Cornerstone Stewardship Launch October 3rd

Sermon at the launch of the Cornerstone Stewardship campaign

The Reverend John Bradley  October 3rd 2010

• Exodus 35.30 – 36.7 When the people gave too much!
• Matthew 6.19-34 The best investment

We have heard a lot this year about cut-backs in government spending and later this month the details will be announced of which programmes will be cut. Here at Cornerstone there is a gap in our budget for the coming year between the predicted giving and the budgeted expenses. This has led your Ecumenical Council to plan this Stewardship Campaign which we are launching today, but it is about far more than giving money.

The reason we are here is to follow Jesus, not just to keep the Church going. Following Jesus is about being a fully human being, not just being a Church member, and his teaching is about bringing in the Kingdom of God, not just growing the Church. So we do our Christian following far more outside this building than inside it.

Cornerstone is a city centre church in a mobile city; a few of you have been here since the beginning but most of us are here for a few years or even months and then will move on. However long or short, it’s important to belong somewhere because it is together that we are the Body of Christ. A human body only works because its different organs each take their different part. Its differences are part of its strength but only if the different parts work together. If you have ever broken an arm or a leg, you will remember how weak it felt when the plaster came off and you started to use it again. The muscles were weak because they hadn’t been stretched. It’s the same with the Body of Christ which this church is. Our strength is in our differences but what holds us together is that Christ is our Head. This body is going to be stretched through this Stewardship Campaign but the stretching will make us stronger.

Stewardship is about more than giving money and balancing budgets; it is about how we give ourselves to God so that His will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. So before we come to the gifts that we give, we need to look at the people we are. We not only give gifts; each one of us is a gifted person. There is no such thing as an un-gifted Christian. Every Christian has at least one spiritual gift (Eph 4.7); how do you use yours? None of us has all the gifts needed to be a church but together we do. If you don’t use yours, the ministry of the whole Church is weakened, like an unexercised muscle. It means not just giving your money but also your time – which is harder for some to give.

When Paul wrote his letters to the Corinthians, he was writing to a wealthy church. When they took up their offertory, they didn’t sing ‘Hear the pennies dropping’; they sang ‘I hear the sound of rustling…’! But the example which Paul held up to them was the church in Galatia which was materially poor but spiritually rich. He writes of them ‘They gave themselves to the Lord first, and to us.’ (2 Corinthians 8.5) They had the right priorities in Christian giving. We give in response to what God has already given us. Titus 3:4-6 ‘when the kindness and generosity of God our Saviour dawned upon the world, then, not for any good deeds of our own, but because he was merciful, he saved us through the water of rebirth and the renewing power of the Holy Spirit, which he lavished upon us through Jesus Christ our Saviour.’ There is an extravagance in God’s giving to us and our giving is in response to that. So do it cheerfully or not at all! Don’t be reluctant payers! ‘Each person should give as he has decided for himself; there should be no reluctance, no sense of compulsion; God loves a cheerful giver.’ (2 Cor 9:7)

One day while I was going to catch a train my mobile phone rang and a young man had made a cold call trying to sell me an investment. I let him finish his patter but when he asked me if I was satisfied with my present investments, he clearly expected me to answer no. But I told him I was extremely satisfied with my investment: it’s thief-proof, moth-proof and rust-proof. Once you’ve invested, you can’t touch the capital but the interest rate is simply out of this world! I told him it’s called the Kingdom of Heaven and people have been investing in it for 2000 years. I hope he looked it up on Google afterwards! Paul told the Corinthians ‘Remember: sow sparingly, and you will reap sparingly; sow bountifully, and you will reap bountifully.’ (2 Cor 9:6) We can’t expect an abundant harvest if we sow casually; we need to plan for abundance. That means that instead of coming last, after you have spent your income on everything else, giving comes first. The Master speaks to our generation when he asks, “Where is the profitability in gaining the whole world at the cost of losing your own true self?” We pray that God’s kingdom will come, that God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. If that means that the aim of your life is to leave the world better than you found it, a bit less like hell and more like heaven, you can do that by your giving. When you invest in the Kingdom of Heaven, there are people who will be fed and clothed and housed and healed and educated who otherwise would not be. You won’t know their names and will probably never meet them but their transformed lives are your true wealth.

There is a precious promise here which has been missed by the financial gurus and economic pundits: ‘you will always be rich enough to be generous.’ (2 Cor 9:11) The consumerist industry – what Jesus called Mammon – doesn’t want you to hear that because it wants you to keep spending on yourself, even if you can’t afford to. It wants you to be dissatisfied because that will make you a better consumer but following Jesus gives you the healthy alternative. I love the version of Psalm 23 which begins ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd; I have everything I need!’

We each need to decide whether our giving is going to be casual or deliberate. If we give casually, we will spend what we have on our own needs and then give from what is left. If we give deliberately, we will look at our total income and decide what proportion of it we are going to give. When giving comes first, the Lord who is our Shepherd makes sure that we have everything we need but when giving comes last, we never have enough. You will need to decide prayerfully what the right proportion is for you to give. In biblical times, the Jews gave 10% of their income and many Christians do that today but the biblical tithe also paid for some things which today we pay for through taxation. Some churches suggest that in Britain today, 5% is a reasonable amount to aim for. But whatever you give, give deliberately and cheerfully. Remember that while the Pharisees were pernickety about getting their tithes exactly right, Jesus noticed the poor widow who literally had only two pennies to rub together and she put them both in the offering chest. She was totally dependent on the charitable support of the Temple and could surely be excused from giving yet, as the Authorised Version puts it, she ‘cast in all the living that she had’ (Luke 21:4) and I expect she did it cheerfully!

This is a challenging time for the Church of Christ the Cornerstone. When this church began, our parent Churches gave generously to plant it here and have supported us financially until now. But the time has come for us to stand up and support ourselves so that those funds can be used to support new work elsewhere. We can rise to that challenge only by praying as if it all depends on God and giving as if it all depends on us. I believe that by God’s help the gap in our budget can be closed and that in giving generously, we shall all be blessed. Hudson Taylor, the pioneer missionary in inland China, once said that God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply. God is waiting to demonstrate that again here at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone.