How are we investing in the Church that succeeding generations will shape?
We can set them up well and set them free to be faithful in ways that we won't ever see.
In the 1980s and 1990s, my maternal grandmother would occasionally gift my cousins, brother, and me with $50 savings bonds on our birthdays or at Christmas. She paid $25 each for them, and the U.S. government guaranteed that her investment would double in twenty years and that the bonds, if not cashed in, would continue to earn interest for another ten years after that.
My Nanna was not at all wealthy in a financial sense. She had a high school education and was both a full-time employee at a school supply company until she retired and a full-time caregiver for my partially paralyzed PaPaw until his death, which was only four years before her own at age 67. But she saw a way to invest in the futures of her grandchildren with the means that she had.
I have held onto each of these bonds until at least the twenty-year mark and most of them until their final maturity. (I recognize that there is great privilege in being able to do so.) As the bonds have matured, I have used them to pay for things that I know Nanna - who died on my twenty-first birthday - would have wanted to be part of. I used a couple of bonds toward my wedding costs. Nanna paid for a piece of furniture in my son’s nursery. She contributed a percentage of my Doctor of Ministry tuition.
The last of the bonds reached the thirty-year mark this month. As I sat at the credit union, filling out information on the backs of the bonds so that they could be redeemed, I said a prayer of gratitude for my Nanna’s care and vision. The bonds that she paid $25 each for in 1995 are now worth more than three times that amount.
I wonder what we are doing as individuals and as churches, no matter what our resources, to invest in the people who will come after us. I’m not necessarily talking about money, though good stewardship is important. I’m thinking more about a whole range of decisions that will set people and congregations up to live into the fullness of who God created them to be. For example, how might we structure our church so that it is nimble and responsive to changing opportunities and challenges? What processes can we set up to encourage regular discernment? How do we cultivate a sense of Christian vocation in all our people, not just in those who might become ordained ministers? What would it take to pay attention to and call out gifts in congregants of all ages?
These are the metaphorical savings bonds of congregational life: creating pathways for faithful imagination for people we might not meet and for circumstances we cannot foresee. Savings bonds are a foil to the fine china that I wrote about last week. Instead of passing along traditions that discourage interrogation and feel like obligation, we can set up systems that entrust choices about the future of the congregation to those who will be living it.
My Nanna got this, and I’m not just talking about the bonds. Nanna was a stalwart in her Southern Baptist congregation, and she had always been taught that women could not be pastors. When she found out that I would be pursuing ordained ministry, she asked a trusted friend to help her study the Bible more fully, because I had discerned a calling that she wanted to support but couldn’t yet. Instead of telling me I was wrong, she sought greater understanding. This posture of openness and curiosity was a powerful model for me, and it offered me the confidence I needed to go to seminary when I had not yet experienced the pastoral leadership of a clergywoman myself.
Let us, then, invest in the future of the Church with the way we approach it now, because the world sorely needs congregations that are creative, spiritually growing, attentive to the gifts and needs of neighbors, and committed to God’s dream of a world run by and for love.