Preaching on money and finances: the Church's role in shaping our economy (A Guest Post)
Photo by Ethan McArthur on Unsplash
In 2008, The Rev. Canon Rosa Lee Harden and her husband, Kevin Jones, launched the global SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) conference, described as ‘the conference at the intersection of money and meaning.’ In its 11th year, SOCAP19 brought more than 3,000 people from more than 60 countries to San Francisco to talk about how to accelerate the good economy.
In the fall of 2019, Rosa Lee, along with a broad group of people who had been watching the SOCAP movement, announced a new event, Faith+Finance: Reimagining God’s Economy. It was to have been held in May, 2020. Since Covid precluded that event happening that group has been working to build an online community of people who want to deeply engage the questions of how faith should be engaged with, and morally lead, the economy. {Full bio below.]
When Lisa Cressman and I first started talking about a collaboration between Backstory Preaching and Faith+Finance, I got excited because one of the things that we at F+F are passionate about is helping the Church deeply engage people of faith with the shaping of our economy.
“The church must become a place where these necessary conversations can find a home.”
And what better way to do that than from the pulpit?
I know preaching about money is difficult.
Even at Stewardship time when people expect discussions of money, it’s tricky.
But we all dig in and do it because we know the future of our ministries and congregations depend upon it. We have to raise money to keep our ministries alive and vibrant.
But I believe we have more to do than just talking about the money that sustains our ministries and our congregations.
We have to talk about money. Period.
Why Preaching About Money is Essential
Money shapes all of life.
We have to be willing and able to foster conversations about that reality.
We—and our congregants—need to think about:
how we spend our money
how we invest our money
and how we relate to our money
Too often, money, or the stuff money buys, is how we determine our worth. And not just our net worth. Our culture wants us to believe that the accumulation of money and stuff is who and what we are.
That’s why it is vital to our spiritual lives that we not only speak about but also preach about money.
Why do we resist preaching about money?
There are a variety of reasons preachers don’t want to preach about money. Some of the reasons I hear are:
I don’t understand money – I wouldn’t know what to say.
Talking about money isn’t polite.
We never talked about this in seminary. Where are the preaching resources?
It’s hard to talk about money to the people who decide how much money I make …
I’m intimidated because it’s hard to talk about money to people who make so much more money than I do …
It’s hard to talk about money when there are people in the room who are living on public assistance. How do we talk across the gap?
I can’t talk about money because I don’t have my personal financial act together.
When I preach about money, people think I’m meddling.
I can’t preach about money because people will think I’m preaching about politics.
“We need to be willing to put our personal anxieties aside and walk into the deep waters where our parishioners live to launch some hard conversations. ”
And, of course, all of those are true.
And at this particular time in the life of the world—with Covid and the resulting fear of collapse of the economy, perhaps even globally—I believe we need to be willing to put our personal anxieties aside and walk into the deep waters where our parishioners live to launch some hard conversations about money. Where we spend it. Where we save it. How we invest it.
Our people desperately need that from us, and the Church must become a place where these necessary conversations can find a home.
Tips for preaching about money
Lisa asked if I could offer some practical tips for preaching about money, and I can.
They will seem small, but I think they are important:
We need to notice our own fears and anxieties about money in this time and use that as leverage in our preaching. We know we do that when we preach about sin, or outreach, or evangelism, or spiritual journeys, right? We know we are usually preaching to ourselves, and our own foibles. We can do that with money, too.
We need to be open and honest about our own struggles. I’m not suggesting that you open up your financial ‘dirty laundry’ for everyone to see, but I am suggesting that we not pretend we have our own finances figured out. People connect with us more genuinely when they realize we are talking about topics we deeply understand.
We need to ask every text we encounter in the lectionary: Is this a text about money and possessions? As Walter Brueggemann has pointed out in several writings on this topic, not only do we avoid preaching about money, the people who compiled the lectionary conveniently hid away many of the most compelling texts. So we need to be very attentive to ways we can connect our texts to the issues of the day.
Remember on a more global level that the economy is a human invention. The way money moves in the world is something that needs the critique of our faith story. Politicians and banks should not be telling Christians how we must interact and behave. We have moral choices to make, and the people in the pews (and pulpits) need to be conscious of that.
We must acknowledge that when we do preach about money and our society and how we use money and share it or not, we are inevitably going to start hitting upon ‘political’ topics. Money is the grease that makes our society, our government, and all of our relationships run. It is what keeps our neighbors and neighborhoods moving.
We don’t have to have the answers. We need to be asking the critical questions of ourselves, our congregations, our country and our world.
Find a ‘preaching buddy’ who is also willing to be exploring this with you. That way, you have someone you can dig in deeper with so the work doesn’t feel as isolating. It always helps to have an ally.
What do we hope for in preaching about money?
We know that one sermon isn’t going to change the world.
But it might change one attitude.
It might get one parishioner to pull an investment out of a multi-national bank into a local credit union.
It might get your finance committee to focus in on where your congregation’s money spends the night.
It might help one person remember to buy a book from your local bookseller who is struggling and employing others in your community, instead of sending that money to the richest person in the world.
It is going to take all of these small actions, and more, for significant changes to be made in the economy so that it serves all of God’s people, not just the richest few.
And I think, finally, we have to know that this can get us into trouble.
But in the words of John Lewis, I would say it’s good trouble. Worthy trouble.
Willie James Jennings, in his Theological Commentary on the Book of Acts, talks about the disciples’ recognition that matters of money (Acts 2:44 and Acts 4:32-35) are inescapable and at the heart of their ministry.
He says the disciples noticed that money normally created distance—between the haves and the have nots, between the needy and the comfortable—and that in the new life Jesus proclaims, the disciples saw money and possessions as a way to join themselves to each other and become bridges between “uneven wealth and resources, uneven hope, and uneven life. Those who have must join those who do not.”
By being silent on matters of money and possessions, we 21st Century followers of Jesus miss the opportunity to be part of this “spectacular joining,” as Jennings puts it.
It is in this moment of giving to God, and to each other, and in the binding of ourselves together in the Body of Christ, that we indeed become Christians.
This is a joining, a relationship, that we preachers must make clear.
FAITH + FINANCE IS REIMAGINING GOD’S ECONOMY WITH “A BIAS FOR ACTION.”
Faith+Finance is bringing together pastors and impact investors, theologians and social entrepreneurs, and other faith and business leaders to respond with courage and imagination to the most urgent and demanding economic, social, environmental, and spiritual challenges of our day. — Faith + Finance website
Faith + Finance is influencing the relationship of people of faith to money and resources by examining:
a theology of economics
how churches can leverage their assets, even as congregations and giving shrink
how to apply “gospel values” to the establishment and growth of sustainable businesses
how to be good economic partners to marginalized neighbors
how to invest in ways that are morally and ethically informed and usher in God’s Kingdom
how to establish new models for funding ministry
We encourage you to sign up for their newsletter to stay in touch with their work. Then head to their blog for insights about stewardship, money, and faith.
About the Author:
The Rev. Canon Rosa Lee Harden is a self-described serial-entrepreneur. Her vocational life has included being publisher of weekly newspapers, trade journals, a business journal and CEO of a ‘Silicon Valley’ start-up. She was ordained as an Episcopal Priest in 2000 and served as Vicar of Holy Innocents Episcopal Church in San Francisco for ten years during which time its adult membership doubled and the number of children younger than 12 went from two to more than 50.
In 2008, Rosa Lee and her husband, Kevin Jones, launched the global SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) conference, described as ‘the conference at the intersection of money and meaning.’ In its 11th year, SOCAP19 brought more than 3,000 people from more than 60 countries to San Francisco to talk about how to accelerate the good economy.
In the fall of 2019, Rosa Lee, along with a broad group of people who had been watching the SOCAP movement, announced a new event, Faith+Finance: Reimagining God’s Economy. It was to have been held in May, 2020. Since Covid precluded that event happening that group has been working to build an online community of people who want to deeply engage the questions of how faith should be engaged with, and morally lead, the economy.
For several years, Rosa Lee also produced the Wild Goose Festival, an annual gathering of progressive Christians focusing on spirituality, justice, music and the arts. She has also served as Canon for Money and Meaning at the Cathedral of All Souls in Asheville, North Carolina, where her ministry worked toward bringing into consciousness how money impacts and guides life’s decisions.
In 2003 she produced the via media series of videos, a curriculum that has been used in more than 1000 congregations in the Episcopal Church and dozens of other Anglican Churches around the world.
She and her husband Kevin have been married for 44 years and are the parents of two adult children, Bradley Jones and B.J. Harden Jones, and grandparents to Logan and Asher. All of the Harden Jones family lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Bringing music and movement together in ballroom dance and through the drum corps activity are Rosa Lee’s two ‘extracurricular’ passions!