Cultivating Generosity: Giving What’S Right, Not What’S Left

Copyright © 2013 Rem Stokes.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-0042-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-0043-8 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 10/15/2013

Contents

Forward

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Increasing Financial Relevancy

Chapter 2 Getting Started, Gently

Chapter 3 Increasing Financial Involvement

Chapter 4 Gaining Control

Chapter 5 Confronting Money Discomfort

Chapter 6 Influences on Money Behavior

Chapter 7 Being on the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk

Chapter 8 Tell Me the Story of the Rest of Your Life

Chapter 9 Giving Voice to Values

Chapter 10 The Role of the Church

Bio of Rembert Rem Stokes

To my wife and soul-mate

LEE

Whose life is a model of generosity.

Forward

Matters of money haunt many congregations! Even more. they haunt the members of our congregations. Too often members are intimidated by conversations about money—much to our detriment. Beyond the annual pledge drive, all people carry their own stories, myths, histories, immediate concerns, resources, wrestling, advantage, disadvantage, wealth, or daily struggle to make ends meet. Then, we come together, strive to be in covenant with one another, and endeavor to support the work of congregational life.

We need tools to explore and understand our individual attitudes about money, to equip ourselves to handle money better in our own lives, so that money serves our values and lives rather than trapping us to serve money. We need tools to bring our deepest values and shared religious conviction into congregational life.

Rem Stokes’ book offers an antidote to that—heart, soul, and mind—personal and social. He has written a book that can begin to help us to uncover ways of better supporting ourselves, one another, and making real the congregational life to which we aspire. It provides needed encouragement for some real dialogue on money in our congregations.

Rem’s writing is stimulating, accessible, humorous, and direct. He has drawn on great resources for this work and provides excellent resources for others. Particularly the opportunity for people to talk frankly about the ghosts that haunt us, all about money in our personal histories as well as our larger culture is deeply needed. The book offers a framework for healing and growth. In addition, it provides a strong outline for a concrete curriculum that could work wonders on a yearly basis for stewardship teams and parish ministers struggling with challenging fiscal times.

This is no quick fix—but rather a thoughtful and spiritually grounded approach to raising much more than funds. It’s about raising awareness about money—that powerful medium through which we express—intentionally or unintentionally—our values and hopes. The book helps to create a strategy for better aligning our use of money with those values and hopes.

Not only does Stokes’ book encourage individual learning and congregational dialogue, but it also encourages the kind of year round, shared learning about money and fiscal matters that we need to begin in order to have faith communities that are fiscally competent. Faith communities still have a long way to go to address issues of class in our faith communities—we can begin, at least, gently talking about money and its impact on our lives.

Rem intends the material to be adapted and adjusted according to congregational size, staffing, and governance structure—but the material here offers rich considerations as you engage in a spiritually grounded exploration of deeper stewardship. This book can provide a powerful springboard for some meaningful and transformational conversation.

Rev. Hilary Krivchenia, Senior Minister, Countryside UU Church

Preface

I started preparing this material in 1953 although I didn’t know it at the time. I was all of twenty-three years old and was somewhere between being financially sheltered, innocent and naïve. I had just joined my first Unitarian Universalist church. It was in Summit, New Jersey.

The church was launching a capital drive to build a religious education building and the minister, Rev. Jacob Trapp, asked me to canvass. Having never canvassed before and wanting to be helpful, I accepted. I accepted, in part, because I thought the parishioners would be eager and happy to contribute to a new Sunday school for their own children. I was wrong. Dead wrong.

What I encountered was enormous ambivalence. On the one hand, pledging to a worthy cause should be an opportunity to promote the values we hold dearly. As mature and responsible adults, it should be an opportunity to repay those unknown people who built the Sunday schools we freely attended and to pass on the generous spirit to another generation.

On the other hand, there was the sacrifice of giving up money they could spend on themselves. Always I see the same emotions, the tug-of-war in achieving that delicate balance between serving our secular and spiritual selves. I learned in the anguished faces of hundreds of parishioners that it is a very unnatural thing to give up one’s hard-earned money.

And it has continued to be so. Over the intervening 60-plus years, I have belonged to seven different churches in almost as many states. (This happens when you’re a corporate gypsy and get transferred often.) And I have served as a District Financial Advisor and consulted 77 times on money issues with almost as many churches. Almost everywhere, I found the same thing: people are generally reluctant to discuss or give money. And they are especially reluctant to canvass and ask for money.

For many, money is a delicate subject. When I was a kid, it was considered to be in bad taste to discuss sex, politics, religion or money. Well, times have changed. One taboo after another has fallen. Sex is now about as explicit as it can get in the movies, magazines and music. Politics are on the front page of every newspaper. And political campaigns are hardly over before the next election cycle starts. Religion has bolted out of the closet and extremist words like fundamentalism, right-wing and terrorism have become part of everyday language. Indeed, all of the whispered subjects of my childhood are now the subjects of TV talk shows: venereal diseases, AIDS, child molesting, sex trafficking, drugs, addiction, tax evasion, cheating and government welfare and Medicare fraud. People talk openly about yesteryear’s most personal problems: mental illness, personal diseases, and every form of cancer. And the walls come tumbling down.

But not money! Money may be the last great taboo. Money may be the toughest of all walls we build with doors that are locked and dead-bolted from the inside. Somehow our psychological worth and self-image are bound up in money.

In this day and age, money has become the polar axis of our lives. The commercial world uses money to judge our highest skills, talents and experiences by what they will pay as salaries. Our accumulated money tells how provident we have been with our savings; how successful we have been with our investments; how smart we have been with our management. The money we owe shows how far our wants and needs for gratification exceed our assets and our judgment. Our distribution of money shows how generous we have been to ourselves and to others. Add this all up, and the wealth-measure becomes the great distillation of our whole lives: the visible summation of our skills, behaviors, decisions, successes, failures and indiscretions, all reduced conveniently to a visible symbol: the dollar.

I believe this to be a cruel, awkward, and grossly unfair gage of our self-worth. We should laugh it off like the great hoax it is. But we don’t. The inner child won’t let us. Instead, our society has tacitly allowed it to become the dominant gage of success. And so the allusion of wealth is a real factor in the money sensitivity issue. It tunnels to the core of our weaknesses and failures. It poses the question: If you are really good, why aren’t you rich? So there is an element in us that lives by an external standard of appearance instead of an internal ethic of character. Wealth—or the appearance of wealth—is a major determinant of our acceptance and self-worth.

It is said that Charles the Fifth spoke to his court in English; to his mistress in French; to his God in Spanish and to his horse in German. I have often wondered how Charles would address the issue of money. Well, he didn’t have to. But we do! No fund drive will be successful if we feel awkward talking about money. No organization can grow in size or quality if it keeps tap-dancing around the issue of money because it is bound up in some unknown or unmentionable fears in our lives.

I have come to the conclusion that the success of a canvass depends very little on the mechanics of the canvass and almost entirely on the attitudes of the members. This does not mean that I do not appreciate a well-planned and efficiently run canvass. I certainly do. But after many years of fund-raising, I believe that probably 90% of the success of a canvass depends on the attitudes of the parishioners. Specifically, it depends on how people think about their ability and willingness to give.

I think that the primary task of any fund-raising event, should be to help members rethink their attitudes, assumptions and behaviors towards money. Since most people are not receptive to talking about money, this great need has been delicately avoided.

Therefore, I see no need for another book to address the easy 10% front-end of canvassing and neglecting the all-important and difficult 90%. There are many good books on the subject of how to plan and run a canvass. These are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the goal of a canvass.

So I have carved out a small niche to pursue what others avoid, namely, cultivating a culture of generosity. I became challenged to understand money attitudes and behaviors and what we can do to ease the tension and produce positive results. I want to understand why giving is such a joy for some people and so difficult for others. It has become a Ministry of Money.

You may justifiably wonder why anyone in his right mind would spend time writing about cultivating generosity in churches. It is certainly not because I am insensitive to the delicacy of this issue. Neither is it the fault of my wife, who is more finely tuned socially than I am, and who suggests that maybe Robert Frost was wrong and I should have taken the road more traveled by. But it is not in the natural order for husbands to benefit from the wise counsel of wives.

The primary goal is to help members understand and deal constructively with the money demons that unwittingly sabotage their lives. This book tries to cultivate generosity by exploring the origins of our money attitudes and encouraging self-introspection to change them to be more consistent with one’s values and visions. It is primarily to help individuals come to grips with the psychological issues behind money behaviors and only secondarily to help churches meet their financial goals. If the former is successful, the latter is almost assured.

Over the years, I have gained invaluable insights running many canvasses and capital drives. Along the way, I have borrowed, used, and kept ideas that work and abandoned those that didn’t. As a District Financial Consultant, I have tried these approaches with many other churches with relative success. I have also shared these ideas in talks to the District Board, the UUA President’s Council and to theological students at the Meadville Lombard Theological School.

The goal of this book is to present the most effective techniques I have learned, created or used over the past 60-plus years in over 70 churches. My hope is that someone will use this material, build on these ideas and find ways to make us more comfortable in cultivating generosity and that our churches and its members will prosper and grow so we can proudly leave a better world than we inherited.

Rembert Rem Stokes

Introduction

This ubiquitous thing called money is woven into almost every aspect of our lives. Most people feel that their money attitudes are natural and universal. Yes, they may be natural, but they are anything but universal. There are more money personality types than you might guess. The seeds of these differences lie deep in the emotional soil of our upbringing. We are so willing to show off the trappings of money, but so reluctant to discuss it.

I am convinced that the reluctance to discuss money openly results from deep emotional issues. These issues, left unchecked, are not benefiting the individual or the churches seeking support.

I am further convinced that there are approaches that a church can do to provoke self-introspection of members by financial involvement, humor, fun, mild tweaking and education to expose and address these money demons.

This book is my attempt to present a series of activities that will mellow the reluctance to discuss money, to help members feel better about themselves and, ultimately, to cultivate generosity by indirection. It consists of three parts.

The first part is called Program Planning. It is a way to help members become more comfortable discussing money openly. This is done by involving all of the members and friends in the financial issues of the church. And to do it in a way that they feel welcomed. Adopting a different way to prepare the annual church budget does this. I call this alternative approach Program Planning because it is bigger than just budget planning. Here the entire congregation is invited to a congregational meeting at which they are asked to make suggestions for ways to enhance the church and its programs. It is a complement for members to be asked for their opinions. At a second meeting, the congregation actually decides on the dollar allocation for each line item. Now the congregation owns the budget and tends to support it more generously. At a third meeting, the entire congregation approves the budget, makes changes or corrects any shortfalls. Here, the congregation is talking about the church’s money—that is, other people’s money—which is comfortable. This is a non-threatening way to get members closer to the financial operations of the church. And it is not threatening for the leaders as well. It is a win-win first step.

The second part is called Gaining Control. There are members who are willing to support the church, but feel that they do not have sufficient funds. It could be that these members may simply be suffering from poor management. Personal finance is absolutely essential in our daily lives. But no place in grade school, high school, or advanced schooling do I remember being taught about street smart finances. Some people seem to pick this up by osmosis and do very well; others do not and have repeated problems with money issues. Gaining Control consists of holding small group sessions to cover a major omission in our schooling. The approach is to offer help in the form of non-invasive techniques like keeping an Expense Journal, doing a Needs-and-Wants Analysis, having a Goal-Directed Budget etc. Here, the emphasis shifts to a discussion of the individual in a helpful, non-threatening way. Only the mechanics are discussed with examples. One’s private personal finances are never discussed. This step moves from the impersonal public to the personal private thoughts about money. It gently raises the consciousness level and helps gain financial control.

The third part is called Overcoming Reluctance. There are members who have adequate wealth but are reluctant to support institutions for a great variety of reasons. This moves from the mechanics of money to the attitudes about money. It consists of holding a