Giving
The spirituality of giving has been tarnished by incessant focus on church fund-raising to meet organizational budgets.
To reclaim the spiritual discipline of giving, we need to step away from church budgeting and experience the joy of simply being generous, in which two needs coincide:
- Someone else's need for support
- Our need to help
Eventually, one's motivation becomes gratitude, but first we need to get beyond the guilt often employed by religion. It can simply feel good to share with another person. Consider our instinct to give after a natural disaster or to a family in crisis. We feel more whole as persons when we give in such a circumstance.
Giving that is motivated by guilt or shame will seek mainly to escape the negative feeling, by giving as little as possible, by blaming the recipient for being in need, or by shifting negative feelings onto someone else (scapegoating).
Giving that is motivated by the positive feelings of generosity will lead not only to more generosity, but to examination of one's life and values.
That self-examination, in turn, can lead to transformation of life.
This is a personal journey, perhaps shared with others, but not to be compelled by peer pressure.
Giving is probably the most difficult spiritual discipline to undertake. Jesus spent two-thirds of his teaching time addressing issues of wealth and power and our need to give them away. If we believe that people killed Jesus in order to silence his voice, then these words about wealth and power are fundamentally difficult to hear.
Churches would serve their members better if they:
- Refrained from adopting ambitious budgets and then asking people to pay for them as an expression of their faith.
- Encouraged people to experience the joy of giving, in whatever form it takes.
- Presented faith-community life as a reasonable way to act out this joy.
- Lived within whatever funds were forthcoming.
