Disciple: What Is the Value of Your Church?

By The Rev. Canon Earnest Graham

“I love my church.” “This is my home.” “It’s a family.” “The way they cared for me when my husband died…” “The sermons really speak to me.” “I was sick for months, and they brought me food and visited me every week.” “They accepted me in a way no other community has.” “Our food pantry feeds people in real need.” “The youth mission trip changed my child’s life.” “The music lifts me up.” “The Bible Study opened up the Bible for me.” “Fellowship.” “Warmth.” “I feel the love of Christ here.”

I have heard all of these words and so many more in my work as diocesan canon for regional ministry. Whether it is meeting with a vestry for a retreat or mutual ministry review, or working with congregations in a search process, there are holy moments that break through as members share how much their church means to them. It does not matter whether the church is large or small, urban or rural, has an endowment or struggles from week to week to keep the doors open, these testimonies proclaim that the church – your church – matters.

Every year, churches wrestle with budgets and wonder how to ask members to give support to the church and its mission. We know the church depends on the generosity of its members to function and thrive, and yet, many churches struggle with what is traditionally defined as stewardship. Is it because we’re embarrassed to ask people to give or of being asked ourselves? Are we afraid of the response or the challenges the church is facing? Possibly, but it is in exactly those moments when we need to remember the holy experiences we share and the deep truth that the church is valuable. The church is precious in God’s eyes, beloved.

Maybe that is what scares us. Asking, giving, sharing, receiving; all of these involve vulnerability and intimacy. We are not asking for something that is of no consequence. When we talk about life and faith and God, we are talking about what is ultimately meaningful to us.

Faithful stewardship leads us to trust in God more fully. I am amazed when we ask members to share a time when the church felt most alive. Most often it is when they built the church building, led a mission response to a natural disaster, established a food pantry that feeds thousands of hungry people, started a preschool or in some other way dared to step out in the name of Christ. In each case, they went beyond what they normally do as a church and discovered a deeper trust in God. They overcame their fear of asking for the resources because they knew the need and the value of responding to it.

Project Resource is a comprehensive way of equipping churches to find transformation in asking and giving. It helps churches and their parishioners understand that the forces in play when we ask on behalf of the special projects – the forces that reduce the fear when we’re stepping out in the name of Christ – are the same forces in play every moment of every day.

The Diocese of North Carolina will be rolling out the resources for and offering training on Project Resource over the next couple of years. Look for the various training opportunities we’ll offer throughout 2017 to introduce this new way of approaching stewardship that will seem radical only until you realize it’s how we should have been looking at it all along.