Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 19
It is no wonder that parishioners often complain that the
Church “always has its hand out.” We spend a disproportionate
amount of our time, talent and treasure seeking time, talent and
treasure—simply because we teach secular fundraising, not
stewardship. Unless the Church resolves to change this pattern we
will be bound to repeat it until we expend so much of our energy
fundraising, that liturgy, worship, education, outreach, and other
ministries lose their place as our primary Christian focus.
To be sure, over the past half-century, secular fundraising
organizations have helped the Church to raise untold amounts of
money. The bricks and mortar of thousands of churches are testimony
to their assistance. But just as their success in raising money is etched
in plaques on church walls, the model of giving they have taught is
engraved on the hearts of the faithful. In my ministry of teaching
stewardship and assisting parishes to raise millions of dollars, I have
often had to deal with the deep impression secular fundraisers have
left upon parishioners, even decades after their experience of a
previous campaign. What secular fundraisers teach as appropriate
models of giving and “stewardship” has become so ingrained in the
mind of the Church, that any attempt to present a higher and more
Christian understanding of stewardship is very often greeted with
disdain and condemnation.
Part of our difficulty is that we have so imbibed secular
models, and so thoroughly integrated them into our language, life
and practice, that to set them aside will require us first to admit that
there are some things about which we were quite simply wrong.
Even in the face of His Holiness, Pope John Paul II’s unprecedented
acts of repentance throughout his pontificate, especially in the
Jubilee Year of the second millennium, 4 and his apologies and
acknowledgment of “counter-witness” in the history of the Church,
4 Cf. International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The
Church and the Faults of the Past, and Homily of John Paul II, Mass for the Day of
Pardon (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, December, 1999).