Missing the mark

By Donald Brooker

 

As parents, many of us go to great lengths to ensure that our children and youth get the best of everything. We sign them up for hockey camps and music lessons, snowboarding lessons and swim teams, tutors and after-school clubs all in an effort to guarantee the success of our children. But many of us don’t teach our children biblical stewardship. I don’t mean to say that we don’t practice biblical stewardship or that by our example we don’t live out our faith in front of our children. But how often do we talk to our children about financial stewardship from a biblical perspective?

For so many of us, we focus on the tangible rather than the intangible. We focus on them scoring a goal or hitting the bull’s eye.

Recently, we had a special month of offerings at our church to help pay down our mortgage. The leadership shared their vision for the church and gave very compelling reasons for us to pay down the mortgage early; and the funds came in. My 12-year-old son, Nathaniel, came home from church that day excited about what he had heard in the sermon and announced that he needed a ride to the bank.

The excitement didn’t last long, though. The following Tuesday when he arrived home from youth, he was confused. "Why didn’t they talk about this at youth?” he asked. "The benefits sounded great when they presented it to the adults in church. Why don’t the youth know more about this?” After just a few weeks, his excitement turned to frustration. "Do they think we don’t care about the church? Do they think our gifts won’t make a difference?”

He ended up contributing a few hundred dollars he earned from his newspaper route, but couldn’t get over the fact that no one ever considered sharing the challenge to give with the youth. Our children need us to model a life of faithful stewardship by our actions. They also need us to explain what we are doing and why. In addition to this, our churches need to include children and youth in stewardship education and give them the opportunity to be involved. After all, we want them to develop good stewardship habits now that will last them a lifetime.

A practice that we started recently was to involve Nathaniel in all our charitable giving decisions. At first we questioned how he would react to giving what, in his world, would be very large amounts of money. To our surprise, he was eager to give his input. Nathaniel’s only disappointment was the tough decision of which charities we couldn’t support.

Our children naturally want to help. They see a need and they want to respond. Society teaches us to store up our treasures on earth and this will bring happiness. The Bible teaches us to store up treasures in heaven.

Are we missing the mark with our children and youth? Our youth need and want to be involved in the church. If we don’t help them become involved in the joy of giving to support the work of the church, I believe we are both missing the mark and short changing them spiritually.

Donald Brooker is a stewardship consultant at the St Catharines, Ontario office of Mennonite Foundation of Canada (MFC).  For stewardship education and estate and charitable gift planning, contact your nearest MFC office.