Recently, we have been talking a lot about our church finances and giving within our Kairos community, and this month at the Leadership Team meeting, we spent the majority of time praying and discerning what a faithful budget is for the next fiscal year. Around these conversations of financial needs and church budgets, we obviously want to trust our abundant God but if we are being honest, it feels almost impossible to avoid the reality of scarcity. We want to invite people away from a scarcity mindset but struggle to do so without appealing to the scarcity situation we are hoping to solve. Even when we desire to live in abundance, we just can’t seem to escape the lingering reality that somewhere there won’t be enough.
Which is why I found something I read by Stanely Hauweras recently so interesting. He said it is actually our recognition of how scarcity enslaves and our desire to live another way that causes us to fall further into scarsity’s grasp. “Our desire to live without fear cannot help but create a world of fear constituted by the assumption that there is never enough.”
We do not begin our days by saying, “Thanks be to God I live in a place of abundance!” but instead, we pray, “Lord help me to be as abundantly generous as I can knowing I live in a world of scarcity.” In short, we operate from a place where scarcity is never defeated. It is at best overcome. We desire abundance not because we believe in it but because we desperately want to avoid the alternative.
But that is not the gospel of Jesus Christ! Grace is not a new way through the same old hurdles. The gospel is freedom. It is a new life in a new kingdom. Sam Wells sums things up well when he writes “God has given his people not just enough, but too much. The problem is there is too much of God that we fearfully refuse to accept. We refuse to imagine a world of abundance.”
But friends, the good news of Jesus is the invitation to abundance is never rescinded, and our church is committed to cultivating the imagination required for us to accept it.
Therefore, as we close out the church fiscal year on June 30th, we believe, through Jesus, we are free to stop choosing scarcity as motivation. We can lean into resurrection. For the Church of Jesus Christ is grounded in eternity. It is a place of abundance from beginning to end. Which means the only thing we “need” is more people boldly willing to receive that good news, to be swept up in a tidal wave of God’s overwhelming glory.
And as the Leadership Team and staff pray and discern our budget for next year, I write all this in the hopes you know that we are not trying to make do with the scarce resources available. We are figuring what it faithfully looks like to invest in abundance. I hope and pray you feel called to do the same.
Grace and peace,
Drew
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