How To Feel Good About Your Stewardship Campaign
Asking church members to give money is not fundamentally different from making an altar call or encouraging a parishioner to read the Bible.
Ben Patterson
April 1, 1981
As I contemplated my first stewardship campaign as a pastor, this little story came to mind: A mother found her young son crying one morning as he was tying his shoes. "Why are you crying?" she asked.
"I have to tie my shoes,' he sobbed.
"But you just learned how. It isn't that hard, is it?"
"But I'm gonna have to do it the rest of my life!" he wailed.
Those were roughly my sentiments. The whole stewardship campaign had been hotly debated by the elders, with the battle lines drawn between the so-called idealists and the so-called hardboiled realists. The idealists saw offering plates and pledge cards as an intrusion into the sanctity and purity of the fellowship. The realists saw it as a like-it-or-not necessity. The idealists were quoting Scripture and saying, "Let God provide." The realists were mixing their Scripture with Benjamin Franklin and saying,
"God helps those who help themselves." The idealists accused the realists of having no faith. The realists accused the idealists of not wanting to take responsibility.
Both were wrong, as I later learned. Pledge cards and offering plates are neither intrusions nor necessities, at least in the sense of the hard-boiled realist, but rather an integral part of Christian worship. They're the proper climax of our response to what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Actually, both groups were laboring under the same delusion. Both saw the stewardship campaign as a fund-raising event. Both were like the little girl in the cartoon who asked her mother as she walked out of church, "Why was the commercial so long?" The only real difference between the two groups was that one wanted to do fund raising with commercials and the other did not.
The Apostle Paul would tell us that the collecting ...
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