Pledging and Discipleship

It is the annual season in congregational life for preparing the financial forecast for life in the coming year. Budgeting. We are well underway. The "Sermon on the A-mount" has been preached, pledge cards are largely in hand, and the appropriate committee is busy trying to shotgun anticipated expenses and income into some kind of a legitimate marriage. One day soon, after the pleading and cutting have been completed, a budget will be adopted and we will move forward into flights of other fancies.

But what are we to make of this process -- this annual collision of the esoteric and the pragmatic, the prayerful and the pedestrian? Isn't there an inherent conflict of interest between the institutional and the spiritual? Spiritual disciplines, after all, which seek to nest the whole of one's life -- time, talent, money, etc. -- in the context of one's faithful and trustful orientation to the priorities of the Creator seem compromised by the institution's insatiable appetite for funding which sounds perennially something like the man-eating plant "Audrey 2" in Little Shop of Horrors coercing Seymour to "feed me."

Is it, finally, possible for spiritual devotion and institutional necessity to co-exist, or is anything a church does in the name of "stewardship education and development" finally tainted as mere "prettied-up, crass marketing" for the good of the bottom line? I'm more optimistic than that. Though it's true that stewardship can descend into mere spiritualized fundraising in the same way that evangelism can be debased by simple church growth schemes, how we spiritually view our personal assets is, indeed, a critical faith concern. That the church's fiscal necessities must tag along belong the church's responsibility to occasion stewardship reflections -- and sometimes repentance -- simply means that the church must be vigilant about its own integrity. Budgeting must be secondary -- indeed subservient -- to faith development. In the same way that therapists, teachers, preachers, counselors and others have the obligation to exercise special care due to the relational power and authority conferred in their relationships with clients, so the church must be cautious about the way it exercises its intrinsic influence. It must, likewise, submit itself to the same kind of stewardship expectations it asks of its members. How is the spirituality, the convictions and values of the church -- its own time, talent and resources -- utilized and offered as gifts from God and held only in trust? Is the church a model to its members about how to steward its own assets? The institution, after all, can be just as stingy, just as self-centered and self-indulgent as those members who comprise it.

Hard questions. For now, we'll count the cards and see how the budget comes out.