Year-Round Stewardship Ideas
As you begin the New Year, highlight stewardship as a way of life throughout 2016, by introducing two or three of the following ideas in your congregation:
Congregational Leadership
Ask everyone on parish council and other leaders to read at least one book on stewardship, gratitude and giving during the course of each year of service and to share what they have learned at a meeting or through a book review. A downloadable stewardship bibliography is available at www.ottawa.anglican.ca/Stewardship_Resources.html.
List What Excites You
Begin a list of responses to the question, “what are you excited about in our Church?” Start with your stewardship team because they need to be the nucleus of energy and excitement. Expand to include others, such as the parish council. Then involve the whole congregation with a bulletin board placed where people passing by can see what others have said and inscribe their own thoughts. Highlight examples from this list in your announcements and bulletins. Identify and give thanks for the examples abundance in your church community that appear on the bulletin board.
Personal Stories of Support
Individuals and families of- ten prayerfully discern God’s direction when deciding how they will use the nancial resources God has provided them to support of the ministries of the church. Ask them to share their stories of giving in worship services, meetings, newsletters and other public forums.
Minutes for Mission
Once a month, have a two to three-minute presentation in your worship service highlighting a ministry or outreach where lives are being changed. The presentations may include descriptions of how worshipers can assist with a project, make a special gift or provide other assistance to make a difference through their investment in a program. Collect and share stories from diverse sources about the difference that giving in your congregation is making both within the church and beyond.
Photos Tell a Story
Help your congregation talk about and appreciate the events in which they have participated. Photos are easy to arrange in displays. How about recognizing in a letter to the congregation that the youth program occurs because of the giving of the congregation and taking this opportunity to enclose a photo from a recent youth event and to say thanks?
Reclaim the Offertory
Have someone read an appropriate passage of scripture prior to the offering, make a few comments about why it is personally meaningful to them and then pray for generous giving. Enlist a team whose responsibility it is to plan and implement a different experience of worship through congregational offerings each Sunday. On occasion, consider a procession into the chancel for the presentation of individual and family gifts. Reclaim the offertory as a high point in worship.
Get Specific in Congregational Prayers of the People
Remember to include stewardship of time, talent and treasure in the prayers of the people. The value we place on time given to us by God, our attitudes about the talents God gave to us and our relationship with the financial resources God provides for us are spiritual issues and a focus for prayer.
Bulletin Inserts and Newsletters
Develop a series of monthly inserts in worship bulletins beginning with the phrase “Because of your gifts”. Every issue of your congregational newsletter can carry a ministry or personal story about gratitute and generosity. Consider a separate newsletter that solely addresses stewardship topics.
Sermons
Year-round, consider the stewardship implications of scriptural texts that ordinarily are not interpreted as having a theme of stewardship. The entire Bible is a stewardship story, beginning with God’s creation of the world, and every sermon can be an opportunity to talk about God’s generous action in our lives.
Based on ideas from the United Methodist Foundation and The Episcopal Network for Stewardship
Written by: Jane Scanlon, Stewardship Development Officer for the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa.
Originally published: Crosstalk, January 2016.
