Message delivered during the offering on October 27, 2024

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My name is Chuck Toney, and I bring you greetings on behalf of the Generosity Team and my colleagues on Session at First Presbyterian Church. This is a little strange, isn’t it? Let me assuage your concerns by letting you know that I am not going to sing the offering.

We chose the offering for this message about Commitment Sunday to align the physical act of making gifts with the spiritual foundation of making those gifts.

As the offering plates are being passed, I invite you to think about what this part of our worship service means to you individually, what it means to our church, and what it means about your relationship with God. In our Presbyterian tradition, the offering comes after the reading and preaching of the Word because our response to the Good News of God’s love revealed in God’s Word is to give. We love because God first loved us, and we give because God first gave to us. As Psalm 24 teaches us, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” John 3:16 reminds us that “God so loved the world that God gave God’s one and only Son.”

I have been thinking and writing and talking personally and professionally about stewardship for a long time. I have been particularly interested in how churches too often talk about stewardship only as a thing that happens once a year, we get through it, and then we don’t want to talk or think about it again – until next fall.

That, my friends, is a mistake.

It is a spiritual mistake because it creates tension and anxiety and even dread around what should be a time of worshipful recognition of the grace of God and the opportunity we have been given to serve as stewards of God’s gifts. My colleagues on Session are tired of hearing me say that stewardship should be an act of joyful worship. I have come to believe that the worship lives in the giving more than the gift.

But we are not naïve, my colleagues on Session and I. The amount and timing of your gifts finance the operations of this church – salaries, Mission and Outreach, utilities, security, building repairs and maintenance, custodial services, debt payments – you get the idea. We receive no funding from any source other than your financial gifts. Your financial gifts finance the work of the kingdom here on God’s earth.

In the spirit of transparency, I want to give you a picture of our financial position so that you can incorporate this information into your prayerful consideration leading up to Commitment Sunday in a few weeks (November 17).

Show of hands – how many of you have served in leadership here or at another church? What I am about to say will probably sound familiar. As of the end of September, three-quarters of the way through our fiscal year, we are doing great on expenses – we are within 1% of our budgeted allocation. Kudos to our leadership and staff for the management of our budget.

And that is against a backdrop of inflation somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% over the past 5 or 6 years. What cost us $100 then costs us $120 today.

The revenue side of the ledger, however, is a different story. Three fourths of the way through the year, we have received about two thirds of our budgeted income. Now, I’m a double English major, but I can recognize a mathematic gap when I see one.

This is not unusual. Virtually every church in America faces the third quarter revenue slump and waits both eagerly and anxiously for the December deluge. On average, we receive 25% of our annual revenue in the month of December. Georgia Power sends us bills every month, and they’re nice people, but they probably won’t wait to be paid until the week after Christmas.

What can you do to help? Pray about your decision on Commitment Sunday. Consider how and when you make your financial gifts to our church. If you’ve received a raise or cost of living adjustment recently, think about making a corresponding adjustment to your level of generosity. My Session colleague Jeffrey Trapnell, who is doing the Lord’s work as chair of the Administration Commission, tells me that the stock market is up about 150% since the pandemic hit in March 2020. I see it in the monthly statements about my modest retirement account. If you own, say, Apple stock, praise God and donate a few shares to your church!

I bring this message intentionally during this portion of our worship service to ask that you seek the joy in the process of making your financial commitment to our church. God has been extravagantly generous to each of us, in the material gifts we enjoy and in the saving grace of the life and death of Jesus. God does not need my money or my checkbook. We own nothing, you and I, but we have been entrusted by God with the material gifts of life. God asks only that we acknowledge the source of all good gifts and contemplate how our stewardship of these gifts supports the mission and ministry of this church, now and forever. Stewardship, then, is a spiritual practice of joyful worship that manifests itself in the act of making financial commitments.

Thank you for your time and your prayerful consideration of this important decision.