So I am going on record as saying that yesterday was the best service that we have had so far. It wasn’t our biggest crowd and included some challenges like figuring out that I need to buy a battery charger for our trailer because after just three weeks of using the electric brakes the battery is done, but still the best so far. 

I hate when Pastor’s say this every week (so I try not to) but I had a great time delivering what has commonly been considered the most challenging of messages. We closed out our Elephant in the Church Series with The Greedy Elephant – Stewardship. As you read this I am sure that you think we just talked about money. Well we did talk about possessions but we also talked about stewardship of self, time, talent and family.  

Being that we are a church plant who invested much of its outside support in some great equipment form Church on Wheels and marketing, we have been doing our best to make ends meet week to week on our own. Some (certainly not all or even enough) church plants that I have read about continue to receive outside support for a period of 2-3 years after they are launched. Even though we do continue to receive some outside support (and are continuing to try to raise more) we are fighting to survive on our own.  

So in order to raise the comfort level of people who give to our ministry or are debating about giving to our ministry (time, talent and resources) we opened up the books for the congregation to see. Instead of making it feel like a business meeting we allowed people to text message questions (ala Mark Driscoll) regarding our finances and vision.  

We went a little longer than I had anticipated and I thought our Children’s Pastor (my wife) was going to kill me for having a 2hr service when we are normally 1.25hrs. So thank you to the guy selling flowers at the corner of Flamingo & Griffin for helping me out. But we got through about 15 questions of varying difficulty and only missed a couple like, “Does InDependence have a world vision?” and “Are considering sponsoring missions trips in the future?” The answers to both of those are yes.  If you weren’t able to make it this weekend we may actually make this the first message we post online. We have the recording end down but we have a little work on the web end. So it may take us while to get the messages we are recording online but we hope to accomplish that very soon. I was impressed by the questions that came flowing in and the energy in the room was great. My intention was not to guilt anybody into giving. First of all I am not that good at it and I really don’t want to be. I don’t believe that guilt should be people’s motivations. Maybe if InDependence falls on its financial face I will think differently, but I doubt it.  I wanted people to be motivated to be Biblical stewards in all the above listed areas because they love Jesus and the word of God lays it out for them. Imagine that trying to promote people being “cheerful givers” not “guilty givers.” 

Any time you throw out the “G” word – give and the “T” word – tithe you can expect some level of discomfort, especially if you are not putting it in a “prosperity” package. (Which I didn’t) Even though we had quite a few first time guests the Holy Spirit made it easy to tell the truth about giving ourselves and the stuff God has let us borrow.