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Money and what it represents is a complex issue in congregations. As an educator, I’m interested in how people acquire what they learn, including perspectives, values, and habits.
We know that certain things need to be learned in particular ways. As such, I’m intrigued by how often we teach things incorrectly or, sometimes, the wrong things. This is especially true of money and stewardship.
Stewardship is about a Christian’s voluntary response to God’s call to discipleship as part of the Body of Christ. As such, stewardship is a value (individual and corporate) and a practice.
Often, congregations seem to tend to “teach” stewardship backward and incompletely. Too often, we attempt to teach Christian stewardship by using the teaching-by-telling approach and leaving it at that, never touching on the affective and the volitional and failing to facilitate the practice. Then, we naively expect that change related to stewardship will happen in the lives of our members.
Stewardship is a spiritual issue and should be addressed like every other spiritual issue in the believer’s life.
The problem is not to TELL people that they need to give 10% of their money to the church; instead, it is to help people arrive at a conviction of value by engaging them in the dialogue of theological reflection by asking, “Share with me, how are you responding to God in your stewardship of life?”
Our failure to help our members learn—–really learn-—-stewardship has consequences.
Our unfortunate approach to teaching stewardship to our members means that we’ve done a great disservice to them over the years by being ineffective in helping them address the stewardship dimension of discipleship (except when it’s time to ask for money for the church budget we tend to not even talk about it.
And all evidence is that we’ve failed even there since most members give only 2.3% of their income to the church).
I suspect that we, the church leaders—pastors, teachers, educators, deacons—have been irresponsible in helping our members in this, probably because we have not dealt with our own money-related issues.
In most of our churches, a significant number of our members are under the oppressive burden of debt, so much so that they are unable to respond in responsible stewardship to God.
I suspect they resent us because we’ve been of no help in dealing with financial stewardship while making them feel guilty about not giving more money to the church.
We need to be more prophetic about challenging the values of the world our members have embraced and the myths of materialism and consumerism the world teaches.
So when we once or twice a year make our pitch for money to fund the church budget, they can’t hear it; at least, they don’t hear it theologically.
And then there are the church members who have bought into the values of the world’s materialism:
The issue of stewardship is complex because it is less about the money and more about values. We ought to address the issue of stewardship in the same way we address issues about faith development and discipleship by considering developmental life stages and cycles.
Different epochs in life require different messages about one’s response to stewardship of life; as a specific example, mid-life calls for stewardship of generativity (learning to face the limitation of means and beginning to invest in the next generation and, in effect, learning how to give your life away.
However, that is not the case for adolescents and young adults whose life stage work appropriately includes acquiring and building. And how unfair and nonsensical to its audience are messages about stewardship of money to young children—who have no money and no cognitive concept of percentages or proportional giving?
End-of-life stages and stages of senescence call for different ethical and theological decisions about stewardship. Only through dialogical engagement can people deal with these issues authentically. I suspect we make our stewardship messages ineffective when we assume that they are the same for everyone at the same time and attempt to teach everyone the same way.
Regarding educational programming, not everything is for everybody at the same time.
I think we confuse and make people feel uselessly guilty when we send the message that, regardless of their life stage, family life cycle stage, and particular life situation, they are supposed to function and respond like “everyone else.”
But rarely are they allowed to learn through dialogue that leads to application, and therefore, I suspect most choose to make no legitimate response to God’s call in this area of their lives. Stewardship is as much a value and a choice as a concept and a practice.
Unless we address all four domains of learning–knowledge, affect, behavior, and volition—our members will never “learn” stewardship as a response to God’s call.
Israel Galindo is the Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning.
Adapted from: How to Be the Best Christian Study Group Leader, by Israel Galindo (Judson Press)
