Blog Posts
Vocation: What do you do?
Erin Weber-Johnson and Rev. Mieke Vandersall always felt challenged when they try to tell strangers what they do for a living. Their profession is far more than a job–it's an expression of their vocation.
Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash
Exodus 36:6-7
“So Moses gave command, and a word was proclaimed throughout the camp: No one is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing, 7 for what they had already brought was more than enough to do all the work.”
Erin recently sat next to a Rabbi on a flight. There was a steady stream of people who would interrupt him and ask questions. He leaned over to Erin and quietly whispered, “Sometimes I wish for anonymity.” His vocational expression allowed for people to bring their own narratives, questions, and presuppositions and he became the face for their experiences.
Erin nodded in understanding.
Erin and Mieke always feel challenged when we try and tell strangers what we do for a living. We have far more than a job–but our job is an expression of our vocation.
It’s complicated. As faith-based fundraising and giving consultants for congregations and non-profits, we often hear a number of responses:
I could never do that. Ask people for the money? That feels gross.
God and money? Could you include any harder topics?
Oh you’re one of those…
My hand is on my pocketbook!
Consultants are the worst. They take your watch and tell you the time.
We've thought about trying to find another word for our vocational title. Even the inclination to refer to our consulting work as vocational may be surprising, or feel at odds with the word consultant, given the commonly held perspective that consultants "take your watch and tell you the time."
The alternatives we've imagined for consultants include: Giving Companion and Partner in the Stewardship Ministry. But what do those names mean? In our reflections, we've realized that the word fundraising itself feels imprecise.
We love our work. We love what we do. Because we work collaboratively, we don't see ourselves as mere service providers. This means that while we offer expert advice, we just as readily dream alongside our clients about what's possible. And we do this while focusing each client community's collective gaze on a common goal. We know that when we fixate on a financial goal alone, we are vulnerable to missing what we believe to be the most important point of all: the process of fundraising is itself a restorative life-giving ministry.
The Bible is filled with stories of God preparing a table for us. In many of the gospel stories, Jesus creates a table uniting communities, resources, and people in innovative ways not only build their capacities, but also their imaginations. When we re-meet each other where we are and take a better look at ourselves in relation to our neighbors, we can create powerful new ways of repairing broken systems, reinvigorating our giving and re-energizing our faith.
The spiritual discipline of fundraising within the context of the church is better known as stewardship. When we engage in the acts of asking for and giving gifts, we must acknowledge and confront our own relationships with money, which often bring up feelings of shame, guilt, frustration and confusion, accompanied by perceptions regarding scarcity and abundance.
Often, what's hidden in the acts of inviting and giving gifts is the unique opportunity to be liberated, to not let our past experiences and narratives bind us any longer. The necessary actions in raising funds can heal us, individually and collectively.
This is why we do what we do. Our purpose is not to prioritize care for bigger givers, and we do not seek status symbols for ourselves or for others.
Rather, we have a bold desire to facilitate the redistribution of wealth.
We yearn for communities to understand that what they cannot do individually, they can do together. Our work is guiding communities together to both recognize and build their collective power.
The reason our work is focused on building trust with people is because they haven’t had positive experiences with consultants – or in fundraising. When you don’t know how to raise money well, you rarely succeed, and that does not make people want to engage in this work anymore. In addition, consultants are rarely trusted and often people think we are out there to do as little work as possible and charge as much as we can. We wish there was a different way to describe that this ministry could look in its truest form, as partnership.
Before starting Vandersall Collective, Mieke worked at a small nonprofit that was fighting for queer ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As the organization’s primary fundraiser, she was face-to-face with many individuals and committees asking for funding. Over time, she began to realize that fundraising was so scary to her because when she was asking for funding, she was asking for acceptance of her as a young, queer woman. To get herself out of this dysfunctional cycle, she had to be confident in her own value, in her own identity. Then “the ask” became much stronger, as it was not a personal ask to heal herself (essentially), but instead to provide an opportunity for others to make a difference in a church that both the donor and Mieke dearly loved. This is why it is a spiritual discipline.
And it is this practice that guides our vocational work. We remain rooted in our purpose.
As we do this work, we believe in God’s call to an alternative economy. Walter Brueggeman, a theologian who has impacted both Mieke and Erin’s theological understanding says it this way: “[A] facet of prophetic imagination…is a new economy that is organized around a love of neighbor and that is committed to the viability of widows, orphans, and immigrants. Widows, orphans, and immigrants are people who in the ancient world did not have advocates who were empowered by the totalism in a patriarchal society. So it becomes a test case for the economy, and it is a redistributive economy of respect and viability for vulnerable persons, and there is no way to cover over or to hide or disguise that we are talking about policies of redistribution.”
Our vocation is so much more than raising money by whatever means necessary.
We acknowledge that vulnerability is at the heart of what we do. It is hard to acknowledge that we have needs. That we need each other. That we cannot do it alone.
Our relationships with money not only shape our relationship with God but impact our relationships with each other. The narratives we tell about our worth intersect with our ability to recognize God’s movement in the world. We are unable to imagine what belonging means in the kingdom of God and create structures around these imaginings without examining the relationship between our worth and work, without reconstructing a theology around money that is liberative.
Our prayer is that one day, as was the case in Exodus, all will have enough—so much so that the people were restrained from giving.
May it be so.
Erin Weber-Johnson
Erin Weber-Johnson is Senior Consultant at Vandersall Collective, a faith based, woman-led consulting firm and Primary Faculty of Project Resource. In 2017 she co-founded the Collective Foundation, which worked to address the gap in giving characteristics in faith communities of color. In 2022 she co-founded The Belonging Project, a movement designed to reimagine belonging across the ecclesial landscape.
Previously, Erin worked as the Senior Program Director at the Episcopal Church Foundation, as a grants officer at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, and served as a missionary for the Episcopal Church. She holds a BS from Greenville University, a Masters of Public Administration for NYU and is currently completing a second masters in Religion and Theology from United Theological Seminary.
A published author, she strives to root her work in practical theology while utilizing her experience in the nonprofit sector. Her co-edited book, Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy is available through Cascade Books.
Rev. Mieke Vandersall
Rev. Mieke Vandersall, Owner and Principal Consultant, has over 20 years of executive leadership experience in the religious nonprofit arena. Mieke encourages nonprofits, congregations and religious leaders as they work to fund their ministries; this work comes out of a deep knowledge of the particular exhilaration and stress of working for long-term structural change and beginning and sustaining programs.
Prior to her consulting work, she was the Executive Director of Parity, where she founded a program for LGBTQ Future Pastors, as well as Not So Churchy, a new worshiping community. This post spanned from 2003-2014. Mieke and the Future Pastors Program is a feature of the documentary film, Out of Order.
Mieke is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Presbytery of Southern New England. Mieke’s work at Vandersall Collective has also been recognized as a validated ministry by the Presbytery of Southern New England.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Stewardship during an election
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
I have been asked by a number of people about some top tips for what to do this year with giving and the upcoming presidential election. There is concern that divisive politics may monopolize the attention of those in our communities. Or, alternatively, how our communities respond to the election may cause givers to rethink their life choices and keep their annual gifts. Recently a pastor asked me if I could send a top five list for ensuring success this election year.
I want to honor that question and also acknowledge the reality that many of us are tired, feeling the relentless weight of holding too much. The truth is we often look for Top 5 Lists because we need quick help and support. Top 5 Lists offer us the promise of easy to digest information and easy to implement action steps.
Each of us deeply desires to know how to eat right, lose weight, save enough for our retirement, and raise our children. We want to know how to have/be enough. Yet, most “How to” lists are full of things we already know. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read a magazine headline promising to change my life in three easy steps only to be disappointed when I already knew the answers. There is no silver bullet, no step-by-step process, to the perfect life.
So it is with stewardship. Really, what we need is not “How to raise money positively/effectively,” but to ask what is keeping us from living into stewardship as a holistic ministry while reflecting the context of the moment. I bet the answers to that list would be considerable!
Here is what we know about giving and the upcoming election. In the 2016 presidential election, I made a hypothesis about how the election would impact giving to congregations. I thought it would be congregations that aligned themselves with one presidential candidate or another that would see increases in giving as advocacy and “rage” giving were at a high.
However, the giving data and statistics that would emerge months and years later would show my hypothesis was wrong. Giving was high in congregations that mostly identified as one political party or another. And yet, it was also high in a number of churches considered purple or with a mixed set of views within the congregations.
Instead of my faulty hypothesis, giving was propelled in congregations that clearly reflected what was happening outside their church doors, made a connection between where people were with their giving and how their giving to the church would be meaningful given that moment in the nation’s history, and invited others to be part of the work.
What this demonstrated to me was there were pastoral needs felt by a congregation and giving became an opportunity to meet people where they were. The work of stewardship, in all its wholeness, was not about meeting a budget so the ministry could take place. Rather, stewardship was and is a contextual ministry, one that asks what are the needs of those in our congregation and how do we shape our ministry accordingly.
The work of stewardship leaders is the work of creating connective tissue between the motivations of givers in the wake of emerging national issues and concerns, and a life-giving invitation to explore how their giving can bring healing and repair in the world.
2024 began with some people concerned about the outcome of the presidential election in the United States this year. Regardless of the outcome, we as a country have seen the fallout and experienced the painful divisions from recent presidential elections.
And so, unpacking what stewardship means this year will be important. Stewardship is so much more than a fall drive to meet the regular operating costs of a congregation.
When we think about gifts, there has been a long-held focus in the church on the 3 T’s: time, talent and treasure. I believe initially the idea of holistic stewardship was amorphous, too hard to wrap our minds around. Instead, leaders offered tangible things that could be offered to God. However, our bodies, and souls are not limited to just these three T. We are more than the time we give, our skills and expertise, more than the money we provide. We are flesh and blood bodies. Our minds and souls, connected in profound ways, were created by the same divine power that made the earth and the heavens and called it good.
Stewardship is not limited to these three components. It includes the totality of our beings. In the ministry of stewardship, we bring our whole selves to the Divine.
What does stewardship of our bodies, our minds, our souls look like this year with the election?
Our family has begun having conversations about our values. What does God call us to be and to do the next day after the election? Identifying our values now allows our family to move beyond places that may feel out of our control, to plan proactively who we will be on Day One.
Once our values are identified, we articulate who the people are that may be most impacted by the election. How might God call us to invite, to manage, to give to and to thank in the midst of that reality?
In this season of the election, I invite you to consider stewardship in its totality, to do the work of connecting others' needs to the abiding values of your faith community, and to live in the hope that through giving of our whole selves, we can work for repair of the world.
Erin Weber-Johnson
Erin Weber-Johnson is Senior Consultant at Vandersall Collective, a faith based, woman-led consulting firm and Primary Faculty of Project Resource. In 2017 she co-founded the Collective Foundation, which worked to address the gap in giving characteristics in faith communities of color. In 2022 she co-founded The Belonging Project, a movement designed to reimagine belonging across the ecclesial landscape.
Previously, Erin worked as the Senior Program Director at the Episcopal Church Foundation, as a grants officer at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, and served as a missionary for the Episcopal Church. She holds a BS from Greenville University, a Masters of Public Administration for NYU and is currently completing a second masters in Religion and Theology from United Theological Seminary.
A published author, she strives to root her work in practical theology while utilizing her experience in the nonprofit sector. Her co-edited book, Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy is available through Cascade Books.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Lord, Help Me
It is up to people like us to reclaim and rebuild the commons, what we share of what God has given us. And some of that rebuilding is of institutions.
Photo by Nick Bolton on Unsplash
This post was originally shared as a sermon based on Matthew 15:21-28 on Day 1 . We share it with permission and with the hope that it is a source of inspiration and nourishment as you work to create vibrant communities of faith.
The Canaanite Woman who confronts Jesus in Tyre and Sidon is, along with Jesus, on the main stage in this week’s Gospel. I am old enough to remember when her story was the bracketed part, the optional part, of the assigned readings from Matthew.
She is a local woman, of the communities in the book of Exodus that would have been conquered by the children of Israel as they conquered and occupied their land of promise after liberation from slavery in Egypt and that long wandering in the wilderness. The Bible gives us hints that the people already there remain, and this is one of those jarring reminders that there were people there, and those people remain even to this generation.
The way they are “conquered” in this time is that, at least in words and religious philosophy in the time of Jesus, they are made outsiders, outsiders to the law, to purity, in their own place, by Jesus’ people. That doesn’t mean that we know who had more money or power or land. We don’t know if she was poor or wealthy or something else. It is reasonable to assume her town was thriving. I have read that she must have been educated because of the sophistication of the conversation, but I have met many extraordinarily intelligent and articulate people without much education. The storyteller has decided that the only thing we are supposed to know about her is that Jesus goes to her neighborhood, and she gets very close to him to tell him exactly what she needs.
Her daughter is possessed by demons. Jesus goes to her neighborhood after saying it is what comes from the heart that defiles, not what enters the mouth. And then he walks through an area where Canaanites live.
It was Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red that opened my eyes to the Canaanites in the Bible. I had read right past them, because they did not fit my theology, the theology I had absorbed from reading the Bible with Christians. God promised the children of Israel that they would occupy the land of promise, and I assumed from that moment that it was so. I heard as I read that the land must be empty - God would not wish harm on anyone, much less cause it, right? - even as I read the story of the guys with the grapes on the pole coming out of Canaan, and every battle and siege.
You are probably a better reader than me. I’m a believer. I tend to lead with that, I tend to make things fit and leave out what doesn’t fit into the way I have been told life and faith work, until someone points out something else, insistently.
Today’s story is a hard one for me. Not because Jesus seems to change his mind and accept the Canaanite woman’s request. That idea is not unsettling to me, and it does appear to be just that. After calling out her request from a respectful distance and being ignored, after repeating it and being scolded, she gets very, very close and seems to beg - articulately and intelligently - but beg. And he sees her and gives her what she is asking for. Her daughter, possessed of demons, is healed.
I find it hard to read because it feels close. I know that feeling. I try to organize my life to avoid it, and most of the time I can, and sometimes I choose to be or have to be the one who insists, who will not let it go, until the blessing is granted. For some of us, it’s our superpower.
On May 18, I got to stand with Matt Oprendek, Matt Heyd, Stephen Breed, Bruce Jolly, Bob Jacobs, Stephen Lee, and the bishops of the Episcopal Church in New York for the launch of the New York Episcopal Federal Credit Union. A Credit Union is a community-held entity that is owned by its members and can loan on its own terms within its membership. It is a federally insured financial cooperative. Now, I might not be as proud of anything in my professional life as I am to have been a part of seeing it through to a charter.
In 2014, a small group of us from the Episcopal Diocese of New York took a resolution to our convention asking our diocese to permit us to explore the possibility of establishing a credit union. The diocese had attempted this before - it is New York after all; we know a financial institution.
The difference in 2014 was the big bank crashes had happened in 2009. The market crash that had to do with bad mortgages and inflated housing prices, the one that devasted so many pensions, had happened. The big federal bailout of banks had happened. Remembering there was no bailout for those pensions, the cynical or corrupt or unethical practices of banks had been exposed. One study at the time found that one-third of New Yorkers were unbanked or under-banked. At my parish in the East Village, I was meeting people with jobs that the local commercial bank would not serve with a checking or savings account. Every conference or meeting I went to about new inclusive financial services, like community lending apps, assumed you had a bank account. They were required. I remembered the Episcopal Credit Union in Los Angeles and their president, Urla Gomes, who told the stories of giving $500 loans to the woman who ran the tamale cart or a few thousand dollars for the house cleaners to get better supplies so that they could level up to grow their businesses.
A longtime member of St. James in Fordham, where the Credit Union opening was held, Raquel Davis, said many community members she talked to at the church’s food pantry while volunteering told her that they are looking forward to joining the credit union. “Most of us are not wealthy,” she said. “It’s impossible for us to get a loan from the commercial banks, so the only opportunity is to go to the loan sharks,” where the interest charged is “overwhelming,” she said. She said, “Thank you for the opportunity in the credit union because it’s giving us an opportunity to have control over our finances.”
Lord, help me, the Canaanite woman says, and she won’t stop asking.
A decade is not how long I wanted this to take. It took us time to understand how we could staff and structure this organization to serve those we wanted to serve. It took us time to agree to a model. There was an unfortunate time there when we got no response to our inquiries from the federal government. I am sure we were not alone in that. When the administration changed, again, so did the rate of engagement. We could not have done it without Dall Forsythe and Bruce Jolly who brought a lot of professional experience and persistence themselves.
There remains much work to be done to keep this thing capitalized and active. But I’m telling you this story because we need more. Adjudicatories of churches are a wonderful field of membership - the great and mighty among us, we ordinary people, and those left out of formal economy, in one group - placing our giftedness and need in relationship, the true fabric of our lives together, not in offering charity, but in building the institutions that empower those we have narratively erased - the losers. Every time the banks crash or the unemployment rate goes up or a politician decides that hating one another will help them get a few more votes, we are binding together what our public life insists must be separated.
There was a time when churches built institutions: schools, hospitals, later food banks and homeless projects. As our institutions are battered in this nation, what were once the common goods of life together - like housing, land, food, and banks - are all organized to maximize the profit of the investor, not produce the best product or service at a competitive rate with market appropriate compensation of employees. It is up to people like us to reclaim and rebuild the commons, what we share of what God has given us. And some of that rebuilding is of institutions.
At St. Luke’s in Atlanta, where I am now, it is literally also about creating more beautiful green space, maybe growing more food, gathering people in a divided city. Yes, and what if we put our resources to work for those possessed by demons today – the demons of sickness, of endless war that is like armed violence in our streets, the demon of being priced out of housing, the demon of jobs whose salaries cannot pay for the basic necessities of life, the demon of a marketplace that will take the most money from the people with the least, the demon of working children, the demon of hunger? Lord, help us.
Lord, help us and bless us with a portion of the Canaanites woman’s courage and persistence. Help us to find ourselves in this story. Maybe you are like Jesus, passing through this particular patch of suffering. Maybe it’s not for you. Are you clever? Maybe you are a disciple, disdainful of the inconvenience of this crap economy and its victims. You’re just trying to follow Jesus after all, or maybe you are like a woman whose child is lost, strategizing to get access to what you need.
May Jesus meet you where you are and go with you as you find your power to heal.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life. Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Rev. Winnie Varghese
The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-William and has been a contributor for Church Anew’s Enfleshing Witness events.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Funding Forward: Sustainable Practices for Funding Ministry
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
This post originally appeared on the Faith+Lead blog and we are sharing it here to introduce you to Grace Pomroy, one of our collaborators for Stewardship In A Box, a resource created in partnership between Church Anew and Faith+Lead at Luther Seminary.
An interview between Arlene Flancher and Grace Duddy Pomroy of the Stewardship Leaders Program at Luther Seminary.
Arlene: For our readers who don’t know what Funding Forward is, can you give us a short description?
Grace: Sure! Funding Forward is the process of finding more economically sustainable models for ministry that emerge organically from the congregation’s mission. People often think funding forward is about “saving the church” or just bringing in more money for money’s sake to line the church’s pockets. In fact this process is a lot more about mission than it is about money.
A: When did you become interested in Funding Forward?
G: Before coming to Luther Seminary I worked for Portico Benefit Services, the benefit ministry of the ELCA. During my time at Portico, I heard from a lot of church leaders who said their congregations simply couldn’t afford our benefits any more. So, they would slowly reduce these benefits over time, cut them entirely, or strongly suggest that a pastor go on their spouse’s insurance. I also heard from pastors who were seeking part-time calls and hired for half-time calls, then being asked to work 40+ hours per week for a half-time wage in the name of ministry. It was clear to me that the current economic system of having a full-time pastor with full benefits was becoming less and less feasible for many congregations. While I think congregational leaders were doing the best they could to find ways to cut the budget and to get as much ministry as possible from a half-time salary, I also knew that this series of small cuts was alienating clergy and that it could eventually lead to congregational closure. I wondered if there might be a way to address the root cause of these concerns, the church economic system as a whole, rather than continuing to put bandaids over the problems in the hopes that they might heal on their own.
A: Can you share a little bit about how you collected data during the Funding Forward research project?
G: In the fall of 2022, we surveyed over 100 congregations in the U.S. and Canada who have experimented with more economically sustainable models for ministry that are aligned with God’s mission for their community. I shared some of my “ah ha” moments from the survey findings in this article from Feb. 20 and this one from Feb. 27. This winter and spring, my research team and I conducted interviews with key ministry leader(s) and a group of lay participants from 12 of the surveyed congregations. Our goal in both the survey and interviews was to answer two primary questions.
What conditions are necessary for a congregation to shift its economic model?
What practices might congregation leaders use to facilitate that shift?
A: What are some stories from the interviews that will stay with you?
G: In an interview I did with a small, rural congregation. During the lay group interview, I could sense tension in the room. A few years ago the congregation had transitioned from a full-time to a half-time pastor. While the congregation’s first half-time pastor gave them full-time ministry for the price of half-time, their new half-time minister was setting up clear boundaries around his time and inviting the lay members of the congregation to take ownership of their ministry in new ways.
One interviewee was really taken with this idea and started exploring new opportunities to connect with the surrounding community and partner with different organizations to find a more sustainable future.
Another interviewee was less optimistic, sharing that every time the church had a good idea the surrounding community seemed to steal it and secularize it. For this member, there was no hope for partnership.
I watched as the more excited member empathized with the more pessimistic one while also naming the hope that she was seeing. She shared: “we shouldn’t look at the other parts of the community as competition. We should look at it as, ‘How can we all work together to make our whole town?’ Everybody has gifts, each different organization has a different gift, and our Jesus has given us all gifts. So why can’t we combine those gifts? … [I believe the town is] looking for something and we can be a partner with that and not in competition.” This conversation reminded me of the importance of lay people who are willing to step in and lead in new ways. Often, they can have the greatest influence and impact in getting other lay members on board. Similarly, this congregation was looking to open up their building to rent space to the community; they would never be successful at renting space if they saw these renters as competition, not partners.
I also had the opportunity to talk with a lay group from a small, new start ministry in active discernment about who God is calling them to be. A key part of their mission is cultivating a network of 23 partners who rent their building, as well as embodying hospitality for all who enter their space. Given that the group who participated in the lay interview included at least one rental partner who wasn’t religious, I wondered how they might receive the final question of the interview: “Where did you see God in the process of creating and/or shifting the financial model?” Surprisingly, it was a partner from a non-religious organization who spoke up first. He spoke about the way he experienced God in the first collective meeting of the building partners in two ways. First – through a spiritual meditation ritual that started the meeting and second, through the partners’ conversation as a whole. He said,
“And being someone who grew up in the church and doesn’t attend a church regularly now but tries to stay in touch with spiritual communities, it felt like healing for me. And I think that’s a cool thing that happens for the people involved – whether they’re in a choir or attending a concert or just coming for a workshop or something. It’s the less visible parts. It’s not the cross on a building, and it’s not a Bible in someone’s hand. It’s nothing like that. And that’s really what most people I know nowadays are connecting to. [It’s the spirit of the place.] It’s subtle and not labeled.”
He also said, “It feels like that warm hug from the auntie that’s going to provide you some tea and a biscuit or something. That energy is really important, and most venues, most churches don’t have that actually. It’s somewhat rare, unfortunately.”
He appreciated that this church embodies hospitality and a calm spirit without asking every partner to share their same view and beliefs. This partner uses the sanctuary space as a concert venue. While his organization is not religious, this is a space where he felt that he and the concert attendees could engage in the spiritual practice of experiencing music together.
In a context where so many are done with or disconnected from religion, I wonder what it looks like for the church to be a place of peace and hospitality where people can experience God together in new and old ways?
A: What’s one thing you learned that surprised you?
G: Funding Forward is deeply rooted in stewardship and generosity is a key practice in this work. I have been passionate about stewardship since 2010 when I started at Luther Seminary. I believe stewardship is about using everything God has entrusted to our care to love God and our neighbors, and generosity is an important (although certainly not the only way) we can live into our call as stewards. I have often worried that this focus on funding forward would take me away from my passion for stewardship ministry. And yet, the interviews reminded me that this work is deeply rooted in stewardship. I saw how congregations were living into the three movements of stewardship: seeing the ways God had come down to them in love, looking in to identify the unique assets God had entrusted to their care, and looking out to see how God was inviting them to use these assets in new ways – creating sustainability not only for them but their neighbors.
Similarly, generosity was a key theme that came up in the interviews. We heard about:
A working class congregation that raised $1.4 million dollars (just from their own congregation) to transform their building and create affordable housing
A landlord who gave part of his building away to a congregation to create a community center for trans and gender-diverse people to gather, grow, and flourish
A large, anonymous donation that was used to create a social enterprise for nourishing Christian leaders and igniting communities of faith by setting an inclusive table of belonging and developing resources for a fresh, bold, and faithful witness in the world
Generosity was not a side project. It was a central component to making these ministries happen.
A: Based on what you learned in your interviews, how would you answer your two primary research questions?
G: First, I’ll talk about the conditions necessary for a congregation to shift its economic model. I went into this project believing that there would be parameters about how much money or what assets a congregation might need to have to get this process started. I didn’t find that to be the case. In fact, we talked to a few congregations within a year from closure when they shifted their model. While finances may have been one motivator for this work and it was sometimes what pushed the congregation to make a bold change, it was usually not the primary motivator. Overall, the congregations we interviewed had these things in common:
They had a clear understanding of God’s mission for their congregation in this time and place.
They had listened to the people God had called them to serve outside of the four walls of their congregation and had an understanding of their needs.
They had a sense of the unique assets God had entrusted to their care that they might use to both live out God’s mission and meet these needs. This might be a building or a segment of church property but it could also be the abilities of people in their community (farmers, entrepreneurs, etc.).
They were open to change and were emboldened to take risks.
As far as the things that helped them to actually make this shift to a new model, these were the four that came up most often:
a network of partnerships with organizations outside of the congregation, and community relationships
trusted pastoral leadership
empowered lay leadership
generous support in time, talent, and treasure
Outside of these four, my research team was surprised by how much discernment, communication, transparency, and consensus-based leadership came up throughout our conversations. This was not something a small group engaged in on the side, they were intentional about bringing the whole congregation along every step of the way. Similarly, I was struck by the deep spiritual nature of this work. There were 20 spiritual practices (prayer, Bible Study, listening, naming God’s action, etc.) named throughout the interviews and it was these spiritual practices that kept the congregation going when they encountered challenges.
Used by permission of Faith+Lead at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.
Grace Pomroy
Grace Pomroy is a financial educator, speaker, and blogger. She helps couples transform their relationship and deepen their intimacy by having open and honest conversation about money. She empowers them to connect their money and their values so they can create a more fulfilling life together. In 2017, she became a Certified Financial Education Instructor (CFEI). She lives with her husband in Gig Harbor, WA. When she's not talking about money, you'll find her exploring new cities, hiking trails, or in her kitchen perfecting her sourdough recipe. She is currently the Director of the Stewardship Leaders Program at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN and co-owner of Embracing Stewardship, LLC.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Announcing: Stewardship In A Box
This post originally appeared on the Faith+Lead blog to promote Stewardship In A Box, a resource created in partnership between Church Anew and Faith+Lead and Luther Seminary.
In 2022, Church Anew launched a new resource aimed at congregations and leaders, called “Lent In A Box.” The idea behind this resource was an acknowledgment that Lent often adds more on top of already busy preaching and teaching schedules, and sometimes it’s nice to be given a theologically trustworthy bit of help. Instead of each church community writing, planning, teaching, and creating everything from scratch, Church Anew designed, created, and offered helpful tools and themes for the Lenten season.
Lent In A Box was a complete success, utilized by and connecting over 350 church communities across denominations, states, and church size. We even had a few international participants! (We see you, Norway and Canada!)
With this success, the team at Church Anew decided to double down and create another “In A Box” resource around the topic of stewardship – this time in partnership with the Stewardship Leaders Program at Luther Seminary. We are excited about this partnership and look forward to August when we will bring you: Stewardship In A Box.
Stewardship has long been a challenge in the life of many congregations and their leaders but never more so than in recent years. With attendance and giving both down, it is more important than ever that we are not only clear with what we are asking, but are also clear with our why.
Just as stewardship is a challenge for congregations, we also know this subject can also be challenging for people of faith. For so many of us, even hearing the word “stewardship” can conjure up images of pastors begging for money, congregation leaders shaming people into giving more to a deficit budget, or biblical narratives about money that don’t seem to align with how we use money today. What would it look like to use a stewardship season to help people unpack some of their baggage around money while also helping them better align their faith and their finances?
The resources in this virtual box are meant to help with all of this. They will:
Alleviate the stress and fear for leaders by giving them practice making a clear and compelling financial ask to their community
Help congregations pay attention to the Spirit’s work in their midst, naming the dreams and the needs of their community while making a case for financial support
Build skills among professional and lay leaders for effective stewardship leadership
Invite people of faith to get curious about what it means for each of us, youthful and elder, to be generous from the abundance that God has entrusted to them
Using tried and true methods from fundraising experts and stewardship leaders, this resource will help congregations from the beginning to the end of a stewardship campaign. This is not an “all or nothing” resource, that everyone follows exactly and word for word. It is meant to be more of a “choose your own adventure,” setting each congregation up for stewardship success in the way that fits their context best.
Our inaugural Stewardship In A Box theme is “You Have Heard it Said…” This worship and spiritual practice series will help people of faith unpack some of what they have heard about money and generosity, reflect on how God might be calling them to use all of their money (not just the portion they give away), and discern how people of all ages might participate in God’s mission in their congregation financially and otherwise. Drawing people of all ages into conversation, it will make a compelling case for developing a spiritual practice around all forms of generosity.
A ready-made resource for congregations of every size, Stewardship In A Box will include:
Preaching Prompts for pastors, deacons, lay-preachers, synodically authorized ministers (SAMs), and anyone sharing a sermon. (preview here)
Worship and Liturgical Resources including song/hymn suggestions, calls to worship, and prayers of the day.
At Home Practices for households of every size and shape that center Christian faith in ordinary moments of life.
Stewardship Basics for church councils, stewardship committees, or rostered leaders looking to grow their toolkit.
Stewardship Campaign Tools that help church leaders communicate God’s work in and through their congregation and ask for financial support
Customizable Campaign Material that centers the mission of your congregation, shares a message from your leader(s), features photos from your church, and has a clear call-to-action for financial support.
Equipping Events
Register to attend an Equipping Event and get access to all the resources.
Online Equipping Event 1: Thursday, August 10, 2023 from 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM Central Time
Online Equipping Event 2: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 from 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM Central Time
In-Person Equipping Event: Thursday, September 21, 2023 from 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Central Time.
We hope these resources give you the support you need for a stewardship campaign.
Used by permission of Faith+Lead at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.
Rev. Natalia Terfa
Natalia is a Lutheran pastor and author who lives in Minneapolis with her hubby, kiddo, and kitty babies. She loves to bake, to read, practice yoga, and find nature adventures. She is passionate about the church of the future, one with no boundaries and filled to the brim with love and grace and laughter and snark and a lot of fellow “not that kind of Christians.”
Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
The Cost of a Body
Photo by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash
What is a body worth to you?
What is a body worth to God?
On the surface, one might be inclined to answer that bodies are priceless. Bodies are sacred. Bodies are beloved.
Yet, this language doesn`t translate consistently. There is a tension that occurs when we talk about one’s hourly rate or the value of one’s time. When a person is injured or killed, insurance adjusters quantify what a life is worth in terms of monetary reimbursement. When considering prison reform, school reform, hospital reform, analytics are made of the cost of a single body in order to determine cost/benefit analysis. How do we make sense of this question in the modern world?
Recently, the nation was horrified at the brutal murder of Eliza Fletcher, a woman out on a run one morning. Initially described in the news at a pre-kindergarten teacher, major news headlines quickly changed to read ‘billionaire’s heiress grandaughter murdered.’ Within 24 hours new information was provided that her grandfather was not a billionaire; that initial headlines didn’t accurately reflect Eliza’s identity. In the midst of this question of her worth, others asked important questions about why this case gathered more attention compared to similar cases of women of color. Why does one human’s body garner extensive attention and public outcry while others remain unseen?
In the Twin Cities where I live, after the murder of George Floyd my family watched as the national guard’s tanks made their way through our streets. Palpable pain and loss gave way to fresh visual expressions of grief. Strangely, the national guards presence seemed to focus their protection at predominantly white owned businesses. The news began to speak of the cost of the protests to local establishments. One business owner of a nearby Indian restaurant was featured saying, “George Floyd’s life is worth the loss of my business. I can always rebuild again.”
How one views our bodies, as vehicles for productivity, as estimable by hourly wage or as beloved impacts the ability to engage in conversations about money. The powerful relationships between body and money impacts our relationship to God.
What can we say about how God moves in our world when even our notions of stewardship and giving are often rooted in the sense of ownership of our material goods. Having created us in his/her/their image, the creation story tells that God entrusted the land and animals to Adam.
Edgar Villenueva further problematizes this idea in Decolonizing Wealth by saying the concept of colonization took place around the time when humans became farmers and concepts of ownership, managing or controlling the land gave way to owning plants and animals.
Somewhere stewardship began to resemble ownership. And, in developing systems of hierarchy and control, ownership didn't stop at land and animals.
I would take Villenueva’s wisdom one step further as colonization connects to bodies. Our body’s worth, with roots from our nation’s history of slavery and the selling of bodies is embeded in our DNA. We feel it in our bodies and in our relationships with others. It translates now to overwork, insurmountable anxiety, and vocational burnout. Folks describe their fear of being replaceable, disposable, or not of worth. Overwork becomes a defense mechanism when asking, “what am I worth?”
Psalm 139: 14
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
As we move into a season often called that of annual giving, stewardship or fall giving, we are often asked to consider our relationship to money. Yet, the weight of this question about the worth of a body lays heavy. How do we pray to a God who forgives us our debts as we forgive our debtors when this language is also linked to scriptures of how God loves us so much that he gave his only son? Ultimately, this drives the question: what was Jesus’s body even worth?
The question of bodies and worth emerges both in theologies of giving as well as the lived experience of those inviting others to give. In thinking of stewardship and faith leaders, I’ve both experienced and read painful stories from leaders (people of color, women, those differently abled, etc) in the church where they`ve described the impact of code switching, of leaving the identity of their body at the door in order to raise money. In other words, these beloved were forced to measure the cost of their body in order to receive funding for ministry.
What am I worth? What are you worth?
Sonya Renee Taylor writes in her powerful book The Body is Not an Apology, “When our personal value is dependent on the lesser value of other bodies, radical self-love is unachievable.” The work of monetizing bodies was historically crafted and rigorously maintained to enforce the notion that some bodies are worth more than others. Some bodies would cost more than others.
The theology of decolonizing stewardship invites us into a new way of thinking about our money in relation to both our bodies as well as other beloved of God. This moment calls us to an unpacking of the ways our minds as well as bodies have been colonized in ways that apply a cost to the body, to the soul. Our work, in exploring our relationships to money and bodies, is one of asking difficult questions, living in ambiguity, avoiding prescription, and celebrating diversity as holy.
This moment calls us to bear witness not only inherited sinful systems that would see a body as something to possess, own, or monetize. It is one not of only tearing down the colonial mindset, but of hopeful imagination as we invite the holy spirit to reorient ourselves to God and each other in the world.
Erin Weber-Johnson
Erin Weber-Johnson is Senior Consultant at Vandersall Collective, a faith based, woman-led consulting firm and Primary Faculty of Project Resource. In 2017 she co-founded the Collective Foundation, which worked to address the gap in giving characteristics in faith communities of color. In 2022 she co-founded The Belonging Project, a movement designed to reimagine belonging across the ecclesial landscape.
Previously, Erin worked as the Senior Program Director at the Episcopal Church Foundation, as a grants officer at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, and served as a missionary for the Episcopal Church. She holds a BS from Greenville University, a Masters of Public Administration for NYU and is currently completing a second masters in Religion and Theology from United Theological Seminary.
A published author, she strives to root her work in practical theology while utilizing her experience in the nonprofit sector. Her co-edited book, Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy is available through Cascade Books.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.