Posts Tagged ‘Generosity’
Foundation Statement on Stewardship
Written for the General Board of Discipleship, The United Methodist Church, 2010 Stewardship is whatever we do with what God has entrusted to us by the way that we live. In response to God’s outpouring love and covenant faithfulness, we live out of God’s abundance instead of the illusion of scarcity thinking. We seek to…
Read MoreWhy Good Things Happen to Good People
Written for Giving magazine, Vol. 20 By the Ecumenical Stewardship Center Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving By Stephen Post and Jill Neimark “Giving is good medicine,” say Stephen Post and Jill Neimark, authors of Why Good Things Happen to…
Read MoreBiblically Generous Churches, Part 3
How can we help our local church become more generous – understood in the full biblical sense – as a group of Jesus’ disciples? Stewardship coach Michael Reeves says that a biblically generous church teaches stewardship of all dimensions of our lives as part of the church’s training of its members. Holistic stewardship is part…
Read MorePrayer for Generous Living
Attributed to St. Ignatius Lord, teach me to be generous, To serve you as you deserve, To give and not to count the cost, To fight and not to heed the wounds, To toil and not to seek for rest, To labour and not to look for any reward, Save that of knowing that…
Read MoreThe Social Contagion of Generosity
Generosity is not just an individual trait; 1 it can have a huge effect on our communities. I was excited to see that scientific studies are actually documenting how generous behavior creates and builds our relationships with others. I’ve always thought of contagion as a bad thing: as in viruses, diseases, a plague. So an…
Read MoreVolunteers Benefit, Too
We’ve known for a long time that volunteering doesn’t only help the people where you donate your time. But now it’s been proven to benefit the volunteer in a whole slew of ways. And it’s not just an attitude difference, either. In an article called “The Generosity Effect,” 1 researchers reported a number of positive…
Read MoreHappiness and Money
Happiness can be elusive. Surveys from way back have shown that Americans in all economic levels thought they’d be happy if they had just 10% more. But recent research 1 is even more striking: When Harvard Business School asked more than 4,000 millionaires how much money it would take to be perfectly happy, 25% said…
Read MoreLive Courageously
I was thrilled to receive Live Courageously, this year’s issue of Giving: Growing Joyful Stewards in Your Congregation, from the Ecumenical Stewardship Center. In addition to a center section Leader’s Guide for an annual financial commitment program based on small groups, it includes “Bright Spot” stories celebrating real people practicing faithful stewardship and generosity, book…
Read MoreAssets and Liabilities
“Generosity is a spiritual disposition, not a quantifiable percentage of income,” said author James Hudnut-Beumler in Generous Saints. Generous people are grateful to God, affirming that “they know their worth comes from God, and not from money – not from money earned, hoarded, spent to purchase things, or used to exercise power.” 1 As I…
Read MoreGenerosity Heroes
Generosity isn’t about what we do with things; it’s about the heart. A generous heart gives quality time to listen to another person, gives follow-through compassion to act on concern for far-away people, gives personal involvement and practical resources to people in need and creatures in danger. And there are plenty of people who demonstrate…
Read MoreResurrection Generosity
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! On this Easter Day, I was thrilled to read today’s meditation from www.generositymonk.com. He cited Franklin Brookhart about “Resurrection Gratitude and Generosity.” Brookhart says: The resurrection of our Lord is the paradigm of the way God works. Resurrection means fullness and abundance of life – all of life.…
Read MoreGenerosity Rising
Book Review by The Rev. Rosanna Anderson From http://www.umcdiscipleship.org, July 3, 2016 Generosity Rising: Lead a Stewardship Revolution in Your Church by Scott McKenzie (Abingdon Press, 2016) What is a “stewardship revolution”? A revolution in giving comes from renewed stewardship commitment by a leadership team filled with people whose hearts and lives reflect financially-dedicated discipleship.…
Read MorePropel: Involvement and Generosity
I just wrote a book review for next year’s Giving magazine on Clayton Smith’s new book, Propel: Good Stewardship, Greater Generosity. The theme of that issue of Giving is “Living Generously,” and I hope you’ll order it online at www.stewardshipresources.org this fall. But there are a lot more ideas from Propel than I could pack…
Read MoreA Generous Eye
Jesus’ parable about the eye as the lamp of the body (Mt. 6:22-24) contrasts a healthy eye with an unhealthy one. The healthy eye illuminates the whole person, he says, whereas (as one commentator puts it) the unhealthy eye creates double vision, making the entire person “full of darkness.” Double vision – that’s a powerful…
Read MoreLocal Church Stewardship Plan Guideline
Written for the CA-NV United Methodist Conference Instant Connection, 7/30/2015 The 2012-2016 U.M. Guideline, Stewardship: Nurturing Generous Living, is now available. This nuts-and-bolts booklet, written by the Rev. Betsy Schwarzentraub, former California-Nevada Conference Director of Stewardship, is written for a local church stewardship team to build a generosity plan for the congregation. The forty-page booklet…
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