Worship & Preaching  >  Preaching on Stewardship > Theological Themes

Stewardship Talks : Theological Themes

The purpose of this talk is to share something of an understanding of the theological themes that underlie a Christian approach to the giving of money.

In raising this topic in this way, we archdeacons do not wish to imply any criticism of our colleagues or to teach our grandmothers how to suck eggs. All three archdeacons in this diocese have significant experience as parish clergy and we have struggled just as much as anyone else with the problem of how to address the stewardship of money. I suppose I am hoping that a theology of money can be discovered and shared that:

• responds thankfully to the love of God in Christ and reflects God’s generosity
• furthers the work of God’s Kingdom
• enables the Christian community to budget for mission and growth
• deepens commitment of congregations and individuals within the Christian community
• enables the Christian community to have enough financial resources to pay its bills

So the motivation for these sessions is supportive and not critical. It is to encourage and resource you, the parish clergy, in this part of your ministry.

It would be true to say, however, that the idea for these seminars arose from an examination of the statistics in the Portsmouth diocese, which reveal that even after accounting for the socio-economic make-up of the area, we have lower levels of giving, in relative terms, than many other dioceses.

A report published in October 2001 revealed that in 1999 (the most recent year for which figures are available) the average giving in Portsmouth diocese was 2.5% of the average income of the population. Out of the 43 dioceses, we were eighth from the bottom. Highest was the diocese of Birmingham where, according to Inland Revenue figures, the average income is £8,956 and the average giving £376 – a percentage of 4.2%. Portsmouth’s average income is £10,065, with average giving of £250 – a percentage of 2.5%. In short, as a diocese we are 22nd out of 43 dioceses on the table of wealth but joint 33 out of 43 on the table of giving.

The Diocesan Board of Finance has wondered why this should be the case. Now, I tend towards the ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ model of causes – not one single murderer, but several suspects all playing their small and independent part in the deed. I think the reasons may include:

• Within our diocese, there have been low levels of quota increase in recent years and lean central administrative costs. With less need to increase income, this has not happened. Maybe, we have quite unconsciously developed a mindset of prudence and preservation for our diocese and parishes– rather than a mindset characterised by mission and growth.
• There is significant suspicion from lay people about the effective management of resources by the church – arising principally from the publicity given to the Church Commissioners’ losses on their investment income.
• Also, our statistics viewed in a national context may reflect the fact, in this diocese, that we do not have large numbers of evangelical parishes where tithing would be the norm. A substantial number of such parishes in a diocese would be bound to affect any average for giving.
• It may be that our lean central structures, where we have only been able to allocate a third of one person on the mainland and some of another on the Island, to support work in Christian stewardship has limited the improvement in this part of church life.
• Finally, it is possible that many clergy do not feel comfortable or confident in teaching on the stewardship of money and that a small number would even produce theological reasons for not doing so.

One of the things I have learned in exploring the stewardship of money in a church context is that we will go to extraordinary and imaginative lengths to avoid the challenge of stewardship for ourselves and that we are able to think of very good and plausible reasons why this particular challenge does not apply to us. Therefore, I am not going to spend time on the other possible factors, but reflect on the final possibility – that in some way the centre needs to support more effectively the clergy in this part of their work.

My task, in this first section, is to make a modest contribution to the establishment of a theological foundation for a balanced and wholesome approach to the subject. I propose to look at elements from three main areas:

• theology of God’s world and
• theology of God’s gift in a Christian society of consistent generosity
• some final reflections on the theology of the ministry of God’s people.

1 Theology of God’s world

It is clear that in some, but not all, parishes people do not want to hear their parish priest talk about money. Michael Wright puts it like this:

It is quite common for people to feel that it is appropriate for our clergy and church leaders to have a lot to say about our Christian believing, belonging, and behaving, but not about Christian financial giving. Indignantly – or uncomfortably – many of us regard that as an invasion of our privacy.

Many of our people want to hear their incumbent speak about the holy things of God and not the unholy things of the world. If money has to be addressed at all – and let us hope we can avoid such a vulgar subject – it should be done by lay people in a way that clearly arises from the practical need to pay the bills. The church at national and local level has clearly shown it cannot manage its resources and it behoves the church to leave discussion and management of money to its laity, who are more ‘worldly wise’ in these matters whilst the clergy should get on with ministry in God’s areas of concern – namely, the spiritual life.

For me this view – which is not uncommon – is based on a theological misunderstanding of the nature of God’s world. Here it might be helpful to look at Daniel Hardy’s work. Hardy in Finding the Church explores what he calls three unsatisfactory ways of providing a theology of money:

• To avoid the task altogether. This, he says, is the way chosen by those of a spiritual cast of mind, ‘who suppose that faith is a matter of relation to an unworldly God.’
• An alternative and more common view is that, though faith is embodied in the world, this involvement is primarily spiritual and ‘a necessary passage’, ‘a ‘sojourning in this world’ whose purpose is to achieve higher spiritual ends. A faithful person should only be engaged with money in a limited and occasional way.
• The standards by which money and its used are guided and separate from all reference to God. People are set free to make what they can of their economic existence.

Hardy argues that we need is, ‘a theology of money that is intelligently and practically Christian...We ought to have a Christian explanation of the proper use of money and also practical guidelines which make it possible for us ...to live appropriately in our money-saturated world.’

I am not able to address such a major theme today, but I would like to share some ideas I find helpful and to begin by thinking about the doctrine of the incarnation: from above and from below.

First, theology from above focuses on the action of God in the world as distilled in the scripture and tradition of the Church. From this starting point we receive the great tradition of incarnational theology that is articulated so beautifully in St. John’s Gospel.

The prologue reaches its climax in the sentence, ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. God descended into human form; the divine word which was present at the beginning of time, speaking the words of creation; this force which nourished the Wisdom tradition and inspired the great prophets of Israel... this same word was focused, contained, and perfectly expressed in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth; that in Jesus Christ God became one of us, so that we can become part of God.

This is one of Christianity’s greatest contributions to the world—the idea that the word became flesh and literally ‘pitched his tent’ or ‘placed his tabernacle’ among us; that God was involved in his world, through human life, an involvement which led inevitably to Calvary— a death and resurrection which was only of long-lasting significance because it was the Word made flesh up there on the cross.

Perhaps that is the beginning of our theology of the incarnation ‘from above’. However, secondly, in addition to this traditional perspective, we take as our starting point our experience of God ‘from below’ we get another perspective: God as present in the ordinary things of life.

Listen to some profound words from a Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, who I have found particularly helpful in this area. In one of his devotional works, Encounters with Silence, he writes, in the reflection “God of my daily routine” about how to seek God in the mundane. For him there is no place in which he guarantees to find God – even in his prayers or in the Eucharist, he is capable of forgetting God. Therefore, he says there should be nowhere in which he cannot find God, even in the routine of his daily existence. He writes:

...if its true that I can lose You in everything, it must also be true that I can find you in everything...Thus I must seek you in all things. If every day is “everyday”, then every day is Your day, and every hour is the hour of your grace.

I must learn to have both “everyday” and Your day in the same exercise. In devoting myself to the works of the world, I must learn to give myself to you, to possess You, the One and Only Thing in everything.

Christians tend to want to divide the world and themselves into holy and profane compartments. God, the church and a life and prayer belong to the holy section; work, money, sex, power belong to the profane part and never the twain should meet or inform each other. What Rahner, and St Ignatius his master before him, was keen to stress was that there are not two compartments to a human being, to life and to the universe – but only one experience in which one could see God’s grace or love present in all things.

This is an incarnational or sacramental way of engaging with life and the world. One in which God is discerned as being present in the humanness and ordinariness of our existence – focussed fully and finally in the man who was God, Jesus of Nazareth.

This can of course can be very threatening. We are comfortable with the mundane and the routine and we do not want it to be changed. One of the things we human beings like to do is to keep God at a distance. But God’s engagement with and transformation of the mundane means that we have no where to hide: he wants to transform in every respect the world he has made; he wants his kingdom to come ‘on earth, as it is in heaven’.

And this involvement of God in his world through human life is not all past tense. The incarnation, the enfleshing of God in Christ, did not end with the ascension of Jesus into heaven...God did not show himself for 33 years and then leave the stage for ever—God is continually involved in his world, upholding and sustaining his creation and also spreading his love, the love of Christ, through you and me as we live our lives.

And what the phrase I quoted earlier “And the word became flesh” remind us of is that Christianity is a religion in which God has revealed himself in history and is continuing to reveal himself through the material elements of creation: though the beauty of creation, through the human being who was God, Jesus of Nazareth, and through the bread and wine and water of the sacraments, through our stewardship of the resources God has given us.

For me, Christianity is a kind of profound materialism. It is not a spiritual religion of ideas or metaphysical notions, but one in which God communicates to his world through real people and real things.

We are the continuation of the incarnation; that it is though us as individual Christians and through us as the church community (the body of Christ) that the Lord is made present in the world today. God acts through us —- he has no other way than to use our voices to speak of his love and no other bodies than ours to show his love to the world.

Karl Rahner, again:

Touch my heart with your grace, O Lord (so that) when I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home. You who are Love itself, give me the grace of love, give me Yourself, so that all my days may finally empty into the one day of Your eternal Life. Amen.

Karl Rahner also rejects the dualistic approach at a philosophical level. He sees theology and the human intellectual endeavour (and the right use of money, is surely a part of that) as together addressing holistically the same subject: the human being in the world. As you know, Rahner is well known for his theology of experience in a ‘graced’ world. He argues that in dealing with a human being in all its facets one is dealing with a human being loved by God. Being loved by God ––– whether or not this is recognised or acknowledged ––– actually affects the way a human being lives and this may be discerned in the hints, gaps and unexplained mysteries of a human life. ‘Sacred’ and ‘secular’ are therefore no longer separate compartments or categories of reality ––– but part of one reality.

We tend to look for extraordinary or extravagant experiences from God. For Karl Rahner doing theology from below, from experience, cannot begin from a situation of God’s absence moving to a situation of his presence, because God is present at the heart of all possible experience. Growth in grace is a matter of how we accept and understand the presence of God.

2 Theology of God’s gift in a Christian society of consistent generosity.

This brings me to my second theological theme: theology of God’s gift. For a Christian belief in God is focused, fully and finally in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ; in his life, his death and resurrection. We know that Christianity is not a philosophical system based on a set of ideas, but is about a relationship with God through Jesus. And that through the process of repentance and the acceptance of God’s forgiveness, there is a recognition of his sacrificial love for each one of us.

This liberating recognition should lead to a new direction in our lives –the Christian way. This way is a journey of exploration towards God in which we express our faith and trust through worship, through love for others and through the careful and responsible stewardship of the resources God has given us to manage.

It is quite clear in the Bible and in the tradition of the Church that we our role is as stewards of God’s creation and as stewards we shall be called upon to explain how we have used the gifts he has given us. Also, we should not be miserable or dour about this responsibility, but be joyful because God has given us life and love and all the good things around us to enjoy, to enhance our lives and to make us the full human beings he has always intended us to be.

This is God’s generosity: God has given each one of us a human life and, by sacrificing his son, he gives each one of us the opportunity for eternal life – to be with him for ever in wholeness and perfection.

Daniel Hardy again, he suggests that this theology of generosity should be the motivation for a Christian understanding of money:

Christian faith is founded on the consistently generative generosity of God for and within existence as we know it...the consistent pattern seen in God’s work in the world is one achieved through God’s free self-conferral in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, pre-existent and historical, God’s life is freely given to become the world’s life. The return expected is the world’s self-fulfilment by following God’s graceful generosity in its own movement; in its own terms, it is to follow after God’s own ‘logic’. Those who live by this generosity...are formed socially by this – in what we call the Church – as a society of consistent generosity.

If we accept that all this springs from the love and grace of God, how then should we respond? Clearly the response of a Christian to God’s gift in Christ should be a thankful heart expressed in offering our lives to God in worship, in service and in a responsible use of the gifts and talents he has given to us. These gifts and talents have been given to us not for our own short-term benefit, but for us to use to his glory and to the benefit of others.

You are so rich in all you have: in faith, speech and knowledge, in your eagerness to help and in your help for us. And so I want you to be generous also in this service of love. (2 Cor: 8)

Paul wrote these words in his second letter to the Corinthians. He was writing to a Christian community which was very gifted and very exciting, but which was lacking in this important area: its financial response to the needs of other Christians. It was then (and it now) a straightforward and central part of the Christian message that one way in which our thanksgiving for the graceful generosity of God, should show itself is in the management of our money.

I am sure all of us would agree with this fundamental idea —- that God has been extraordinarily generous to us and that we should respond to his generosity by thanksgiving, through worship, through love for others and through Christian stewardship. Not only does this concept of God’s gift to which we respond consistently generously applies to life in the Christian community, it is also a perception we can share with the world – particularly as citizens of the fourth richest nation on the planet. As Daniel Hardy says:

...ways must be found for (the universe)...to be shown the logic of God’s own unlimited generosity. As we find these ways, we will help people in the world to become ‘stewards of the mystery of God in Christ’...the help we offer them must be realistic to their situation and faithful to the unutterably free generosity of the God we know in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

Of course, it would be immoral for us to imply to our congregations and naive for them to believe that we can make a full response to God merely by paying some money to their local parish church each week. Support for a local church can be an important part of this total response. It is not by any means the whole picture – but it can be a useful beginning.

So what about the practical outworking of all this rhetoric? What is the appropriate mechanism by which can we encourage people to contribute financially to the life and mission of the church?

I suppose it could be done on a subscription basis, as a golf club would do it. Let me have a go at setting a subscription for the diocese – these figures cannot be exact. The average cost of running a parish in this diocese for one year – that is all its expenses – is about £29,071 . The average Sunday attendance per parish is 78. Therefore, on a straightforward subscription basis, we could say it costs £370 a year or £7.11 a week for each adult who attends a church in Portsmouth diocese. Therefore, we could quite simply set a subscription at that level.

However, this only works if everybody pays it and such a sum would be too much for some people (£14.22 a week from a retired couple living on income support would be too much, whilst £14.22 from a couple both working would probably not be enough). A subscription model is not just and not Christian. It fails to acknowledge the differences in the ability to contribute between different parts of the diocese and, even within those areas, the differences between the circumstances of individual Christian people.

The Bible and the Christian tradition teach the principle of giving a proportion of our income – people are therefore invited to contribute according to their ability. The Old Testament suggests the proportion of 10% of income and some Christians follow this practice of tithing. The Anglican Church since at least 1958 has commended the principle of proportionate giving for its clergy and people but, unlike some churches, it does not apply a strict rule of a particular proportion for every member. In 1982, the General Synod passed a resolution affirming a standard of 5% of net income ‘to and through the church’ both for individuals and also for parishes who were challenged to commit at least 5% of their income to world mission

We cannot, I suggest, be inflexible and prescriptive about this because the appropriate proportion for each person or family is something for them to consider privately and pray about. There is no external formula which can be instantly applied to the stewardship of money ––tithing is a Biblical guideline, but for some on very low incomes that may be too much and for others on higher incomes it may not be enough. For example, I am very conscious that there are some women in our congregations whose husbands are not supporters of the church and we should be sensitive as we would not wish to put anyone in an awkward or embarrassing position or make anyone feel guilty.

Three points can usefully emphasised in any preaching or teaching on this subject:

• First, this proportion of our income need not be confined to giving money for the mission and ministry of the local church, but might include direct giving to other charities.
• Secondly, if the principle of proportionate giving is adopted —- all contributions of the same proportion are of equal value to God, even though in cash terms they may vary greatly. Indeed the widow’s mite may be a much more sacrificial gift that a much larger sum from a wealthy person with money to spare. Obviously, the remaining 95% of a net income of £50,000 – £47,500 – is a great deal more than the remaining 95% of a net income of £10,000 – £9,500.
• Thirdly, the local church itself ought to practise what it preaches –– as many do ––in that it should give a proportion of its own income to the needs of the world and to missions and charities.

So, in a very crude way, if those who make up the diocese’s average Sunday attendance of 11,000 all received the average income of £10,065 and all gave 5% of that income, the parishes of the diocese would have an enhanced income of £5,535,750, an increase of 36%.

3 Some final reflections on the theology of ministry:

So finally, what is the distinctive responsibility of the clergy – called and ordained by God to lead the Christian communities of the diocese – in encouraging the stewardship of money in their parishes? How are we called to exercise the charism of leadership in this respect?

There are two false paths down which we can go. First, the temptation to dominate in this area and second the temptation to abrogate responsibility and say this is nothing to do with me. By inviting all those ordained people who hold the bishop’s licence to one of these seminars I would not wish for a moment to encourage the view that all power and responsibility for the life of the church should lie with the ordained ministry. I believe that we need to rediscover some of the insights of the first millennium of the Christian era.

One of the most important movements in the churches in the last 40 or 50 years has been the recovery of an understanding of ministry as arising from baptism. The Second Vatican Council and the documents from the Faith & Order Commission of the World Council of Churches have reminded the churches of the primary role of the People of God in ministry. All of us who ordained need regularly to be reminded that an understanding of the church in which ministry is seen as the exclusive province of those in holy orders and in which the laity’s task is to listen and obey is misguided. It is the product of a harmful dominance by the clergy and has resulted in the disabling of the baptised people of God in their distinctive vocation to engage for and with Christ in the secularity of the world. Of course, one has to recognise that in many parishes such talk remains merely rhetorical and is honoured in the breach but not the observance – the clergy remain firmly in charge in an unhealthy and unhelpful way.

I suggest that the formalisation of ministry into a single three-fold pattern and its later professionalisation into a paid occupation –– particularly in the Anglican Church –– is not part of the unchanging and eternal essence of Christian ministry but, sociologically understood, a response and adaptation by the church to its place in the world. Though in essence ministry and the exercise of leadership within a Christian community are the responsibility of the whole baptised people of God and arise from the charism given by God to the whole community in order to build up its life, it would be simplistic to draw the conclusion that the ordained ministry is merely a corruption of something pure and primitive. We may be familiar with C.K.Barrett’s definition of the ‘paradox’ of ministry as: ‘A church that rejects the gifts of leadership will greatly impoverish itself: a church that allows them to develop in a worldly way will destroy itself.’

The challenge before us is to exercise Christian leadership in a way that is not motivated by the ways of the market-place, but by the generosity of God and to do this in such a way that offers genuine servant leadership – surely an aspiration for the ordained – to the whole people of God ––as one who is there to orchestrate, to enable, to encourage and to facilitate the ministry of others.

Secondly, it would be wrong to encourage on the other hand a convenient and disingenuous other worldliness among those who have the responsibility to lead the Christian communities of the diocese. For the reasons given earlier, I hope that clergy will play a proper role in leading and teaching in this area.

I am conscious that the fact that 80% of the diocesan budget is spent on paying the stipend. pension and housing of we the stipendiary clergy. In short, 80% of the diocesan budget and perhaps on average about half of the parishes’ income – is spent on us. At a human level, this makes it embarrassing for us to teach on stewardship, because those of us who are stipendiary clergy are in a sense ‘singing for our supper’.

However, in our preaching and teaching on Christian stewardship what we should be emphasising is that we are not seeking to feather our own nests, but teaching Christian disciples to live responsibly with what is not theirs but God’s Also, as the recent report to the General Synod on clergy stipends Generosity and Sacrifice shows, there are sound arguments both in scripture and tradition for the proper recompense of those exercise a full-time ministry in the Church. We need a cohort of clergy who are properly paid and supported and who are keen to explore new ways of ministering for our new context.

And the recent interim report from the Bishop of Chichester’s working party on the structure and funding of clergy training clearly argues that those who offer themselves for ministry – ordained and lay, stipendiary and non stipendiary – need to be trained to a higher standard initially and thereafter offered regular opportunities for serious development throughout their ministry. This is going to cost money and, though it is hoped some of it will be funded by the re-allocation of existing resources – some new money will need to be found.

Therefore, in conclusion, we have some choices to make. We can continue to operate in a world of prudence and preservation until the money runs out in a year or two or we can look boldly to the future seeking to engage more fully with our communities and with the good news of God’s kingdom on our hearts. To follow this latter course, we need to do several things, including addressing the need for the church to be properly resourced financially – and for that to happen, all of called to a ministry of leadership and oversight need to play our part in teaching a sound and balanced theology of stewardship based, I would suggest, on an incarnational understanding of God’s world and a thankful theology of God’s gift.

[1] Wright, Michael., Yours, Lord: a handbook of Christian stewardship, 1992. p.1.

[2] Hardy, Daniel W., Finding the Church, SCM, London 2001 ‘Theology of money’ pp. 115–116.

[3] Hardy, 2001, page 117.

[4] Hardy, 2001, page 126.

[5] Hardy, 2001, page 126.

[6] Please note these figures can only be indicative. They are calculated as follows. We do not know how much it costs to run all the churches of the diocese. We could find it by adding up the income from the annual accounts of all the parishes, but we do not have the resources to do that piece of work. Gordon tells me three or four years ago, it was calculated that – on average – the quota represented 60% of parish income. The quota for 2002 is £2,442,307. If that indeed represents 60% of the parishes’ income, we could therefore posit a total income of £4,070,051. If we divide this by the number of parishes’ (140), we get an average parish income of £29,071. The diocesan ASA for 2001 was averaged at 11,000. If we divide this by 140 – we get an ASA for the average parish of 78.  

[7] Barrett, Kinglsey., Church, Ministry and Sacraments in the New Testament,  p. 40