My giving is a token of my gratitude.

I learned my own first lessons in Christian stewardship from the present Bishop of Gloucester and most of what follows comes from an address given by him.  I love because I have first been loved.  I give out of gratitude for all that has been given to me.  And if what I give of my time or my money is a genuine token of my gratitude it will be proportionate to my resources - to what I have myself been given.  It will have virtually NOTHING to do with the needs of the Church.

So the Bishop of Gloucester writes "the basic principle of which the Stewardship movement .has sought to remind the Church is true.  That gratitude to God for what he has given us is the mainspring of the Christian religion.  Without it every aspect of real religion withers and dies.  Without gratitude worship becomes either a dead formality or a cringing act of deference, service becomes a self–justifying impertinence, prayer becomes a whine and morality a reluctant insurance premium. In many aspects of religion Christians accept this as true, however often we fail in the practical application of it.  Our trouble in the Church has boon that we have simply not applied this principle-to our giving.  We have substituted other motives – compassion, duty, convention – and the task of the Stewardship movement now, as at the beginning, is to put gratitude back into giving . . . . . to show people that this aspect of our discipleship has got to be  congruous with all other aspects and that if it isn't or isn't becoming so – than the other aspects will suffer grievous damage.

I have always believed this to be the very essence of the Stewardship movement.  And I have always believed also – as some of you will have heard me say before - that we did ourselves a grave disservice when we allowed the Americans and the Companies to foist this name 'Stewardship' upon us.  The very metaphor 'Stewardship' is incapable of expressing the Gospel.  The Christian religion cannot be taught in terms of Stewardship.  It is not the right metaphor.  The fundamental relationship between a man and God is not to be expressed in this metaphor but in the great Biblical metaphor of sonship.

There are in the New Testament, of course, a whole lot of subsidiary metaphors to illuminate and to illustrate different aspects of our sonship.  As God's sons we have got to be, for instance, obedient as soldiers, we have got to be loyal like subjects, we have got to be faithful like stewards, we have, got to be diligent like servants, we have got to live together responsibly like citizens, we have got to be keen like merchants, we have got to warn each other like watchmen.  We have got to be dependent as branches, as useful as limbs, as solid as rocks and as devoted as lovers.  But underneath all these metaphors, co-ordinating all these duties, there is the great fundamental fact of our sonship.  When we come to talk with God, when we come, as it were face to face with God., we are to say 'Our Father'.  Basically God is not someone-who entrusts to a steward; He is someone who gives to a son.

Now this is, I would submit, not merely playing with words.  It is much more important than that.  If we try to blow up the word 'stewardship' so that it may include sonship, if we say to a man in effect, 'you are God's steward but you must exercise your stewardship lovingly like a son', then we are getting the whole thing exactly the wrong way round.  We are giving priority in the Christian life to the Steward's qualities of faithfulness and of responsibility and integrity, instead of the son's qualities of thankfulness and of joy and of love.  We want, of course, both sets of qualities.  I am not suggesting that faithfulness and diligence are inferior to joy and to thankfulness; I am only suggesting that, in the life of the Christian disciple, they are secondary .rather than primary qualities.

Just as in a human family a child experiences love and gratitude before he begins to practise responsibility, so it must be in the family of God,  It must be stewardship through sonship and not the other way round.  This is fundamentally the old distinction between faith and works.  You want both.  Of course you do.  You cannot have the Christian religion without faith or works.  In the Christian life you see both, but you only get either, I would submit, if you have got them in the right order.  In the Stewardship movement we have got them in the right order.  We do base our doctrine on gratitude.

Hence the importance of the tithe.  Because historically this is exactly where the tithe starts.  'And of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee'.  This is why in Stewardship we have always stressed that the determining factor in a man's giving is his income - and not the needs of the Church or of anyone else.  We give the tithe as a token of gratitude.  Here again we have done ourselves a dis-service by the denigration of the word 'token'.  We have spoken of 'token giving' as something to be despised, whereas in fact token giving is exactly what Stewardship is about.  The real issue here is concerned with the reality of the token."

St.Paul seems at one time to have had a very common modern attitude to money and the Church.  He begged Christians for money to fulfil the needs of the church elsewhere.  Then he learned himself how much better in every way was the giving of those who first gave THEMSELVES.  Indeed if my giving is to be a token of my gratitude it MUST begin with self-giving.  It will involve whatever I have of skills, of time, of material and spiritual resources.

In his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes of the Macedonian Christians:

'I can swear that they gave not only as much as they could afford, but far more, and quite spontaneously, begging and begging us for the favour of sharing this service to the saints and, what was quite unexpected, they offered their own selves first to God and, under God, to us.  Because of this we have asked Titus, since he has already made a beginning, to bring this work of mercy to the same point of success among YOU.'

The success Paul writes of is that Christ-like generosity which is the stewardship of a man responding to the unconditional love of God the Father.