Exploring attitudes to and uses for money in our series Gratitude, Hope and Opportunity
Visions, goals, strategies: they’re key to helping our churches move together into the future, to God’s glory. These words can be a distraction, but a vision is just how and where we want to be in the future, goals are just waypoints: things we want to see on our journey: they may lie ahead or we may have passed them, reassured that we are on track. Strategy is just the plan or the map we follow. We shouldn’t get bamboozled by words.
Money can also bamboozle us. Strategies provide choices about the future we want to live in: money provides opportunities to make choices. Sometimes money’s presence or absence appears to be the deciding factor, or we make it that, not God or us together with God.
When it comes to money, the anxieties are often to do with not knowing what to do with it or not knowing where to find it. There is often the sense that ‘if only’ we had more, ‘we could…’. Sometimes, an unexpected gift or legacy places the opposite problem: ‘what we could do now, so many possibilities.’ We seem often to be besieged with opportunities either those we can’t afford or those we can’t choose between.
Opportunities and choices together give us a future when yielded to God. They give us the courage to work with what we have, not what we hope for, because we recognise that it is God’s resource we are using not our own and that he has provided, is providing and will provide what we need to move forward.
So a strategy is something that uses God-given talents and God-given resources to bring new life. Money too, is a God given resource that can help create opportunities to be living bread and water to others. Money and strategy have the power to confound or to bless. The way to demystify both is to put them together, prayerfully and with eyes open.
The opportunity before us all, in Lichfield Diocese now, is to embark on a journey together: the Seeking the Kingdom journey where we have chosen to prefer growth to decline and recognised that we can grow into the future through feeding our faith, supporting our ministry and building up our parishes and communities. We can grow by being better at being church, together.
These choices are the choices before us in Seeking the Kingdom, supported in the consultations across the four episcopal areas last autumn. Our opportunity, simply put, is to express the values of God’s Kingdom in our churches, in our communities and in our lives so that we can bring the life in all its fullness that Jesus Christ came to give us and so that we can become his hands, feet and body.
As we embark on a shared path, we stop spending our resources on distractions and may find we have enough to put towards the task at hand: inhabiting the future that God calls us into: his Kingdom.
David Wright is Chair of the Diocesan Board of Finance
For more on our strategy, Seeking the Kingdom visit: www.lichfield.anglican.org/our-vision