Stewardship Reflections

This is a season in which many churches are holding their stewardship campaigns as they prepare for a new year of ministries. Here at First United Methodist Church, we will be holding our stewardship campaign on Sunday, November 8. This is my 2nd post to help us reflect on stewardship and it also gives me a reason to post a beautiful picture of the changing autumn leaves!

A couple of years ago a pastor of a church called me and in the course of our conversation he told me this story, “Something wonderful happened yesterday in church. In between services, two teenage boys in our church came up to me and gave me two one hundred dollar bills. And they said, ‘We want to donate this money to the New Orleans Christmas outreach fund that we talked about in church today, and please keep it anonymous.’"

And I said to this pastor, “Wow. That was a big amount of money for two youth to give in the church.” And he said, “Actually, they’re brothers. And instead of the parents giving them gifts for Christmas this year, they gave them each a hundred dollars just a few days ago to spend on anything they wanted and they chose to donate it all to this mission outreach. These two teenage brothers were so moved by the pictures of the devastation in New Orleans during the worship service, that they knew Jesus wanted them to do this."

This pastor went on to tell me, “I’m not going to forget what these two youth did for a long time to come.”

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This story reminds me of the time when Jesus was teaching his disciples about stewardship and pointed out to them a poor widow who gave all that she had by placing two small coins into the Temple treasury.

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We'll be focusing on the story of the poor widow in worship on November 8. Her act of generous stewardship will not be forgotten.

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Enjoy the changing leaves!