Let Go and Let God with Money

It’s pledge drive time, and that’s got me thinking about the theology of giving. Pledge drives by their nature are detail-oriented, focused on nuts and bolts — budgets, needs, targets, goals. I find sometimes I need to come up for air, look around the larger landscape a bit, and remind myself of the spiritual reasons for doing what we do. How do we think of church giving as a matter of the spirit?

One thought I’ve been working on is that giving is a way to “let go and let God” with money. The phrase comes from AA; but the idea of letting go as a spiritual imperative has deep, deep roots in Christian spirituality. Many prayer practices, many spiritual disciplines, include some form of giving up conscious control — or, more accurately, the illusion of control — in order to be more open to the experience of God. We believe that God is always everywhere already at work in the world around us; if we often fail to recognize that divine prevenience, it is largely because we are so full of ourselves, so intent on our own plans and projects and being-in-charge, that we have no room in our consciousness to take in the larger-scale action of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Sometimes we just need to let go of our intentions, we need to “intend not to intend” as one spiritual writer puts it, we need to give up some control, in order to let ourselves become aware of what God is doing that’s bigger and better than we ourselves.

For instance, in the practice of meditative prayer, it is important to give up the illusion of control over our own rational, discursive thought-processes in order to open up to a deeper awareness of God. By repeating a simple prayer-phrase, or by attending to our breathing, or by inhabiting a scripture story in our imagination, we still the constant background chatter of our internal monologue to the point where we become attentive to the love and grace and presence of God — and our own prayerful response to God — that run too deep for words. The letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

The same is true in the practice of pastoral care. In having a pastoral conversation with someone, for instance, one technique I was taught and now try to teach others is “active listening.” In active listening, it is important to give up our own desire to control the conversation, it is important to let go of our own agenda and allow the other person to speak what is truly in their mind and heart. So often care-givers want to “make everything better” or cure the situation or bring comfort; but sometimes the other person is not ready to be comforted; sometimes there is pain and grief and anger to be acknowledged and borne and worked through; and a true care-giver must give up the desire to control and instead provide the safe place where such pain can be laid before God, from whom alone real healing can come. The letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

What if the same thing is true in the spirituality of giving? What if a central part of giving as a spiritual discipline is letting go of the illusion of control over our material well-being? In our culture money is a powerful symbol — perhaps the powerful symbol — of our ability to control life; money is the measure of the capacity we have to secure our food, our shelter, our clothing, our basic needs and our greatest luxuries; spending power is the effective form of the power we have to shape the world around us the way we want it. But, as Jesus’ parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16-21) tells us, as our own experience time and again tells us, such control is an illusion. Part of the spiritual practice of giving is to give up that illusion, to give up control over some of our money as a reminder of the fleetingness of all of our money. Part of the reason the biblical standard of giving emphasizes giving a proportion of the first-fruits — rather than, say, a carefully calculated amount based on a rational analysis of needs after all our important personal expenses have been paid — is the very fact that a tithe-off-the-top symbolizes that over which we have no control, it is the sign of our willingness to let go of something that matters to us, so that we can be more open to see what God will do in that space.

That’s not easy for us to hear. Our American culture is very conscious of the responsibility of money. When we give philanthropically — say to charitable organizations or schools or foundations or symphonies — we want to know that the money we give is being used wisely and well and for the purpose for which we gave it. When we give, we want to exercise due diligence about the recipient of the gift, and we want the recipient to exercise due diligence with our gift. When we give philanthropically, we give with strings of expectation and oversight and control attached. That is only prudent.

But in church giving, there is that extra added component of the spiritual practice of letting go. We give partly to remind ourselves that the flow of energy and activity and resource in God’s world is bigger than we are, that it is ultimately beyond our control. Part of church giving is to give with no strings attached, not even the strings of making sure the money goes where we want it to go. That’s a bitter pill for our contemporary consumer culture to swallow. But the letting-go is essential to the experience of God.

And if stewardship is about letting go of (some of) our money, then it is also about “letting God” with money. We are called to give to the church free and clear, off the top, no strings attached. But we are equally called to participate in the life of the church, to take our places in the councils of the church (as the Prayer Book puts it), and part of that calling is to use the monies committed to the church in the active work of ministry. Vestries and Finance Committees are charged with the specific duty of administering monies committed the church through budgets; but every member of the church has some share in the ministry that is funded through monies received. The practice of stewardship is about good administration as much as it is about generous giving. Sharing in the work of the church is the space in which we discern together what God is doing in our midst and how we can join in that doing — and that space is opened up by the letting-go of our first-fruits as free-and-clear gifts.

So that’s the thought I’m working on. What if the spiritual side of the practice of stewardship is letting go and letting God with our money? How might we approach church pledging if we had this spiritual practice in mind?