You will not often find me quoting
Southern Baptist sermons; they are not to my taste at all. The following little section, however, I
love..... "Before this church can do great things for God,” shouts the
preacher, "It's gotta learn to crawl!" "Let it crawl
Reverend! Let it crawl!" shouts
back the congregation. "And when it's learned to crawl,” the preacher
continues, "It's gotta learn to walk!" "Let it walk Reverend!" responds
the congregation, "Let it walk!"
Then fixing them with his eye, the preacher shouts: "And when it's
learned to walk, it's gotta run,
and we all knows a church can't run without MONEY!" There is a momentary silence, and then the
congregation shouts back as one man: "Let it crawl
Reverend! Let it crawl."
When an assistant priest at
A friend of mine became a mission
priest in dangerous times and places during the Zimbabwean civil war. His African worshippers, if they had nothing
for the collection, simply gave a little curtsy and passed the plate on. He found himself blessing more curtsies than
cash each Sunday, and so, although sympathetic to the poverty of his
congregation, he devised a more satisfactory way of taking the collection. He stood at the front of the church as row by
row the congregation came forward to put their offering on the plate under his
interested eye. The giving trebled
immediately.
I have identified four types of
giver in the Anglicanism that I know and love.
The first is very rare. He is the
enthusiast. He is often, but not always,
a Glory‑Alleluia type, a bible bashing, God‑besotted, fanatic and
bore. He is the stuff that martyrs are
made of. He's drunk on God, not
Mammon. In today's world he is a freak
then. So thoroughly converted is he,
that he tends to get bored with Anglicanism and disappear into the excitement
and madness of Pentecostalism. He
tithes, that is, he gives a tenth of his gross salary to the Church, because
he's been convinced that the Bible tells him to, and he does it with a whole‑heartedness
and joy that brings him many blessings, he says. Half a dozen folk like him and a church's
financial troubles are over. My parish
doesn't have a single one such.
The second type of giver is not
quite so easy to define, for he is indeed a genuine Anglican type, and the very
best. He too tithes, though normally and
more sensibly his net income, not his gross.
He recognises that what he pays in tax to the Government is, in an
authentic sense, a part of the biblical tithe.
Like the previous type he loves God, has been thoroughly converted, has
shaken off Mammon, but he's no fanatic.
Far, far better, he is the genuine article, the salt of the earth;
loving, tolerant, reliable, always there.
His lovely generosity is an expression of gratitude to, and regard for a
God he knows, and loves, and tries to pray to regularly. To convert people into this sort of person,
is our task and delight, the true evangelical endeavour, but like all
conversions it is difficult. There are half a dozen such in Ararat. Not all of
them tithe exactly, but all, by usual Anglican standards, are very, very generous. Without them we would collapse financially,
and worse, we would lose our authenticity as a Christian community.
The third type of giver is the usual
church‑going Anglican. He loves
his parish church, but is rather more doubtful about God, and so is far more
concerned to subsidise his material future than a more dubious spiritual
one. He hates being urged to give money
to the Church. It makes him cringe. He
can usually be persuaded, though with great difficulty, to increase what he gives
by a dollar or two, if he thinks the Rector a nice fellow, if the pressure is
relentless, if his rector is in despair, if the parish church is in danger of
closing, and if he's just had a salary increase or a good year's crop. Every time he hears the word
"tithe" he starts retching and vomiting. He is far more ready to give his time and
labour to the Church than money. On impulse he can be very generous, but
rarely. He considers himself to be more
than generous. There are lots of such folk in Ararat, I love them because they
are a parson's staple pew‑fodder, the folk I have grown up with, and been
formed by. My task as a parson is to
turn them into the carefully tithing, loving, wholeheartedly believing sort of
giver that I identified previously as category two. A task I am singularly unsuccessful at.
The fourth type of giver is made up
of the hopeless cases. Those who, like the vast majority of western mankind, have sold out
to the miserable god Mammon.
Their Christianity is vestigial, their house, their garden, their
retirement, their children's education, their overseas holiday, their golf,
bowling, leisure are their great concerns, their obsessions, what they live
for. The Church exists for baptisms, weddings and funerals, and for a bit of pie‑in‑the‑sky
and cheap comfort in times of distress.
Their support of the Church is negligible. I visited one such
recently. We had a cup of coffee and an
affable chat in his comfortable home. So great was his pharisaic self‑satisfaction
and self‑righteousness, so complete his meanness, so ingenious and well‑worked
out his arguments in support of his meanness and perceived generosity, that I
left feeling almost ill. I had visited
someone who had sold his soul to the devil, to the no‑good, no‑God,
Mammon. Money and self were his raison d'etre. He was vile.
So there you have four broad
categories of givers in the Church. Although harsh on the last I can abide any
category of giver so long as one criterion is present:
dissatisfaction with what is given. If
we are dissatisfied with what we give we are not quite lost to the god Mammon,
there is hope of improvement and of therefore a chance to squeeze through the
needle's eye into the
All things (e.g. a camel's journey
through
A needle's eye) are possible, it's
true.
But picture how the camel feels,
squeezed out
In one long bloody thread from tail
to snout.