Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 9
We must learn to give without expectation of return. Imagine
what parishioners would say if a priest or minister took to the pulpit
and offered a nice tote bag to anyone who would give at the $50
level. And while those who endow libraries and hospitals may
rightly expect to have a building named for themselves or their
family, can you imagine what it would be like to have a parishioner
ask to have St. Joseph’s or the First Street Church renamed “The
Smith Family Church”? Giving and generosity are not transactional
—they are vocational, and therefore should not need the
encouragement of donor recognition schemes and trinkets.
As part of its everyday work secular fundraising employs
these recognition and premium programs as well as other practices
designed to induce giving. Over the past fifty years the Church has
to a greater or lesser extent done likewise when it has adopted these
practices in its efforts to help finance the Church’s ministry. I
believe that by employing secular fundraising practices in the
Church we have been more concerned with outcomes than values,
method than theology, and major gifts than generosity. This being
said, there is nothing to be gained by assigning blame and revisiting
the past, except to learn from our mistakes.
We should start by naming the secular fundraising practices that
have crept into our personal and communal values, and identifying
how they affect our Christian vocation as stewards. If we have
embraced the hard-nosed practices of secular fundraising out of fear
of becoming less important to society at large, or of standing up to the
often insurmountable pressures of secularism, we need to ask
ourselves what we can do about it. We must have the confessional
will, courage, and fortitude, to acknowledge that we have gone off
track, and to reform our practices to reflect our values and tradition.
We can begin by examining whether and how we have
provided for the education of our clergy and laity in issues of
stewardship. While our seminaries and theological colleges have
quite rightly concerned themselves with biblical studies, pastoral