Stewardship Articles

A Building Campaign Illustration

Ruben Swint, Senior Strategist, Generis Partners, Atlanta, GA

Back in the early 80’s I went to Ireland with my then roommate and two other girlfriends.  At one of the bed and breakfasts that we stayed in we met an older woman from the United States.  She traveled to that part of Ireland, I believe it was the County of Cork, every year.  She spoke Gaelic and after spending the evening talking with her she offered to give us a chauffeured tour of the countryside the next day. 

The Irish countryside is greener than anything you can imagine.  It’s dotted with quaint cottages with thatch roofs.  The people living in these cottages speak Gaelic.  They don’t know it’s a language that’s almost extinct.  They sweep their dirt floors with homemade brooms.  The land is hilly and beautiful and it’s outlined with stone walls.  Stone walls were the way families in Ireland used to mark their property lines, crops, etc.

I was quite fascinated with these walls.  They are low enough to the ground that you could sit on them.   There is no mortar or cement holding the walls together, just the stones.  There are large stones which are pretty.  These stones helped to build the walls more quickly.  These are the stones you notice when you’re driving by.  These are the stones that you remember years later when you think about those walls.  But, there were also smaller stones, some stones were in fact quite small.  Thinking back now, I realize those smaller stones, while not as impressive, not as memorable, (as a matter of fact, if you were driving by in a car, you probably wouldn’t even notice the small stones in the walls) were probably the stones that hold these walls up.  The smaller stones are just as necessary as the larger stones, maybe even more so.

In this capital campaign some of us can‘t provide large, pretty stones.  Some of us are wondering where we’ll find even a small stone or two mites to contribute.  We have single parents, people on fixed incomes, members who have lost jobs, church members who will soon be losing jobs, and some who have been overcome with medical expenses.

We’ve all heard before ways to come up with extra money.  Give up one dinner out a month and you can give $50 a month to the Capital Campaign.  Well some of us have given up one dinner out in order to put dinner on the table each night.  Or maybe you’ve heard that if you take your lunch to work once a week instead of buying it and you can give $30 a month.  Okay what do you do when you’ve given up the power lunch in order to pay the power bill?

It’s simple actually.  You do what you can.  Sacrificial giving doesn’t mean we don’t pay our bills, it doesn’t mean we do without food.  Sacrificial giving means we pray about what we can give back out of what we‘ve been given, then commit ourselves to giving that.  If after making a commitment it gets too difficult, you might need to make a change.  On the other hand, if it gets too easy, you need to make a change also.

Some families in this church can give large stones.  We may have families who can provide an entire room with their gift.  Maybe your gift can provide the doorknob so we can open the door to that room.

Another family’s gift may provide a bathroom (a women’s bathroom) with lots of toilets and sinks.  Maybe your gift can provide the chains that go in the toilet tanks.  If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this church let it be that a church with a flushing toilet is a happy church.

It takes a village to raise a child, it takes large and small stones to create a pretty/sturdy stone wall, it takes two mites from a widow to make Jesus notice an offering being given, and it takes all of us to build this new building.