Oh my. For most congregations,
just as the new church year gets started, the fiscal year soon enters its last
quarter. How is your congregation set for the big push to “make budget?” Will
members give it an Old Testament tithe? Or at least a few thousand dollars?
Money is an issue. Most churches struggle
with declining membership and fewer givers. At the same time, churches need
more staff than ever because church members don’t have as much time and energy
for voluntarism as they used to. Today’s congregations pay people to have great
Sunday Schools, delicious coffee, bookkeepers, and so on. Even thriving churches
struggle with soaring expenses.
Unfortunately, the economy—and
markets—haven’t exactly been thriving, have they? So again, will your church
members give it an Old Testament tithe? Or at least a few thousand dollars?
At least, that’s how we normally
frame the church budget crunch. But I’d like to put a different spin on the
matter. Instead of talking about Old Testament tithing—one of the few Old
Testament laws that gets any press on modern pulpits—I’d rather talk about
being one-hundred-percent stewards. Rather than make a big push in the last
quarter for a few extra big checks, I’d like church members make it their
Christian ambition to imagine how they can put everything they have: money,
time, talents, visions, and dreams—put everything they have in the service of
the good and neighbor.
The one-hundred-percent steward
idea also had deep roots in the Old Testament—but more as a blessing than a
law. You will remember that, in the creation myth, God tells Adam and Eve that
their job is "fill the earth and subdue it." Subdue sounds a bit
negative, but it isn't meant to be. What God is saying, actually, is that Adam
and Eve were blessed with the responsibility to make all of creation,
including themselves, prosper. The fact that this is a blessing, rather than a
command, becomes obvious when you contrast the Genesis story to other ancient
Near-Eastern creation myths, such as the “Enuma Elish.” In those myths, people
were created as slaves to work earthly gardens to provide food for the feast
tables of the gods in heaven. In fact, the early parts of Genesis can best be
read as a satirical response to these other creation accounts. The point of
Genesis, here, is that the Jewish God blesses rather than condemns; he gives
the garden to human stewards to care for and enjoy, rather than as a prison
farm without an exit.
So Genesis tells the story of early humans
trying to do the amazing things with their lives that God wanted them to do. For
example, besides making the garden grow, we read in Genesis 4 that Jabal herded
animals, and Jubal learned to make beautiful music with harp and flute.
Tubal-Cain figured out how to make tools of bronze and iron--the world's first
industrialist. And so on. Filling the earth and subduing it is code for using
our human brains and hands and culture to give our lives divine meaning and
purpose.
The thing is, we get to do this
with our whole lives, all the time. Or, to put it in the words I began with, Genesis
portrays humans like us as giving one hundred percent of our lives developing the
gifts and opportunities God has given us.
Modern one-hundred-percent
stewards offer their hobbies and pastimes, their authority at work, their spiritual and physical gifts, their education,
thinking, emotional intelligence—they offer it all to God and their fellow
humans to make both the earth and their lives more, now, what God wants them
to be forever.
One-hundred-percent
stewards might be executives who build new factories for profit and for
employment. One-hundred-percent stewards might be model-train enthusiasts who
share their hobby with kids who need Big Brothers. They are farmers who grow
crops that save the soil rather than eat it up. One-hundred-percent stewards
include the GM employee who dreams of putting his kids through college while
making the best trucks he or she knows how. Oh, and yes, one-hundred-percent
stewards give generously out of their financial resources to make sure that the
church is a blessing to them and in the world, as well. And this especially
happens when the church is a community of people who are into building
community where people wear love on their sleeves.
Genesis is
an invitation to put moralistic, rule-bound, if-you-tithe-then-you're-perfect
Christianity behind us. Instead, the creation account invites us to freely use our
entire life, all our culture and energy, our job and hobbies and church
participation—everything we are and have to help make the earth and our neighbors everything they need, thrive.
It takes
wisdom to be a one-hundred-percent steward—wisdom that Adam and Eve seemed to
lack. It also takes courage to see all your skills and gifts and money as the
total budget God put you on to be the kind of human he hoped for in Eden. But there is
also no life like it.
Especially
for congregations full of such hundred-percent stewards coming to the end of
their fiscal years!
