The largest portion of my annual givings goes to my congregational church; as does a large portion of my volunteer time. But competing for my time and chequebook are many other issues about which I care deeply. I regularly check my internal moral and ethical sextant to see if I’m putting my energies into areas which are meaningful to me and to my family.
My daughter’s oldest friend (they were in the baby room together around their first birthdays) has cystic fibrosis. This little girl deserves a long long life filled with high highs and low lows like the rest of us. So, every spring our little family spends some time, effort and money to raise funds for the annual CF Walk for a Cure. It’s our personal mission — which ends with a day at the Toronto Zoo and has become a highlight on our calendar.
Over the course of each year friends, colleagues, acquaintances and others appeal to us with their personal missions — usually for various diseases, medical conditions or local initiatives. This extends our circle of care to worthy areas — from literacy programs to various diseases and conditions to community environmental initiatives, like native plants on private yards and community gardens on corporate grounds.
One of my many lives is in the arts. I have many very talented friends who are actors, writers, directors. I love to support them any way I can. I don’t have the time to work on their productions — to lift a boom even for an afternoon — so I do what I can. Supporting the arts beyond those created by my friends is also important to me.
Then there’s our daughter’s public school. A small stack of twenties is handed over at various booths at the annual Fall Fête. Plus the other regular asks: magazine drive, monthly book catalogues, craft and bake sales, etc., all in aid of a discretionary fund. It is part of the culture of schools these days. At the other end, having graduated from schools of higher and higher learning, we the parents are appealed to as good alumni.
I’m guessing that this list of givings and interests is not that different from yours — replace arts with Scouting, replace CF Walk with food bank. That while the bulk of your givings goes to your church, you feel pulled in many directions by your concerns, your legacies and your own personal missions.
Each of us is constantly discerning how to make the world a better place. We have some time, a few talents and a couple of dollars — gifts from God we want to return to creation somehow. It might include $25 to the Record and 100 hours a year to Big Brothers and your time on session and your Sunday givings and helping with the clothing drive for the local women’s shelter and an Out of the Cold program and sitting on the board of a local agency and signing an online petition like the Charter for Compassion and the time you spent reading up on Hopenhagan and $50 to PWS&D and so on.
Once upon a time, many decades ago, our lump-sum payments to the government and to the church would cover the majority of concerns in the world, from international relief to local medical centres (both these examples: first initiated by churches then ceded to governments). But, either the church has shrunk, or the world has grown or, as I think more likely, our consciousness has grown to embrace more and more marginal corners of the world. Most of us increasingly do church outside of church.
That doesn’t mean we don’t want to do church; in fact, I’d guess we want to do church more than ever. We find some meaningful ways of doing church outside the parameters of Sunday morning.
We go to church not out of habit or because of societal pressures (which bend in the opposite direction) but because we want to be there. It is a testament to our faith. And we put our money and our time and our talents where our faith is; but, not all of them, because, and here’s the dirty little secret, “church” is not as big as our faith. And you can see in the myriad ways we serve, that we wish it were.
