Cheerful Giver

During our annual stewardship campaign last fall, we distributed a brochure describing the "six steps of giving." While the perspective presented there is fine, to me it missed the reason I give money to the church. I wrote up a different approach, presented here:

God is a Cheerful Giver!

In the church I grew up attending, we used to sing a song that started with the words

God loves a cheerful giver,
Give it all you've got!

It had a rather catchy tune, and a rather poorly thought out theology. I don't give to the church, or to other causes, for that matter, to earn God's love. God loves us freely and without condition!

It is God's love for me that motivates me to give to the church and to other worthy causes. The example that I see in the Divine makes me want to imitate it. I think that is a part of what it means when scripture talks about being made “in God's image.”

When I received the flyer “Six Steps in Christian Giving” recently, I was a bit put off. I read the six steps that were spelled out there, and thought to myself “I don't fit into any of these categories.” For me, giving is not a duty, or a sacrifice, or any of the other steps articulated there. Giving is one way to connect with the Divine through my actions. In other words, I give because God first gave to me.

That doesn't mean that the steps in the flyer don't speak to others. But if I were writing the pamphlet, I'd be sure to talk about that other dimension to giving, the one that talks about the wild abandon of God's love for us, and how we can experience a taste of it by giving joyously out of the abundance God has given to us!