Stewardship

Ministry Connections: Stewardship

The Church—Hope of the Financially Uninformed?
By Dick Towner

This issue of WILLOW addresses the question of whether the church is really the hope of the world. I believe it is the hope of the world — a very broken and needy world desperately in need of hope. But I’m often not sure the church is the hope of the financially uninformed (as I fervently believe it should be).

Why do I feel the church should be the hope of the financially uninformed? Reason number one is that a whole bunch of folks really need a ray of hope regarding their financial situation. They’re in a financial hole and don’t know how to get out. For them, and everyone else I know — whether or not they’re in financial difficulty — finances are a huge day-to-day issue. For the church to ignore a topic of such centrality in peoples’ lives may be, in the words of Laura Nash, the greatest act of self-marginalization in the church’s history.

Another reason I believe the church should be the hope of the financially uninformed is that the church may be the last remaining place in which financial and stewardship issues can be discussed in non-market terms. The Bible’s counsel regarding both the use of our material resources and our relationship to them, is the one source that can be trusted to be totally free of conflict of interest and to have only the individual’s best interests in mind. Plus, it offers the wisdom of none other than the Creator of the universe. I’m not sure there are other sources that can make the former claim much less the latter one!

A final reason for the church to be a source of hope to folks regarding their financial lives is that the church’s failure to do so yields the day to the counter-biblical and financially unhelpful messages of our very materialistic culture. Those messages ultimately lead to a person serving money rather than God and to storing treasures on earth rather than in heaven. Ben Patterson said it very well, “There’s no such thing as being right with God and wrong with your money.”

Does your church offer hope to the financially uninformed? It can if it has a year-round financial stewardship ministry that teaches, trains, and supports and encourages its members (and maybe even the community at large) in the biblical perspective on earning, saving, debt, spending, and giving. 

Dick Towner is the executive director of the Good Sense stewardship ministry for the Willow Creek Association

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A Solid Financial Stewardship Ministry is Just Good Sense

Sometimes God calls people to be a voice in the wilderness. Other times, He calls people to be a voice at the intersection of Main Street and Madison Avenue.

Count Dick Towner among those in the latter category. He walks along a pathway that few envy … or traverse. In a culture that screams for bigger, better, newer, Towner desires to see people being fiscally sound with the resources that God provides them. He is a champion for good stewardship.

“Two years ago when the Willow Creek Association approached me about creating Good Sense curriculum and heading an effort to help other churches work through the whole stewardship issue, it had all the sounds of a legacy to me,” Towner says, “I’ve really been involved in this area for 35 years.” More

Sounding the Call to Stewardship: Church Building Programmes

Imagine hearing your alarm go off at 5:30 a.m. On a Sunday. Getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning to load up a truck with equipment and set up for a church service. Seven hours later you tear down and haul equipment back to storage, finally returning home.

Now imagine doing that every Sunday for 13 years.

That was the reality for members at Kalamazoo Community Church (KCC), in Kalamazoo, Mich. “We’ve used six facilities in our thirteen years — middle schools, high schools, a YMCA, and an office building,” said Senior Pastor Dave Johnson.

Although church members were faithful to sacrifice sleep and face early morning setup duties for over a decade, it was tiring. When the church purchased property several years ago, the first of a series of attempts to build began. Those initial attempts failed.

“We as a church really got serious about building when we decided to make this a grassroots movement, not a pastoral decision. If we were going to build, we were going to have to leave it up to the Lord and to our congregation,” said Johnson, who came on board at KCC in 2000.

The congregation responded. “We had home meetings where church members would talk and pray about a building plan with different ministry leaders and staff,” said Johnson. Consensus among the members grew, along with excitement about what a building of their own could mean. More