money where my mouth was. I had become famous for my amazing shoes, not for my generous spirit. People were buying me little gifts and sending me cards all themed around cute shoes, particularly when they intersected with women’s empowerment. They were sweet and delightful but I didn’t want that to be my only story. I thought, if I died today people would say look at how much she loved shoes and there would literally be a mountain of evidence to back up that statement.

I began to love stewardship because of what it taught me, how I learned to share more and how I started giving more. I didn’t miss the money I had given way and I guess I didn’t miss the things I didn’t really need to buy either. More than that, I think it was an act of growing up, not just in relationship to my church but to my community. I could say, I want to be a part of this man’s election. I want to be a part of this woman’s campaign. I want to be a part of this event or cause of a non-profit and not in word only but in action and deed. I was learning more about the power of collective giving and how my gifts mattered, not only to me as a practice that could help me be more generous, but to the organizations I wanted to support and fuel and nurture. It changed not only my giving but my spending, what did I want to invest in? Did my dollar vote as local as possible or as fair as possible? I saved more as I gave more. I wanted to be a better steward in every way, or at least try.

Talking about money is never very easy. I was grateful that I began practicing generosity myself because I would need to start doing it more as the Abbey grew. When it comes to talking about money in church there can be two serious obstacles. The first, is that with everything powerful in the world, people find a way destroy something beautiful. We see this in scandal, when a pastor or a church treasurer embezzles money and we see it when a pastor misuses their power and asks sweet old ladies to send their social security dollars in so he can have another jet, or mansion, or whatever else obscenely rich folks buy. The second reason, is probably even more challenging, which is to say, that we don’t talk about money and when we do, we don’t always do it very well. Maybe a private conversation with a credit card company or a financial planner, but not really a public conversation. We can’t ask people what they make, we can’t talk about what they have, we can’t ask real questions because they are not polite and I think that is designed with intention. Because if we start talking, we start to know the pay inequalities all around us. We start to wonder, marvel, and become enraged at the financial inequalities that surround us. When we start asking these questions, we start to sound like the one that was crucified so long before us. We need to talk about money, budgets, and access to power, if we don’t the systems that exist now - always will.

I’m ever grateful I was learning about giving because when we began this effort, I had little idea how hard or how empowering stewardship would be. In fact when we started, I tried to lay all of the costs at the feet of the coffee bar. I knew giving was a spiritual practice, I knew it mattered, but I guess I still didn’t trust it. When I attended New Church Start Boot Camp, my peers were thinking of the people they could ask for major gifts to help fund the startup phase. I loved their care for the vision of creating community, but I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if we were rolling in coffee money and I never really had to worry about doing that. I thought it was a no brainer; why wouldn’t people pick us over Starbucks, we give 10% of our sales away plus we are so friendly and we are going to try so hard. Well, it turns out there were a lot of reasons people didn’t pick us, and trying hard wasn’t enough to convince anyone to come drink our coffee everyday. We would not, as it would turn out, be rolling in coffee money. And I had to start talking about it.

I had not been very clear about money, in part because I didn’t know how to ask people to pledge to the Abbey while we were also a part of a larger church. This messiness came with the benefits of financial management and office support, but it also came with the confusion of who is paying for what ministry. Our budgets were separate but that’s not really what it looked like outside of the finance committees. So when our leaders talked about money, it was easier for everyone to think about how we could sell more stuff rather, than the real question of practicing faithful stewardship.

We had to grow into our work both as a church and as a coffee bar. The coffee bar lagged behind, even as our evening service began to fill up. In 2014, my spouse and accountant gave me a projection, he had been reviewing our profit and loss statements from the very start and his spreadsheets said we would close in 12 months (he does this work for a big company, so I had to take him seriously). We would run out of money and we would close - even with rather unrealistic improvements we would only limp by for 18 months. Some hard conversations and choices were at hand. I didn’t start this ministry with a heart for closing it, and at least if it did close, I wanted to say I had given it everything I could and I just didn’t feel like I could say that when I was still working with one foot in our mother church.

The end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 was just about the most challenging time in my professional life and probably the most uncertain for the life of the Abbey. We were growing into our own church and leaving our mother church. I leaned into the first Psalm daily, the poetry of a tree rooted by the waters and the notion of it giving life in its due season. This just wasn’t spring yet. It’s just winter and I had to wait for the fruitful season to follow. In this time I even began to debate one of the most clear values we had held from the start. We give 10% of our coffee bar sales away, which is delightful and ridiculous when you are trying not to close in 12 months and can think of all kinds of ways that you could deploy that resource internally. One of my coaches suggested it, she named other ideas on how we support people and that if we go away, so do the ways we make sacred space for people and organizations in our city. I started to agree and brought it to a few board members to begin a discussion, it went nowhere. No one wanted to entertain it, giving was a part of our work. We kept giving as a community. We kept taking that collective risk. We continued to nurture those ties to nonprofits and we worked to build those relationships. If we were going to take the risk, we started investing more in the partnership, more time and energy, more preparation and more intention that this would be a true partnership, not an act of charity. This work transformed our space, we do nothing alone and the gatherings we hosted went from 50 some a year to more than 120 this past year. We gave our space, our time, and our resources with intention, just like we ask individuals to do, and we not only grew but we were able to keep generosity for others at the center of our focus.

I also started asking people for help fueling the Abbey. It was clear now that if you gave to the Abbey, it fueled the Abbey. It was clear now that that big church on the hill wasn’t paying for everything and if we wanted to exist, we had to take ownership. People started giving, and giving with intention. Every gift mattered, weekly gifts of $5 and $20 and $100. The first year, our giving doubled. The second year, our giving doubled again. And it is not because one person started giving a huge gift and we could put their name on the building, it is because 60 people and then 100 people and more started giving, as a practice. They nurtured the web of this community. They drew us together in relationship and for every gift I am truly grateful. We didn’t close in 12 months and we have ended every year in the black.

As we continued to grow, I had the opportunity to deploy the best practices of nonprofits around us. New church starts may lack the stability of an existing church (or at least the impression of it) but what we lack in stability, we more than make up for in flexibility. I could deploy best practices, like a narrative budget, online giving, thank you notes to first time givers and thank you notes on quarterly giving statements, and I didn’t have to organize five meetings with key stakeholders to do it. I didn’t have to to spend one moment winning over the church’s Chief Objection Officer or the Head Matriarch, because we didn’t have one. New churches, like new people, are often a little more flexible, it is the gift that balances inherent uncertainty and vulnerability. When money gets tight we often start nickeling and diming folks, in a church this looks like turning what could be a great community-building event into an opportunity to collect five dollars from folks who bring their kids to an egg hunt or stop by for a nice hot dinner. We’ve never had to do that, we thought about it, but we could double down on generosity and keep focused on our intention of being for others. We focused on our strengths as a church, our difference made us stronger. We could participate in community-giving events in a way that most traditional churches can’t or shouldn’t (in my opinion, at least not until they are known as a community asset) and that helps us remember to focus on being for others rather than being for ourselves. It is not hard to ask people to give when you know in your heart of hearts that this place and this work matters.

I had to deploy my own strengths, take what I had learned in all of the classes and embody these practices in a way that felt right in my own skin and with my own language. I asked for the offering with care and intention each week. We hosted classes around budgeting, not with the prosperity gospel but with a progressive, Methodist theological framework. I started to gather folks before large stewardship efforts to ask for early commitments, to share why this place mattered and to break bread. It had an astounding impact and the truth is all I had really done was connect people, give space for stories and invite people to be a part of it. I hadn’t even provided all of the content. Each person who shared was offering a new verse to the song of love we are singing together. People cried, people laughed, and in the end people knew each other better and I think that is why they gave. 

In our first year, there was one large gift from a Life Insurance Policy that slipped through our fingers because of a technical mistake, over which I had no control and had worked to prevent two years before. It was heartbreaking and frustrating. That $42,000 would have given me so much peace in our unsettled seasons when I worried and prayed, wondered and cried, yes cried…a lot… about our making it through the next 18 months. I am certain we would have put that gift to good use and deployed every penny in love. But I am sometimes grateful, because our path forward involved so many gifts that were given with great love and deep intention. Those gifts may be dwarfed by that one gift in the eyes of the world, but our course proved to be one of many people, practicing generosity together. At the time Bernie Sanders was running for president and proudly touted that his average campaign gift was $27. So was ours, so was ours. Our work is fueled by grad students giving five dollars a week and professionals giving $100. Folks giving quarterly, monthly, and annually at every increment. Folks took leaps from not giving to giving ten dollars, then taking another step to $15, and then the next year to $20 a week. Community folks giving through Omaha Gives and Giving Tuesday and church folks giving month by month, or week by week, fueled us forward. I couldn’t be more grateful for each one. Each one is a celebration of sharing the work, strengthening our connection and making a real, tangible commitment to journey together.

Our faith calls us to strengthen and nurture the ties between us, the relationships that weave us together. This work requires generosity, it is weird by the world’s standards. It is risky and liberating a the same time. It saves us from ourselves. May we have the courage! Amen

Questions for discussion:
• What is your experience with giving?
• What makes it a hard practice?
• What might be a next step for you?