Giving in Grace
Christian Giving
At Christ Church we encourage the following principles of Christian Giving:
- Regularity: is my financial giving a structured, regular discipline? Practically speaking, for those of us who can, that means giving through a direct debit or similar scheme.
- Reviewed: the danger of regularity is we stop thinking about our giving therefore we also need to be regular about reviewing our giving.
- Proportional: what matters is not the absolute sum that we give. The widow in the Temple gave a lot less than her rich neighbours. What matters is what that sum means to us, is it enough to help us confront greed and acquisitiveness in our lives. One signpost towards this is to say we should give, at minimum, a certain proportion of our income.
- Excess: Christian Giving should be regular, structured, disciplined. As we grow in grace, we can hope from time to time it can also become wild, free, excessive. Spontaneous, excessive generosity – that is the mark of the image of God, of the people we are becoming.