Every Little Makes a Mickle: The Genius of Relational, Systematic, Proportional Giving

 “Every Little Makes a Mickle: The Genius of Systematic, Proportional, Regular Giving”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, Nov 17, 2013

Text: I Cor. 16:1-4 // Series: The Church Just Wants My Money: And Other Myths 

Song: “How He Loves”           //          Prayer

When Meg and I got married, almost 15 years ago, we realized that we had a problem.  We had come from two completely different money cultures.  Or more specifically, we came from two families who talked and thought about money in very, very different ways.  In my family of origin, money was a topic of conversation all the time.  Where did the money come from, where did it go to, how much did dad make, how much did so-and-so’s dad make… these were all fair game around our dinner table.  We were very frank and very detailed in our conversations about money.  Then I met Meg and her family and they approached money about very differently.  For them, finances were for private discussion and any mention of it was highly vague and always impersonal.  So you can imagine when we got married, that we had some big work to do to merge these two vastly different money styles.  It’s not even that we thought about money vastly differently, although we did.  It’s that we talked about it vastly differently.  Every family, every individual has a money conversation culture – it might be a monologue, it might be a dialogue, it might be very frank and “brass tacks” it might be some very obtuse and highly private. 

But here’s the thing that we are driving at with this November mini-series.  Just like every family has a unique money conversation culture, every ministry, every non-profit, every charity and every church also has a money conversation culture.  Some talk about it incessantly.  Some never talk about it at all.  Some are very forward and sometimes aggressive.  Some are so secretive you have no idea how any of it works.  And in the church, if no one ever talks about how we talk about money, the unfortunate myth that takes root and grows in our culture and in the church itself is that “The Church Just Wants My Money”. 

So we are investing the month of November to talk about how we talk about money.  Because it’s important to understand that if the church doesn’t just want your money, it’s logical to ask “what do we want?” 

As an elders team, we want your heart to be in line with what God has for you in every area of your life.   We want to create an atmosphere or a climate where people can live with openness, hope and safety in all areas of their life and this includes conversations about money and resources. 

Our elders team has become increasingly convinced over this past year that we have room to grow in our communication clarity about the type of money conversation culture that we want to have here at Jericho Ridge.  I know this conversation makes some of your nervous.  To be frank, it makes me nervous.  And that’s saying something coming from a home that talked about money all the time!  To be candid, pastors don’t often like to talk about money and the church because, our livelihood – my family’s pay cheque - is attached to the conversation. And because of that very personal connection, I can feel very raw or exposed and it can appear highly self-serving to talk about money.  But the challenge, as Pastor Keith reminded us of last week, is that God is deeply interested in what is going on in our hearts.  And there’s not any better barometer around priorities, values, and how we are living them out than how we disburse our resources.  And as Christians, we are not doing a better job than our culture in how we talk and think about money.  I came across this cartoon in Leadership Journal a few years ago that pictured this perfectly for me… [The baptism].  It’s so true isn’t it?  Sometimes that last part of my life to experience transformation is my wallet.  And so for this series, we want to ask “What principles should guide our conversation and actions as individuals and as a church around disbursing money?”  Turn with me to I  Corinthians 16 and in 4 vs. we’re going to find these 3 principles there:

1. Give Relationally NOT Randomly
2. Give Systematically NOT Emotionally 
3. Give Proportionally NOT Equally

Now, before we jump into our text this morning, I’m going to put a proviso on this message.  The Scripture passage that we are headed to explicitly states that is an internal conversation & expectation for God’s people, meaning those who have said yes to Jesus and who are actively desiring to live in congruence with His vision and plan for your life and His world.  So if you are here today and that doesn’t describe you, good news….  A lot of the things I am going to say don’t all apply to you!  But, on the other side of the equation, these are principles that, if applied with wisdom will aid you in being a better manager of the resources (time, talent, $) entrusted to you.  So don’t check out fully, stick with me for the high points, alright?     

Let’s look at our text.  This is God’s Word: I Corinthians 16:1-4 [one slide]

We tend to think of a conversation about money and the church as a twenty-first century phenomenon.  But it is interesting here that the author, the Apostle Paul, one of the early leaders in the Christian movement and the author of much of the New Testament, is writing and answering a question that this group of Jesus followers had about money and the church and giving.  They wanted some guidance on how they should think about and practice generous living.  And so Paul gives them advice that is both practical but also very instructive for us.  The first thing we discover is that this text is about a need that has emerged in the church in Jerusalem.  We know from history that this was likely a famine and other economic tragedies that struck Judea towards the end of the first century.  We also know from reading that book of Acts that Jerusalem was the epicenter of the birth of Christianity and early in the first century, the Jewish churches were taking up offerings for the spread of the gospel to the Gentile world.  So now, here just a short time later, the Jewish church is in need and the gentile church in the city of Corinth writes to Paul asking “what can we do to help our brothers and sisters?  How can we meet this need?”  And Paul says “great question – first thing, you are not going to meet this need alone.  I have already spoken with the other churches in other areas like Galatia and they are on board, too.”  The reason these churches are on board for giving to a struggling congregation with needs in a distant city is that they have a deep and historic relational connection with these people.  This brings us to Giving Principle #1: Give Relationally NOT Randomly

• It is natural that our money flows to where our hearts & our relationships are (16:1) – Jesus talked about this.  Where you treasure is, there will your heart be also (and visa versa).  In this text we see that

        - There is a sense of interdependence between  Christians in Jerusalem & the Gentile churchesThese Jewish Christians are the ones who sacrificed financially to send Paul and the other early missionaries to Corinth with the gospel and so they are simply returning the favour.

• It is natural to want to support things that are making a real difference (or have touched our lives personally)

This is giving 101.  Most of us practice this intuitively in disbursement of funds.  Where a cause or an agency has touched our lives personally or the lives of people we know and care about, we are statistically more likely to be engaged.  Where cancer or autism has touched our family, we are more likely to be responsive to appeals for related causes and charities.  Peter Ash and Amadou Diallo of Under The Same Sun are engaged in the plight of people in Africa with Albinism because they themselves have albinism.  And so these Christians in Corinth are simply doing what comes naturally: they have been touched personally and came to saving faith the ministry of the church in Jerusalem and they have maintained some form of relationship so their giving naturally flows along those lines. When they think about meeting the need, they don’t think about it abstractly, they think about it personally.  There’s a face to a need. 

This is why when we present giving options, like our 2013 Gift Guide which we will be releasing shortly, we put in it people we have active relationships with.   They are part of our extended family and so we give naturally to them because we know them personally, we believe in what they are doing and though we have tons of giving catalogues and options to choose from, we want our gifts to impact relationships not just make us feel good about ourselves.  This is also why included in Jericho Ridge’s budget from the very start 8 years ago is a commitment to give to the networks and the people that we are relationship with.  In 2013, we are intending to give just over $35,000 out the door to people we know like

-      C2C Church Planting network – here in BC, we have started 3 churched together this fall as a network & the existing church plants are doing amazing.  I visited one, Cross Ridge Church in Cloverdale, this past weekend.  The budget for BC is over 1 million this year!

-      Education (CBC + MB Seminary) – our goal is to help support students who feel a call to ministry.  We want to get them out the door with as little debt as possible so this year and next, we are helping to fund 25% of Spencer Lafleur’s tuition  costs as he takes courses at MB Seminary here on the campus of ACTS.

-      Camps – As a denominational family, we have 5 camps here in BC.  And over 5,220 kids went to camp this past summer.  668 of them reported turning their lives over to God for the very first time! 

-      And of top of that, there’s our 5 supported workers with Gain, with Frontiers, Wycliffe, MB Mission, and Youth Unlimited.  We write a cheque to help cover a portion of their salaries every month so that they can continue to do what they do – reach people with the gospel. 

-      Above & beyond that, last year, you gave $4,043 for various projects for these 5 people in our 2012 Gift Guide. This is outside our budget!

-      And on top of that, JRCC and people connected with Jericho raised over $30,000 to send a team to have a life-changing impact in Guatemala and we plan to do it all over again in 2014!  Not to mention Laval and Tanzania and many other giving opportunities. 

We may be a little church, gang, but I want to say that I am proud of you.  I am proud of the way in which many of you are living out generosity and the impact that this is having outside of the walls of JR.  When you add this up, In 2014 we plan to invest $92,390 in mission-focused relationships. 

So to the person who says “the church is a country club only focused on itself and its members and funding stuff that is for them” I would say categorically, that is not true of Jericho.  God has been incredibly good to us & as He continues to resource us, we will continue to resource others. 

But this brings us to giving principle #2.  That’s the WHAT (transformed lives) we want to do and WHO we want to do it in partnership with.  But the question that the Corinthians are asking Paul is “OK, we know what & who we want to give to – the needs of the church in Jerusalem.  Our question is HOW should we do it?”  You get the sense in the text at the end of verse 2, that their initial plan was to have Paul come, they would get everybody together, Paul would make a big speech, an emotional appeal about the needs, they would take up a huge offering and it would be awesome!

Paul says to them “bad idea”…  Not only should you give relationally, but Paul instructs them to “Give SYSTEMATICALLY not EMOTIONALLY”

The problem with emotional appeals is that most of us that have emotions are susceptible to them.  For example, when I see Sarah McLaughlin on TV with the dog on her lap and singing “It feels like home”, as a dog owner, I want to give to the SPCA.  I want to give to the SPCA, I don’t want the horrible things to happen to animals that Sarah says are going to happen if I don’t send money right away.  BUT look carefully at most appeals.  They start with your emotions but they don’t stop there.  Most of them want you to invest “a little more than a cost of a cup of coffee per day”, don’t they?  Why?  Because they know that emotional appeals have a shelf life.  They fade quickly and they tend not to raise as much money as structured giving.  This is what Paul is after from the Corinthians.  He tells them:

• Having a planned, regular habit of giving allows you to respond thoughtfully when presented with compelling competing needs

Paul doesn’t want to be forced into a position where when he shows up in Corinth that he has to perform and tug on emotions and hope against hope to raise some big dollar amounts for the needs in Jerusalem.  So he gives them again, a very sensible strategy that can also apply to our own finances.  Get regular about your giving. Just like you do about savings.    

- “On the first day of each week, you should each put aside a portion of the money you have earned” (I Cor. 16:2a)

So here is the problem I find in our family budget with giving: if we leave it to the end of the month, there’s always more month than money.  If we leave it till when we have some extra or left over funds, we never give anything or if we do we give way less.  As I was doing my research for this message, I came across a phrase out of the UK which expressed this perfectly.  It reads as follows: “Every Little Makes a Mickle;

Many a Mickle makes a Muckle.”   As with many British phrases, it requires translation into English J.  So here it English Trans: “A lot of small amounts together become a larger amount.  With a larger amount, you can do more.”.  A mickle is a lot and a muckle is a lot of lots.  I think an example of this is - Example: JRCC’s Benevolence Fund

We get calls for support from the community and from within the walls of JRCC all the time.  And if we responded emotionally to all of them, we wouldn’t have any money left at all.  So we decided a few years ago to take up a special offering whenever we have a communion Sunday.  And this money goes into an account that is used to meet these needs.  And most Communion Sundays, mickles trickle in.  And over time, when we put all those mickles together, we have a mackle that we can respond adequately with when someone is in need.  Every little bit given makes a difference and when it is given systematically, regularly, it is powerful. 

This brings us to our third giving principle that Paul highlights.  That “Giving  should be PROPORTIONAL not EQUAL”  This instruction doesn’t come through crystal clear in the New Living Translation, but in the NIV, it is much more evident - “Set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income.” (16:2b, NIV).  In other words, those with more substantive incomes should be able to set aside more.  But here’s the trap that I fall into, and perhaps you do, too.  I love the way Chip Ingram puts this in his book “The Genius of Generosity” and we are going to give away copies of this next weekend to anyone who wants one.  In telling his story he says “I’m not sure where I got the idea, but… I thought generosity was something reserved for people who were either very rich or very holy.  Growing up in a middle class family… I knew I was neither….  I knew that being selfish was completely unacceptable. But generosity… was reserved for another day -  like when I win the lottery or make it to major leagues or own my own business…  I my mind, generosity required a lot of things I knew I didn’t have like a big bank account…  Generosity seemed like a characteristic you might try to develop someday when the chips fall your way and you have some extra to spread around” (p. 9).  The problem: if you wait until you have tons of money to give away, you’ll never get there.

This past Friday was National Philanthropy Day.  And I watched a report on the Morning News produced by Business in BC Magazine. They were reporting on how fantastic it was that the wealthy here in Metro Vancouver, by which they meant people with a net worth of over $1 million, were more than twice as generous as their counter parts in Washington State.  Now, guess how much money the rich gave away in in 2013?  $5,217.  You may be impressed by that.  I sure wasn’t.  Can I say it – if you have a net worth of over 1 million dollars, and that is all you give away, that is pathetic!  If that is the proportion of the income of the rich are giving away, we are all in trouble.  But the opposite danger is also true.  We can look at that number and think “ah ha.  I am carrying more than my weight around here!”  and we can get proud and feel superior.  But each of us need to ask “WHY” we give.  Do we give relationally, regularly, and proportionally. 

We are going to talk more about what this looks like next weekend but right now I want you to pause for a minute and write down your questions and thoughts and all of that, but right now I want to say up front that JRCC’S budget that we are presenting tonight at Vision Night is built upon the principle of Equal sacrifice; not equal amounts.  Because we believe that your money is connected to your heart and your spiritual life in significant ways, I believe that everyone here at Jericho can contribute something to our mission here.  Sometimes people put $20 in the offering and knowing the circumstances of their lives pastorally, that is a HUGE sacrifice for them.  Sometimes people put in a $20 as a kind of fee-for-service mentality and they think that the angels are rejoicing in heaven. 

Friends, think of what could happen around here if everyone moved two steps closer to sacrificial giving in 2014.  At this point, we are having to focus on pairing back because there are some people who are doing heavy lifting and some of you who are not giving to the budget at all.  Which, to be frank, puts increased pressure on those who are giving.  But as we come into the Christmas season, whether you think you have a little or lots, all that God is asking each of us to do in the area of finances is to walk in obedience & faithfulness.  So we don’t guilt millionaires and we don’t guilt people into starting giving.  We believe that it is God’s heart is for everyone to share the load together.  Even those who give generously have room for growth in this area of our lives.  We want to create an environment here at Jericho where there is hope, healing and growth and a counter-cultural movement in the area of generous living.  So that God can do amazing things. 

As we wrap up, I want you challenge you to a simple action: this week, read this passage again and invite God but His Holy Spirit to speak to you about one of these three areas of generous living.  Ask God to grow your heart in one area and take some new risks and try some new ways of being generous and see what happens when you:

1. Give Relationally NOT Randomly
2. Give Systematically NOT Emotionally 
3. Give Proportionally NOT Equally

Let’s pray together as we invite God to do a work of generosity in our hearts.