Always Enough
Sometimes I ask God for silly things. When my seasonal allergies are acting up but I forgot to grab a cough drop, I say a quick prayer before I enter someone’s hospital room, asking God to help me stifle any coughs so that I will not make the patient nervous. When I am driving down the highway and decide to stretch a little too far between refueling stops and the fuel light comes on, I pray that God will give me enough gas in my tank to make it to the next exit. When I get distracted before a worship service and neglect to stop by the restroom, I pray that God will get me through the entire service so that I do not have to step out in the middle of the liturgy.
In each case, whether God intervenes in my affairs or leaves me to reap the consequences of my own poor planning, I know that I will be alright. I may have to step out of a room to get a drink of water or walk down the highway for a while or suffer the indignity of excusing myself from church before continuing with the eucharistic prayer, but, in cases like those, the worst possible outcome is still something I can handle, even if I like to pretend otherwise in the moment.
Although I still say those silly little prayers, I have found over the years that my ability to trust in God regardless of the outcome has grown. That shift, which comes from a mixture of life experience, spiritual maturity, and repeated encounters with mortality, has changed the way I say those prayers. Nowadays, after starting off asking God for the simple solution I seek, I usually ask God to remind me that, no matter what happens, God will be with me, granting me the strength to bear whatever comes my way.
How do we convince ourselves that God will always be with us? How do we instill within our hearts and minds a confidence that, even when it is more than a minor inconvenience that we face, God’s provision will see us through?
We practice. Again and again, we practice. How? We read the sacred accounts of God’s faithfulness in holy scripture, remembering that God’s mercies are new in every generation just as they are new every morning. We worship the One whose never-failing love surrounds us on every side, seeking to reconnect with God and God’s promises. We lift to God our prayers of thanksgiving, acknowledging all the ways in which God has supported us. We bring to God the concerns of our hearts, asking God to help us trust that, just as before, God will pour out God’s love upon us.
There is no passage of scripture, no particular prayer, no gesture of worship that, by itself, can fill us with faith, yet the Holy Spirit is able to use the offering of ourselves back to God in order to plant, nourish, and grow within us the seeds of faith, which can take years to bear fruit. Sometimes the lessons of our childhood, planted by parents and Sunday school teachers, though dormant for years, awaken in a new chapter of our lives just when we need them. Other times a familiar lesson speaks to us in a way we have never heard before, providing a fresh encounter with God. The point is to find ways to stay connected and foster a relationship with God until that relationship takes hold within you.
One of the ways that we, as a congregation, practice building up our confidence in God is through financial stewardship. In many churches, the leaders tell the congregation how much money is needed to fund next year’s budget. “We need a six percent increase in giving this year,” they tell you, “or else we will not be able to keep up with increased costs.” In the end, I trust that those congregations are just as faithful with the resources entrusted to them as we are, but I think asking people to give in order to fund a specific goal misses an opportunity to instill faithfulness throughout the congregation.
This fundraising approach to stewardship starts with the premise that resources are limited. Unless we give enough, our church will not be fruitful. Unless we give enough, we will not be faithful. But, with that approach, the line between doubting our faithfulness and doubting God’s is vanishingly thin. Although we might not use language this straightforward, when we think of the mission of the church as something that is only possible when we do enough on our own, we bind God’s hands in the strictures of our own limitations, and, when significant personal needs arise down the road, that can become disastrous thinking.
What if, instead, we began with the premises that God will always be with us in ways that transcend our ability and that God will always give us enough to pursue God’s vision for our lives? What if, instead of asking a congregation to give a particular amount, the leaders of a church invited its members to make a radical commitment of their resources as an act of faithfulness, which, in turn, those leaders will receive and use on behalf of the congregation in another parallel gesture of faithfulness? That is what we seek to do every year at St. Paul’s.
We do not have a budget for next year yet. We do not know how much money we will need because we do not know what ministries and programs we will pursue. That only comes in response to your generosity. The vestry will create a budget based on what you tell them you expect to share with St. Paul’s in 2025. They are likely to build a budget based on the same priorities reflected in recent budgets—with an emphasis on transformational outreach, quality formation for all ages, excellence in music and worship, valuable opportunities for congregational engagement, necessary care for our historic properties, and faithful clergy leaders—but they do not have a number in mind that they hope you will reach.
Although we do not know what next year’s budget will look like, we do know that God has given the people of St. Paul’s all the resources we need to carry out God’s plan for our church and our community. The goal, therefore, is not to raise a certain amount of money but to be faithful in everything that we do with every penny that we are given. That is the goal for our parish, but it is also the goal of every stewardship program—that you and your household would seek to be faithful to God with what God has given you.
What would your household budget look like if you started out the same way? What would happen to your relationship with God if you no longer approached your financial obligations from the perspective of limited resources but began with the belief that God has and will give you enough to pursue God’s vision for your life—a life lived in community with others? How would that change the way you think about the needs of your neighbors? How would that impact the way you use the resources God has entrusted to you as an expression of faithfulness?
With God, there is always enough. By holding that posture of abundance instead of a mindset of scarcity, we practice faithfulness in our lives in ways that deepen our confidence in God’s faithfulness. The goal of the Walk in Love campaign is not to raise money for the church or to fund next year’s budget or even to grow the valuable programs and ministries that we offer—at least not directly. Our goal is to grow in faithfulness, both as a congregation and as individuals. When we find ways to deepen our commitment to God, everything else that is good around us grows, too, because, at its core, stewardship is a spiritual practice.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
