Stewardship
All Saints’ Vestry Stewardship
Covenant
June 2005
We, the members of the Vestry of
All Saints’ Church, in thanksgiving for God’s provisions for both our
individual and our corporate lives, pledge our time, talent, and
treasure to God’s work at All Saints’.
With God’s help we commit to:
Participate in our communal life;
Engage in ministry in accordance with our spiritual gifts;
Financially support the parish through pledges, gifts and
offerings.
We understand the tithe to be God’s standard for giving and
thus
the minimum goal for our pledged gifts.
We invite all members of All Saints’ Church to join in this covenant and
to celebrate with us God’s gifts to us and our giving of His own back to
Him.
The purpose of the All Saints'
Stewardship Committee
is to guide and encourage this faith community
of All Saints' on its stewardship journey.
All
Saints' vision statement talks about about calling people to God through Jesus Christ
and trying to help them follow Him. "Evangelism" and "discipleship" are two
words for the calling and the helping. And we mean to call and help each
other, those within the congregation, as well as those in the community
around us.
Stewardship follows from this. It is integral to our
relationship with God, and part of the process of drawing close to him, of
being His disciples. We don't look at stewardship as raising funds to meet
a budget or provide for capital development. It isn't recruiting people to
volunteer in the Sunday school or set up for coffee hour. It is not a
matter of convening a committee every fall to send out pledge
solicitations. We do all these things, yes, and more, but we try to do
them as responses, not to the needs of the parish, but to the love of God.
The question is not, where is your pocket-book, and what are your
talents, but where is your heart? As Jesus valued the poor widow, who gave
out of her poverty, rather than the rich, who gave out of their abundance,
we value giving out of our spiritual emptiness, our need for the Lord.
Stewardship is the act of turning our hearts toward God, and recognizing
our utter dependence on His overflowing treasure. At All Saints we believe
that when we do so turn to Him, approaching in spirit and in truth, He
will make clear to us how to see, and be stewards of, what he is
providing.
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