New Year, Renewed Stewardship

December 13, 2021 by Robert Hay

Happy New Year!

Did you make a New Year’s Resolution this year?

Maybe your resolution is to lose weight (the #1 resolution each year) or to save more money or to spend more time with the ones you love. We make resolutions each year to try and do something different in order to hopefully better ourselves. We have gotten stuck in a routine or we have a habit that we just can’t seem to change. We know we need to change, otherwise we are going to keep getting the same result and we want a different, better result. We use resolutions as motivation to make positive changes that we know we need to make.

Are you stuck in a stewardship routine? Have you been doing the same thing for stewardship year after year? Does your stewardship program need a change? Stewardship today has to be different than stewardship yesterday.

Make a New Year’s Resolution to change your approach to stewardship.

Stewardship should be about sharing the good news of how your church is the hands and feet of Christ in your context and then inviting people to be a part of that good news by giving of their time, talent and treasure. Share the impact stories of how you are serving the needy in your community or how you are providing Christian Education to children or how your worship services glorify God.

Talk about your church’s mission statement and the relationships you have with each other and with Christ. Involve the clergy and laity; the young and the old; the long-time member and the newest visitors.

Make the theme of your stewardship program be about how much God has given you and your congregation and all that you are doing with the resources God has provided. Then invite people to be a part of it. Provide them many opportunities so that they can give of their time, talent, and treasures.

And do all of this all year round, not just in “stewardship season.” The New Year’s Resolutions that change us the most are the ones that we fully embrace and that eventually become a part of our new norm, not the ones that we do for a month and then forget about. Make stewardship a part of the new norm of the church.

This doesn’t mean you will be always asking for money. It means you will always be thanking God for the abundance of gifts God has shown you and your congregation and that you will be celebrating that at every opportunity you can. This is a culture shift; a lifestyle change. Move your congregation from a culture of scarcity to a culture of generosity! Tell the good news of your church, invite people to be a part of it, and they will with their time, talents, and treasures.

Robert Hay, Jr. serves as the Senior Ministry Relations Officer for the Southeast. He works with congregations to create a culture of generosity, offers seminars and workshops, develops gifts and fundraising plans for ministries, and provides coaching and consulting to pastors, committees, sessions, and lay leaders. You can reach Robert at Robert.hay@presbyterianfoundation.org.