I prayed for weeks about this talk, and it occurred to me that in all these years, after inviting many people to share their stories, I’d never shared about OUR Stewardship journey.

I grew up in a family very involved in church. Service was just a way of life. My parents believed in sharing our SPIRITUAL GIFTS in service to God, country and community.

My parents pledged every year but they never told us the dollar or percentage amount. We got to put the little numbered envelope in the plate every week. But we never saw the actual check because Mom always said, “That’s between us and God.”

Bret’s family attended church sporadically, but they also instilled in him the philosophy and habit of service to one’s community.

When we were first married, we worked in hospitality, and we rarely had Sundays or even holidays off. So our church attendance was irregular at best. We did join a church in Miami while he was in engineering school, and while we never let the plate pass us by, we didn’t pledge since we viewed it as a temporary church home.

We joined Christ Church in Norcross while pregnant with Josh. When he was born, we went to one income, and a pretty tight budget. We joined Foyers and ended up in a group with an older man, Karl, who was on vestry, or chaired Stewardship – I don’t recall which. One evening he called us, opening with “We haven’t received your pledge card yet, and I’m wondering if there’s something holding you back.”

Talk about feeling called out — no pun intended. I told him that we just felt that we weren’t in “that stage of life” yet. That with a new baby and Bret’s travel schedule, our time and treasure were very limited. And to be honest, the idea of giving 10% was just impossible.

But he explained that PLEDGING was not the same thing as TITHING. That we could pledge $1 if that’s all we had – the amount wasn’t important. By pledging, we were just saying that we were going to be around for that next year. It wasn’t a contract, it was just a way to demonstrate that we believed in the mission of that church and that we’d engage.

And so at Ingathering, we placed our pledge card into the basket on the altar. It was scary because the  amount we’d written on that card was embarrassingly small. But it was also exciting because it was the next step in our “adult” Christian journey. And it was hopeful because we were trusting that God would provide enough for us to be able to fulfil that pledge.

So. Here we were, this young family, doing our best to make it to church twice a month. At 31 and 32, we were babies. We’d scrape together a little bit of treasure for the plate but we hadn’t yet figured out how to give our time or talent.

But God is infinitely better than we are at determining how and where we can use our gifts. We got to know our deacon, Nancy Yancey, who had founded Rainbow Village, a program for mothers facing homelessness. Back then, the families lived in some old houses owned by Georgia Power. After sitting vacant for years, they leased them to Rainbow Village for $1 a year. What a huge gift for those families and the fledgling ministry.

One day Nancy mentioned that the houses constantly had issues. Little things that could be repaired by anyone handy, but also bigger things like lights not working. If only she could find an electrician who would work for free.

Well. As it happened, Bret was a licensed electrician. So he became their go-to fix-it man. Any time they needed a repair, he’d go take care of it.

That was probably when we began to trust in God’s perfect provision. Because every time he had to buy something for a repair, that money would just appear. Or he’d find exactly what he needed in his workshop which he inherited from his Granddaddy –  who was a master electrician.

God is in ALL the details.

This was an answer to our prayer for a way to supplement our meager financial offering so we could feel like we were contributing in a meaningful way.

But it was also the answer to so many prayers of so many people. God wants us to share our time, talent and treasure, and Bret’s talent — and electrician’s license — were much more valuable than our treasure, because the money he saved Rainbow Village was exponentially more than any amount we could offer.

Over time, we got more involved. We found plenty of ways to give our Time and use our Talents, and as our Treasure increased, so did our pledges. We moved over here to St. Matt’s in 2006 and the rest is history.

That phone call made me uncomfortable and I would have been perfectly happy if Josh had chosen that moment to start crying and give me an excuse to hang up. But God grows us through uncomfortable moments. And that conversation changed the way we viewed the act of pledging.

I think back to when I thought “We’re just not in that stage of life yet” and I have to laugh at young me. Because we’re always in “that stage of life,” no matter where, or how old, we are. God doesn’t give us our gifts once we hit a certain age, or income bracket. We receive our gifts when we’re born. That day when Jesus fed the 5,000 – it was a CHILD whose offering was multiplied, not the comfortable empty nester.

It’s harvest time – and as far as Jesus is concerned, it’s always harvest time. In John 4, verses 35-38, Jesus told his disciples,

“Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps … harvests a crop for eternal life …One sows and another reaps. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

We all play a part in the harvest. It’s an ongoing cycle that involves the entire Body of Christ, starting way back even before those first disciples.

Today, as we celebrate All Saints, I give thanks for my parents, who prepared my soil and planted seeds, then nurtured and watered my servant’s heart. They were able to reap what they sowed with me and my brother, but weren’t able to reap the next season’s crop: my children, who are so much further along than I was at their ages.

And while that makes me a bit sad, I know that it’s as it should be, because that means they did their part in the never-ending cycle.

God meets us where we are, no matter where that is. And he loves us too much to leave us there. I wonder if Karl knew the seeds he was planting when he made that phone call over 20 years ago.

I never make phone calls like that. Fortunately for us all, God has many different ways of planting seeds.

Over the past six weeks we’ve encouraged you to think and pray about how you can use the gifts God has given you to do the work to which God has called you. I invite you to continue to talk to God about how He might want you to use your gifts to His glory. How might Jesus want YOU to participate in His Harvest?

May God continue to bless us all!

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Good morning, everyone. I want to talk about stewardship. A lot of people know who I am. My name is Jay Jones, and my family and I have been members of St. Matthew’s for ten years. When we started coming here, we sought a church home, a place to belong and contribute. You probably know my wife, Amy. She contributes her talents to the choir. She’s a musician, and she does very well.
I could’ve joined the choir, but I cannot sing. I can’t carry a tune. And this fact has been put upon me by my family many times. Like I could say that, you know, my singing is so bad. How bad is it? Okay, my singing is so bad. Autotune gave up on me.
I wanted to talk to you about how we approached stewardship. In 2015, Lynn Kiker approached me about taking over the acolyte ministry. She had been doing it for 20 years and had that ministry running like a machine. It was well run, but it was becoming physically challenging for her to keep doing it, so she was looking for someone to take it over. I was reluctant to do this because I’d never done anything like that. I also wondered if I could do it. I had reservations about sticking with one thing for 20 years. But I prayed, talked with Amy about it, and agreed.
It wasn’t easy at first. I was flailing around trying to learn what to do, but I had a lot of support. I had the families, the parents there who helped, and those acolytes who knew what to do. So, what I came out of that experience was that I learned a lot about acting, but I also learned a lot about myself.
We can all agree that personal growth is good, but to make that happen, you must be willing participants. You have got to make that leap of faith.
It was a scary time, but I eventually got used to it. And after three years, I said, okay, that’s enough. I’ve learned that I have other skills and talents to give. Today, I’m on the vestry board. I’m the youth liaison for the vestry. I’m also on the audio-visual team that’s live streams, worship, and other events. With this spirit, we also encourage our children, Katie and Ellie, to contribute. Katie is in college now, but when she was here, she was an acolyte, and she was with the youth group ministry. Ellie was also an acolyte, and she’s now in the youth ministry, too.
And I’m very proud of my girls. We watch them grow up here and come into their own, and they value friendship and always want to help. Amy and I worked to teach them these values, but being here at St. Matthew’s played a significant role. I’ve seen other children come through the doors here and watched them grow up. It’s been a gift to me to watch kids come in here crawling around, making noise and growing up and graduating high school and going to college, and some of them getting married and starting a family on their own.
As I said, it is a gift and a blessing, but like all good things, it takes work. We have created a community here at St. Matthew’s not just for the single purpose of worship, and worship is essential, but we also are here to fellowship with one another. As I was preparing for this talk, I searched the Bible to find a verse. One that stood out to me was I John 1: 6-7. It says, “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin.
That means that as a community, we have to work to make our community represent the teachings of Jesus. We can’t stand on the sidelines to watch. Thankfully, there are many roles here at St. Matthew’s for contributing time, treasure, and talent. The first is treasure, to pledge financial support to the church. The second is to give your time, and the third is to give your talent. To volunteer, to help out, to be there.
The return on stewardship is not a very finite thing. But I have come to think of it as making a positive impression, especially for our young people, that helps them navigate life as they grow up. You can’t quantify it. But you can see it when you talk to someone who grew up here at St. Matthew’s, and you pick up that spark. You can see it.
That is because of who we are. In stewardship, we support the community, which means we support each other. I recall an old newspaper saying that I think applies to what I’m talking about stewardship, especially with young people: “It’s not the splash that you make but the ripples that count.” Being here at St. Matthew’s and bringing up our children has benefited us. But you have to get involved, and you have to make it happen. Through your gifts of time, treasure, and talent, we are living Jesus’s teachings and making a difference. Thank you.

Jay Jones

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