What is Greed?

This is a picture of my three-year old nephew Ty. (Isn’t he cute?) Ty is very precious to our family. You see, we waited for him and prayed for him for a long, long time. We all rejoiced when my brother and sister-in-law received word that they had been chosen by a birth mother to adopt her baby. But—when that baby was born, the birth mother changed her mind. A few grief-filled months later, another phone call came. Jason and Tammy had been selected again. And several months later, they met the birth family at the hospital in Dallas, Texas, and left carrying their tiny little gift from God.

Those who know me well are aware that I almost always have a “Ty Story” to tell or a new picture of Ty to show. However, my purpose for posting this picture is to offset the “less than flattering” story I am about to tell. This story shows a shadowy side. I guess he can’t help it—because he was born a human being and is plagued, as are we all, with a case of the human condition. J Anyway, at his little sister’s second birthday party a couple of months ago, there was an altercation. It was time to break the piñata. Unable to imagine a gaggle of two and three year olds wielding sticks while blindfolded, my brother bought a non-violent piñata---one that has ribbons hanging from it which are pulled by little ones, one at a time, until someone pulls the “magic” ribbon that causes the candy to drop. Now---just to set the scene. Every child gathered around the piñata was holding a gallon-size hefty bag bearing their name which would carry their loot. The piñata was stuffed to its gills with candy. Near the piñata along the wall, there was an extra five-gallon pail of candy that Jason and Tammy brought just to make sure that there was an abundance for all. At his party, no one was going home empty-handed. But when the piñata broke, little Ty unraveled. He dropped to the ground and wrapped his arms around all of the candy in his proximity. When the other kids came near his bounty, he scowled and gave them a shove! And, ironically, the more he fought to protect what was his, the fewer pieces of candy ended up in his Hefty bag.

My brother reached in and lifted Ty out of the fray. He said: “Ty, I don’t like seeing greed in you,” Between sobs, Ty asked: “Daddy, what’s greed?” J

Ironic, isn’t it? Ty’s parents had provided everything needed for the party. There was candy in abundance---and there was no chance that Ty was going to go home empty handed. In fact, most of the candy in the five gallon bucket now sits in their pantry at home. And, yet, on some level, Ty was fearful---that there wouldn’t be enough, that he’d have to do without, that others would grab his share. Ty was operating with a scarcity mentality. And we do that, too, don’t we? God has provided all we have needed and more---and yet we fear that there somehow won’t be enough, that we will run short, that we have to grab all we can get or we’ll have to go without.

But here’s the best part! We all still love Ty. His behavior that day didn’t change our love for him at all. And, fortunately, even when we embrace a scarcity mentality and compete and shove to get what we think we need, God still loves us as well. Our actions and attitudes when we fall victim to “the human condition” do nothing to change God’s love for us.

In this season of Thanksgiving when our attention turns in a more focused way to the celebration of our blessings, I invite you to focus on the abundance that God provides. Even in a difficult economy, even as we are in recovery from natural disasters, even as we struggle sometimes to believe that there is “enough” for what we need, may we notice God’s abundance in five-gallon buckets and other kinds of containers---and be grateful that God our Heavenly Parent always provides more than we need. When we know that God is that good, we can simply relax and open our hands to both receive and give.

And, by the way, isn’t my nephew a cutie?

Happy Thanksgiving!

On the Journey with You:

Jill

Our Need of Economic Recovery

http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=1006

Our Need of Recovery
For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack” for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom. So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer.

Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners.

Why Pledge? Why Ask Others to Pledge?

As spring fully blooms around us and many of us turn to making summer vacation plans, it may seem an odd time to devote my newsletter space to the subject of “fall stewardship campaigns” but alas, that’s what you’ll find in my space this month.

Specifically, I want to talk about “pledging”—a spiritual practice of many and a touchy subject for others. Why is pledging important? Let’s take a look from two distinct vantage points. First, and most importantly, pledging is important because it reflects a solid commitment to regular financial giving to and through the church. As such, it is a spiritual practice. As Christians, we are formed by our spiritual practices. I once spoke with a spiritual director who posited that anything we do for thirty days in a row becomes a ritual, a habit, a routine for us. Regular, disciplined giving to God through the church is one way---and a key way—to ensure that our hearts have a generous shape. Jesus describes this when he says in his Sermon on the Mount: ...’for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21) One might expect him to say that when our commitment grows, our treasure will follow---but he turns that notion upside down. He says that where we decide to invest our treasure will determine the path of our heart. Making a “public” (as in “on a pledge card”) commitment to invest our treasure in God’s reign in our midst will deepen our longing for God’s reign on earth to fully come and our commitment to participate in making our prayer a reality. This is the first, and most important, reason for pledging---spiritual growth and deepening commitment to God.

There’s a second reason as well. And it’s a fundraising reason. Sometimes people ask: “What difference does pledging make?” And those who know the statistics might answer: “Anywhere from 100-300% in total giving.” Here’s what we know. In congregations where no annual campaign is held, and there is little or no focus on stewardship education, the average household contributes 1.5% of their income to God through the church. In congregations which invite people at least once yearly to pledge an amount of money, the average household contributes 2.9% of their income to God through the church. In congregations where people are invited to pledge a percentage of their income out of gratitude to God, the average household contributes 4.6% of their income to God through the church. (Wayne Barrett) Simply put, asking people to pledge a percentage of their income out of gratitude to God yields more resources for God’s work in the world.

If you regularly emphasize Christian stewardship in your congregation and an annual campaign is part of your regular practice, you are fulfilling an important aspect of our call to make disciples. If your congregation does not currently focus on stewardship or give people an opportunity to make a commitment to give back to God a portion of what God has given to them, please consider doing so this year. Within the next several weeks, pastors and other identified stewardship leaders in each local congregation in our district will receive a letter from the District Stewardship Team with a list of resources for Annual Stewardship campaigns. Please watch your mailbox for this helpful resource. Also, take time to check our district’s stewardship blog---www.generousineveryway.blogspot.org. And, if you’d like to post something, let me know.

In the meantime, may God bless you richly as you are about the work of “making disciples (stewards J) for the transformation of the world!”

On the Journey with You!

Jill

The Offering: A Meditation by Marie T. Cross

Offering plate, offering basket, offering box,
Made of silver, brass, willow, plastic or wood.
An empty place to be filled with our gifts.
An opportunity, a challenge, an expression of grace.
Touched by many hands.
Passed on. Passed by.
Passed back. Brought forward.
Offered and blessed.
Counted, accounted, and spent.

What was given? What was received?
What was intended that our gifts would do
For others? For the church? For ourselves?

Coins, dollar bills, handwritten checks,
noisy loose change or quietly sealed tight.
Spontaneously given or by a careful decision, a private
choice made public.
Earned interest, cash dividends, paychecks, our income--
Commissions, pensions, social security, welfare.

And with our money, we offer ourselves, our values, our hopes
and desires.
Vocation, leisure time---
Out of a sense of duty, generosity, conviction,
commitment?

With our money, we offer ourselves
What we choose to be.
What we could have brought. What we could have brought.

Offering plate, offering basket, offering box,
The regular, repeated call to discipleship and ministry.
Giving, in gratitude to God,
A part of what already, always belongs to God.

Good Communication Enhances Financial Stewardship

At the close of 2008, the First UMC of North Liberty published its first annual stewardship newsletter entitled "The Journey---Stewardship." The purpose of the newsletter was to tell the story of the congregation's vital ministries and the need for financial support. Since the newsletter was published, First UMC has seen an increase in giving, in spite of difficult economic times. If you are interested in seeing a copy of the first edition of "The Journey" send your request to Jill Sanders at Jill.Sanders@iaumc.org.

Biblical and Theological Perspectives for the Missionally Stewarding Church----From "Stewardship for the 21st Century"

From Chapter 3 - Biblical and Theological Perspectives for the Missionally Stewarding Church by Lon Kvanli:"Stewardship has come to be understood as church code for the annual fund-raising campaign ... This functional approach runs counter to stewardship that is rooted in the Trinity. Stewardship and mission are not simply two pieces to the puzzle of winning the offering plate prize. Stewardship needs to be framed theologically, informed by various theories and research on stewardship, and focused on a God-given, communally discerned mission and vision. In this (third) chapter, the focus (is) on the theological framing of stewardship for the sake of the mission."Stewardship and Perichoresis"Perichoresis is a Greek word which means whirl, rotation, or circulation; in addition, the word means the sharing of all things, including hopes and sorrows, joys and fears, and even the daily needs of life. Perichoresis is a wonderful description of the Trinity. The Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a total sharing relationship. The Father shares all, the Son shares all, and the Holy Spirit shares all. This is a different model for giving. In a perichoretic stewardship the giver is motivated to share all that one has to offer. This desire to share all is rooted in the Trinity's complete giving of self for our sake.""There are several Bible stories and texts that illustrate perichoretic giving. In the story of the widow''s mite Mark 12:41-44 the woman held nothing back, but gave everything she had. She had a relationship of trust with God."Stewardship: Abundance and CommunityKvanli posits that anxiety based on scarcity reflects a lack of faith. Likewise, covetousness is "distrust while on the other hand, the cause of generosity is faith. A man is generous because he trusts God and never doubts but that he will always have enough.""A healthy stewardship is rooted in the biblical promises of God's abundant generosity.""Not only is God a generous God, God is also a missionary God - a sending God." God sent Abraham and Moses on a mission. They had faith in God's promises and carried out their missions."God is a generous God, and God frequently promised prosperity ... for the whole community of faith rather than the individual." The prosperity is meant for the common good. " ... the Bible frames stewardship as an understanding of that which encompasses all of life, including the mission of the church." Stewardship, Trinity, and MissionImportant research today is focused on " ... the connections between Trinitarian theology, missional theology, and stewardship ... the Trinity is the source of the mission and the church becomes the mission - the living expression (or manifestation) of that mission." The Missionally Stewarding ChurchIn summary, the missional stewarding church:" ... will be a responsible steward of God's abundant gifts ... in response to the needs of their context and community.""Knows the purpose of stewardship ... is for the building up of the whole church community for the sake of the mission and vision.""Knows it is invited and sent to join in God's mission and vision for the world."" ... lives into the reality of knowing that the mission and vision are the reason for the church."" ... (knows the need for) community because it is only in community that we learn missional stewardship from each other and for each other."" ... trusts in the forgiveness and grace of Christ. " ... knows that it is through Word and Sacrament that God invites us to join in God's mission and vision for the world. " ... knows and lives into the reality of having been abundantly blessed and will use those abundant blessings God has given to restore right relationships with the community. For a fuller reading of the important points Kvanli is making, please go to Chapter 3 - Biblical and Theological Perspectives for the Missionally Stewarding Church.

An Example of Extravagant Generosity

Several years ago, I had the privilege of traveling to the deep interior of Mexico for an immersion experience. We spent several days with the people of the Metodista El Salvador, a mission church in El Higueron sharing food and fellowship, learning conversational Spanish, mixing concrete by hand, and pouring floors for a parsonage and a classroom. On the last day in El Higueron, we sat outside around the dining table, a table that had become a communion table many times during our stay as we listened to one another's stories, and shared our final meal together. During the meal, one of us commented on the simple, yet beautiful terra cotta pottery that our hostess used to serve us. She promptly went to her kitchen, pulled seven pieces of pottery out of the cupboard and presented them as gifts to us. It was humbling to hold her gift in my hands, and I was moved to tears by her generous spirit. This woman, who by worldly standards had so little, emptied her cupboards to share what she had with us.

Her example continues to challenge me. I can't say that I have ever sent any plates or serving bowls home with dinner guests. Her generosity forces me to admit that I cling tightly to so many things, often because I am afraid. It makes me want to loosen my grip and let go of those things so that what I have can bless others. And, mostly, it unsettles me to think that an abundance of resources does not necessarily lead to generosity, and that a generous spirit cannot be quenched by scarce resources! Is it typically the case that the more we have, the less we are willing to put what we have at risk? (Or is it just me?)

What would God do with us and through us if we loosened our grip on the blessings we have received--our gifts and graces, our buildings and bank accounts, our love and our lives--and offered them to God in order that others might be blessed? What if we discovered how to love and give of ourselves with reckless abandon? Maybe, just maybe, we would know what it means to be the Church of Jesus Christ!