Money Matters I: Priorities
FROM THE RECTOR
Most churches, like most households, think of money as something we need to pay the bills. If we are going to keep the lights on, the bulletins printed, and the staff paid, we need pledges to come in. Thankfully, this isn’t that kind of article. Although we depend upon your gifts to keep things going at St. Paul’s, your consistent generosity enables our vestry to think about money primarily as a means for ministry—a way for our church to explore and celebrate God’s infinite grace, acceptance, and love. Would your personal finances be any different if you thought of money as a way to fulfill your own personal mission statement?
This article is the first in a series that explores the way that all of us—as a congregation, as households, and as members of the wider community—use money to express value. Today, I focus on how we spend money as an expression of our priorities. In a few weeks, I will write about the ways our savings are an opportunity to proclaim the gospel. Later on, I will conclude the series by looking at the connection between our financial plans and our hopes for the future.
Where does all of your money go? What purchases do you take time to consider carefully, and which ones are more or less on autopilot? I remember early in our marriage when every trip to the grocery store was informed by our detailed financial plan. Anytime we splurged on a protein that cost more than $1.50 per pound, we knew it was a reason to celebrate. And we did! These days, we still shop for what is on sale, but we do not give as much thought to which brand of tissue we can afford. Being intentional with our finances does not mean clipping every coupon, but it does mean recognizing that every expense is not only a financial transaction but also an expression of non-economic value. How can we recapture the sense that all of our spending matters without becoming anxious about every penny?
Churches make the mistake of talking about stewardship as if the only part that counts is the part you give back to the church, but even those who devote the first ten percent of their income to God’s work in the world have ninety percent leftover to use in other ways. Do we think that God’s vision for our lives is merely a ten-percent commitment? When it comes to practices like reading the Bible and saying our prayers, churches do a great job of reminding their people that we follow Jesus “sev’n whole days, not one in sev’n,” but we forget to emphasize how true that is with our money as well. Imagine what impact churches would have if they focused not only on convincing people to let go of a tenth of their income but also taught that every dollar spent is an opportunity to deepen our connection with God.
Actually, that is why churches like ours encourage people to tithe—not to raise more money for the budget but to teach people that when we give our first ten percent back to God we develop a sacrificial spiritual practice that begins to align our whole lives, including all our spending, with God’s work in the world. But that is a teaching for another article. For now, I want to focus not on what we give to the church but on how we use the rest of what God has given us to carry out God’s work in the world.
Think of the ways in which you already make value judgments with your spending. Do you prefer to shop locally and support small businesses? Do you patronize or avoid certain companies because of the causes or groups they support? When you purchase a car or replace your home’s HVAC system, do you think about the environmental impacts of those decisions? Even if we do not think of them as such, all of those are theological choices. Lately, our family has been replacing some of our traditional weekly meals with vegetarian options. Partly that is because of inflation, and partly it is for health benefits, but one of the main reasons we are eating less meat is the ecological impact of our diet. Will our family fix climate change because we eat lentils instead of beef? Of course not, but that one intention has begun to shape other decisions I make, and collectively individual decisions throughout the community of faith can have tremendous impact.
Our vestry routinely examines the church’s operating budget to make sure that how we spend money reflects our values as a congregation, but our church’s budget is a miniscule fraction of the combined spending power of all the people at St. Paul’s. Might you consider a similar theological examination of your own household budget no matter how big or small it is? Top-down initiatives like boycotts can be important ways to affect change, but there is even more power in each of us recognizing that every purchase we make is an expression of our faith.
Not every decision feels theologically significant, but behind each expense is a long chain of underlying decisions, very few of which are theologically neutral. How did this item get to the store shelf? Who made it, raised it, picked it, packaged it, moved it, stocked it, sold it? Though a ridiculous idea, if every product label contained detailed descriptions of all the business practices represented by each item, we might change our mind about what we buy. Sometimes ethical considerations make their way into the marketplace—think sustainably harvested seafood or conflict-free diamonds—but more often it is up to us to do our homework before we make a purchase, and that usually takes a lot of effort on our part. I think it is worth it.
I am not trying to convince you that every purchase you make must reflect a certain level of faithfulness. Instead, I am inviting you to consider how much power there is behind all of our purchases. Even incremental change, when magnified across a congregation, can make a significant difference. When you decide to give money away to your church or other organizations that do good work in the world, let that be a first step in how you use your income to embody your faith.
Think long and hard about who our God is and what it means to belong to God through the one who championed the cause of the poor, who taught that worldly possessions are a stumbling block for those who would enter God’s reign, and who died and was raised again so that we might live forever. Jesus shows us that our relationship with material possession must be subordinate to our relationship with God, and that balance in our lives takes shape one purchase at a time. Allow these considerations to inform your spending habits. Do not relegate faithful spending to the work of the vestry. Take that work up on your own and trust that, together, how we use the financial resources God has given us is a powerful way to pursue God’s vision for the world.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan