FUNDING OUR FUTURE - Sermon 1 - Sunday 10th October 2010 - All Saints

Readings:   2 Corinthians 8:1-15     Mark 12:41-44

Sermon By Rev. Roy Woodhams, Vicar of Fleet 

I know I’ve told this story before, and I’ll probably tell it again - but here goes:A small girl in Church one Sunday spotted her mother putting a 50 pence piece into the collection plate.  On the way home she listened for some time while her mother ranted about the poor quality of the sermon that they had been forced to listen to.  After a while, the girl could stand it no longer.  ’But Mummy’, she interrupted, ‘what do you expect for 50p?’

‘What do you expect for 50p?’ is a pretty reasonable question to ask, isn’t it?  But I’m going to allow for inflation for a moment and bring the question up to date and ask, ‘What do we expect for £5?’

What do we expect for £5?

A Gallon of petrol - a mediocre bottle of wine - a packet of cigarettes - a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal - 700g of mince or a pack of chicken breasts (unless we shop in Waitrose where they seem to have lost the plot on meat pricing!)

What do we expect for £5?

For the next four weeks, leading up to our Patronal Festival, and as part of our ‘Funding the Future’ programme, we are going to concentrate our sermon teaching on various aspects of Christian giving.

An important element of Christian service is that of “giving” and by our giving we are following the New Testament pattern of taking up a collection in order to “provide for needy saints, and support the work of the church”.  And here, we find the answer to one of the most often asked questions about Christian giving - “If I give my money to the local Church, what is it used for?”  And the answer is pretty much the same as it was in the early Church at the time of the writing of the Acts of the Apostles - the money we give is primarily to support and resource the ministry of the local Church.

As I have said before, this Parish is in a very privileged position - being able to pay for all the new facilities that we needed in order for us to function effectively and reach out into the community!  We’re able to do that because of the generosity of people in the past who have bequeathed money to support these projects that are now happening all around us, here at All Saints right now and at P&J soon.  But having done all this work, the ‘stored up’ money runs out.

It costs over £200,000 a year (That’s pretty much £20,000 a month, £5,000 a week and £700 a day) - a frightening amount of money - to cover ministry and utility costs and to pay the staff which this Parish needs in order to be able to do all the things that God is calling it to do!

And simply, the money we give through the planned giving scheme pays for that!  Or more to the point, it doesn’t anything like pay for it at present, which is why we need to have this ‘Funding our Future’ campaign now!

In the New Testament reading this morning, and as we’re reminded in the little introduction, Paul is writing to the Church in Corinth - a large commercial centre renowned for its wealth, paganism and licentious living.

Doesn’t that sound alarmingly like the Fleet that we live in?

And Paul, seeking to inspire the Corinthians to abound in the grace of giving, used the example of the churches of Macedonia (that is the Churches in Philippi and Thessalonica) - they were not rich Churches like the Church in Corinth - rather they were poor and persecuted, and yet apparently they gave - and we hear that they gave Sacrificially, Joyfully, Voluntarily, Persistently and they gave ‘Themselves’!  Which undoubtedly adds up to the truth that they gave ‘generously’. 

And they gave to support preachers in the spread of the gospel, to help needy Christians in a foreign land, and to help an old preacher in his time of need.

And there is a modern comparison which I am able to offer you here, and which is based on statistics provided by the Diocese, and it’s not about far off Churches in foreign lands 2,000 years ago, but about 21^st century Churches right here in Fleet and Farnborough.

The Parish of Farnborough, which covers huge swathes of ‘estate housing’ and very few of the sorts of houses we see in Fleet, has a level of Giving to the local Church, per head on the electoral roll , which exceeds that in Fleet by almost 200%.  Yes, Anglican Christians in Farnborough give three times as much, per person, to resource ministry as do Anglican Christians in Fleet.

I asked the question earlier, ‘what can we expect for £5?’ 

Well, if every single person on our electoral roll did give £5 a week - the cost of a Gallon of petrol, a bottle of wine, a pack fags, a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal or a packet of mince, which, I venture to say is affordable to every single one of us, whatever our financial positions - if we did that, then we would have half of what we need to resource the ministry of the Parish in the future.

And that wouldn’t be a problem, because as we are reminded  in the Gospel reading, what is generous for some people is not at all generous for others!  £5 a week would be a bit like the Widows mite - and there will be huge numbers of us who can (and indeed many already do, surpass that figure 3, 5 or 10 times over!  Then will the ministry of this Parish be properly resourced!

In the little booklet which you have been given, there is a graph which I have found very helpful in understanding what is wrong with our parish Finances - would you like to turn to it for a moment.

You will see that each black vertical line represents a giver in the planned giving scheme, and you will see that the graph goes up to 201 - that is how many givers (accounting for husband and wife pairings) there would be if everyone on the electoral roll gave in this way.  Red lines represent those of you who have already reviewed your giving since we began this campaign earlier in the year.

I think the graph highlights 3 actual problems, and one potential problem:

The first actual problem is that there are almost 60 potential givers on the electoral roll (down in the right hand corner) who have not yet joined the planned giving scheme at all.

The second actual problem is that about 85% of those who are giving, are at a level which is below the average required to meet our costs.

And the third actual problem is that only about one in eight of us have so far reviewed our giving this year in the light of the present need.

The potential problem is that if our top ten givers were all riding together in a minibus that happened to drive off the edge of a cliff (I trust you will realise that I’m using a metaphor?) then in one fell swoop the giving would fall by about 35%!

At the top of the graph it asks where you fit in?  A good question, as we also consider that God calls us all to be generous after the example of Jesus Christ himself “ . . . . that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty, you may become rich”.

When we give generously, we are not responding to the Vicar ranting on a Sunday Morning, or to the Finance Team who sit in dark rooms plotting graphs and statistics!  No we are responding to God himself, who has given us life, and to Jesus Christ, his Son, who in his death has won for us eternal life, living in the joys of heaven!

A 50 pence piece met a £5 note at a pub and said, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen you around much lately, where have you been?’   The £5 note replied, ‘I’ve been hanging out at the Bingo, done the lottery a few times, had an Indian takeaway, been to a couple of football matches, a bit of shopping, a holiday in Greece.  How about you?’   The 50p piece sighed and said, ‘Oh, you know, same old stuff – church, church, church!’

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