You’ll hear a lot more about the campaign elsewhere in this newsletter and at church, even in your mailbox!  We have an excellent Stewardship Team guiding this process.  They have done a wonderful job both in working out the logistical details of the campaign and in connecting the “ask” part of Stewardship with the faith principles that encourage us all to give generously.

Here’s the theme the Stewardship Committee came up with for this year’s campaign.

“Nurture the Soul.  Ignite the Spirit.”

The theme makes clear that giving to the church is soul work.  Faith work that touches the deepest parts of ourselves where purpose and meaning dwell.  Stewardship is work of the spirit.

But I want to add a detail that might be missed.  The nurture and igniting that comes from giving to the church comes not from the church programs your gift makes possible, or from an abstract connection to the church’s mission, but directly from your act of giving.  It is you, opening your heart in love for the church that provides the nurture your soul needs.  It is you, releasing your energy of abundance that lights the spark that will ignite your spirit.

The church, though our programs, and the community, and the living expression of our faith, merely reflects back to you the nurture and igniting that you give.  It is the community giving, the very act of stewardship itself, that makes the church a place of nurture.  It is the love we pour into the church that makes the church loving.

It is, in a perpetual cycle that only makes sense in spiritual terms, our giving to the church that makes the church worth giving to.  Members who give freely find not only that the church fills up with more that we love about church, but also find themselves filled up with more of what inspired them to give in the first place.

The cycle can spin in the opposite direction as well.  A tentative and carefully measured step toward the church results in a feeling that the church itself is somehow retreating.  But the church is only reflecting your own hesitancy.  The church is a spiritual mirror.  

The question in considering your pledge is not, “what is the church worth?”  But, “What am I worth?”  What is my spiritual health worth?   Not, “What do I get?”  But, “How fully do I want to be invested in a community of people who I care deeply about, who I have come to love; a faith that has inspired me to be better and do more than I thought possible, that has lifted me when I was down, and lifted me even higher when I was up?”

I hope the answer to that question is as big as your soul and as generous as your spirit.