Meeting the Funding Requirements of Parish Life
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Each and every one of us should be seeking to educate ourselves (and our families) about appropriate Christian stewardship of our resources, especially our material resources. Part of this process is to learn more about and to take greater responsibility for the important issue of funding the work of our local parish.
Every year our parish — Sts. Peter & Paul Orthodox Church, Springfield, MA — passes what is essentially a maintenance budget and, frankly, we struggle to make that budget balance. Despite having been talking about a pledge system for many years, we still have a dues or membership system. We need to repent, that is, to turn away from this mentality, which implies that there is an “enough” that we can return to God through His Church. Our whole life is in Christ, Who is our life. We owe God everything — every penny is His, every morsel of food, every moment of our lives. Do we have anything that has not, ultimately, been given to us by or through God? Indeed, whatever we “have” has been given to us by God to steward, that is, to care for on His behalf. God has given us life itself. His Church deserves a central place in our lives.
How then should we each determine our personal financial support of the Church? This is the simple, two-step approach we should take: 1) We should make a personal/family budget based on our income and make support of the Church the very first category in that budget. 2) We should prayerfully decide what percentage of our total income (before taxes and other deductions) we will give to the Church, remembering that everything we have is a gift from God. This approach is called “first portion, percentage giving” or “proportionate giving” and is widely considered the most appropriate method of supporting the Church financially. Instead of giving what is left over, we make Christ and His Church the first priority.
When I say “we” in the first line of the previous paragraph, I have in mind every member of our parish. Young people, too, as they begin to have earnings, should be taught to support the Church properly through first portion, percentage giving. I am also thinking of retired people who may not have a salary, but who have a living drawn from the resources they have accumulated during a lifetime of work.
We all should know what our living is and, no matter how large or small it is, we should all be able to effectively and responsibly use the proportionate method of giving to support the Church. Even if we are drawing on savings and counting on pensions for our living, a percentage of those funds can and should be given to the Church.
I feel confident that if we all pledged at least five percent of our living to the support of the Church we would balance the parish budget and, beyond that, do more as a parish community in fulfillment of our Lord’s instructions to meet the needs of those less fortunate than ourselves.
We should remind ourselves that proportionate giving is an ancient, biblical custom, not a modern invention or innovation. In the Bible’s Old Testament the faithful were directed to “tithe”, that is to give fully ten percent of their income in support of the work of God’s people. Some Christians do that now. If some day in the future we all tithed (or even struggled toward tithing), then our parish could pass a “tithing budget”, as some other parishes already have. A tithing budget is a budget where every year, as a parish community, we give away ten percent of the parish budget in support of worthy causes. What a wonderful and potentially powerful witness to our faith in Jesus Christ that would be!
I know people who actually tithe. While they may suffer in some respects in the ways that the world and culture around us measure suffering, they lack nothing they truly need. Rather, they and their families have seen their faith rewarded.
We should all prayerfully decide to use the method of proportionate giving to establish our pledge of financial support for the Church. We could determine what percentage of our income we gave last year and round that figure up to the nearest full percentage point to settle on this year’s level of giving. (NOTE: There is a practical example of how to do this accompanying this sheet.) Then each year we could continue to grow that percentage figure until we had fulfilled the tithe. Such an effort would be a truly praiseworthy act of faith. If we are unable to make this kind of commitment now, then we should at least pray that God will forgive our weakness and help us to do better in the future.
With love in Christ,
Fr. Michael Korolev, Rector
Parish Council
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