Looking Back: Offering and Collection: a message from the Moderator

From Sept 1984

John MK Paterson

Christian Giving Plan

A Summer visitor to a small remote church put a £10 note into the offering on the Sunday morning. When he was leaving the church, and office-bearer came up to him. “Excuse me,” he said discreetly holding out the £10 note. “You put this into the collection by mistake.”

That true story highlights two misconceptions in the minds of many members of the Church Of Scotland. One is that a £10 note in the offering is inappropriate to the needs of today’s Church. The other is that it is quite misleading to call an offering a collection. There is all the difference in the world between the two.

A collection is for a worthy cause. We collect money for a charity. We collect things for a jumble sale. We may collect money for a special project within the life of the Church, but we do not give life to the Church by what we collect.

The Church is given its life, on the one hand, by the historic momentum of the Holy Spirit, and on the other by the members’ individual and particular response to the Holy Spirit who prompts each one of us to respond to his gift of love.

LACKING LOVE

Love, or lack of it, lies at the heart of the situation facing our Church today. Collectively in our congregations, we may have all the spiritual gifts of prophecy and knowledge and we may have faith enough to move mountains, we may make the most generous gifts to the poor, but if we lack love, then it all adds up to failure at the end of the day.

 What God is saying to us today, as we look at the dramatic needs of the Church, is that we are failing to love the Church; failing to love the Body of Christ of what we are a part; failing to understand what it really means to love ourselves, for we are nothing other than what we are in Christ.

Certainly we love ourselves materially. We will spend money on our clothes, our houses, our cars; we will save money for our holidays, our children, our old age. We will even put money into a deposit account and take great pleasure in looking at the figure written in by the banker, saying to ourselves: “Look – last year I had only £X, this year I have £XX.”

FAILURE

And all the time, the part of us that is the Body of Christ becomes increasingly undernourished. We become hardened to the facts and figures which prove conclusively that the Church is being weakened by starvation, and in time, unless we love it more, it will become a cripple. “The Crippled Body of Christ.”

The need to have the Christian Giving Plan should make us ashamed. It is like the sad declaration of a devoted wife who one day is constrained to say to her husband, “I have loved you faithfully and in every way possible throughout all the long years of our marriage. Although from time to time you have been kind, you have often been thoughtless, careless and inconsiderate; and you have never given me any real sign that you loved me or cared for me.”

The need to have a Christian Giving Plan should embarrass us. In the eyes of the non-Christian world we are proclaiming failure. In their eyes, we are saying that inflation has done what heresy failed to do. In their eyes, the deterioration of many church buildings, is doing what persecution in the past failed to do. In their eyes, the poor and the marginalised may soon no longer look to the disciples of Christ to feed them or help them.

SPLENDID PLAN

The shame and embarrassment of letting the world know that we have not been true to our vows to give as we promised, and that so many of our financial problems are directly related to our lack of love, can only be overcome by a new beginning and a new resolve to change and improve the pattern of our offerings throughout our congregations.

I would urge all members to take to heart the very serious nature of the financial circumstances which govern and restrict so much of the Church’s worship and outreach today.

The Christian Giving Plan itself is splendid, and has the advantage of being able to be modified to suit every kind of local requirement. I would invite every congregation that has not already done so to engage in this competent and professional programme in a spirit of love for the Church of Jesus Christ – our Father’s Church, our Church, the Church for the world that God loved so much.

Looking Back menu

Life and Work is the magazine of the Church of Scotland. Subscribe here.