Tag: stewardship

In this episode we sit down about the spiritual discipline of tithing. Is it still a valid New Testament practice? What does the Scripture teach? How should we talk about it?

Tithing is the beginning point of generosity not the end point… when people argue with me about tithing, they’re never arguing because they want to give more… they’re looking for a reason not to give…

Tithing for me revealed motives that were deep in my heart… it revealed my fear of losing money or not having enough… tithing unsettled and stretched me and made me more disciplined…

In Acts, when the Spirit is poured out, people get radical with their generosity… tithing is fulfilled and heightened in the New Testament, it is not done away with…

The reason that a lot of people aren’t tithing is that they are living off of more than 100% of their income… you have to learn to live on less…

Now of course when people walk through crisis, for that there is grace… in fact, that’s why the rest of us should be tithing—to take care of those people!

Sometimes the way that we’ve talked about tithing is transactional… it’s about the person to person interaction with God, and we’ve lost the communal aspect of tithing…

The problem with many people is that when they start making $75k or more is they lose contact with the poor… when you lose contact, you lose compassion… tithing keeps us connected to the plight of the poor…

One of my own measurements personally with giving is, “Can I pray the prayer: Give us this day our daily bread?” with authenticity… if I can’t pray that prayer and mean it, I’m not being generous enough…

Giving to the church is a different kind of giving… it is worshipful and therefore undesignated… there’s a sense in which it is an openhanded gift, where we are saying to God, “I am yours…”

If everyone at New Life Church tithed, we could just about solve the problem of homeless, single moms in El Paso County… that’s what drives me to talk about this…

Where a lot of pastors fall short is that we don’t tell people where the money is spent… we need to let people know how their collective giving does collective good…

How should pastors and churches help people position themselves to embrace generosity? In this conversation, a continuation from the previous episode, Pastors Brady Boyd and Andrew Arndt are joined by Chris Brown (Nationally Syndicated Radio Host of “Life Money Hope”) to answer this question and more.

The biggest revelation I’ve had in dealing with churches is that people are confused about stewardship… when people think about stewardship, they think the church is just trying to get their money…

Fundraising and stewardship are not the same thing… stewardship is about managing God’s blessings in God’s way for God’s glory… not just 10% but 100%…

We need to teach people to be faithful with the 100%…

At the core, this is about financial discipleship… we need to be teaching people not just what to do, but how to do it…

It saddens me that the church is an authority in the eyes of the world when it comes to marriage and parenting, but we’re not when it comes to finances… those churches that are taking stewardship seriously are seeing a lot of results…

The reason we teach on financial management and stewardship is not so that we can get their money but so that the Lord can get their hearts… we’re trying to teach people to worship the right thing…

People don’t give because they’re broke… so if you want to really do this well, people have got to pick up on the fact that this is something for them, not something that you want from them… it’s about trust…

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

• How good of a job do you think you and your team are doing at helping people think biblically about managing “the 100%” as opposed to just “the 10%” of their resources?
• What are some improvements you could make to this area of your ministry?
• Take some time to list 5-6 practical things you could do this year to help bolster the quality of financial discipleship your church. Talk about them with your team.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Chris’s Podcast: Life, Money, Hope

stewardshipcentral.org

Many pastors find it difficult to talk about giving and generosity in their churches, but developing a culture of generosity is essential to Christian living. In this episode, we have a conversation about how pastors can help our churches to embrace generosity.

SHOW NOTES – DEVELOPING A CULTURE OF GENEROSITY PT 1 – 017

Talking about money makes me evaluate my motives more than any other topic… I want to make sure that I am asking people to give for the right reasons…

At the heart of discipleship is inviting people to transfer allegiance to King Jesus… when you name money, sex, and power, we’re talking about the age-old temptations that have to do with how we orient and order our lives… it gets personal…

When worship becomes charitable giving rather than laying our lives on the altar as a living sacrifice, we have lost…

Every time I talk about money, I am having to live down the poor behavior of people I have never met… We have to be aware that we are staring in the face of a bad reputation, and the only way to reverse that is by doing the right thing for the right reason for a very long amount of time…

When you remember what the church is—the family of God, the household of faith—you can start to compare that to what a family ought to be like… when you are in the family, everyone chips in and contributes their strength…

Part of our role is also to help people see giving differently… God is the most generous giver we’ve ever known… the creation is full of excessive gifts that God didn’t need to give… when you understand that the heart of the New Testament is grace, “gift”, then it turns you into someone who becomes like God… you become a giver…

I’ve learned not to be ashamed or embarrassed to talk to people with finances about opportunities to give… but the relationship has to be based on shared trust and mutual love and respect, and if you just see them as a pocketbook, you will never gave their love or trust…

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

– Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability: http://www.ecfa.org/

– Henri Nouwen: A Spirituality of Fundraising

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

• What challenges have you experienced in talking about stewardship to your church?
• Where do you need to develop a larger “frame” for talking about stewardship?
• On a scale of 1-10, how well have you talked about stewardship in terms of biblical, kingdom mission? Why did you give yourself that rating?