On April 11, 2009, a frumpy, middle-aged woman from a little village in Scotland stood on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent and announced that she dreamed of being a professional singer “as successful as Elaine Paige” (a famous English singer) prompting the judges to grimace and members of the audience to snicker. Then she opened her mouth and began to sing…
I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high and life worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die.
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
The judges’ faces lit up and the audience leapt to its feet in wild applause, and within nine days the video of her performance had been watched over 100 million times on YouTube and other social media sights around the world. Susan Boyle and her improbable dream that would not die had gone viral. Within the year, Boyle had released her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, which sold six million copies in six weeks; and she had hosted her own TV special in which she sang a duet with none other than Elaine Paige herself, who has called Boyle “a role model for everyone who has a dream.”
I have a dream, too. My dream is that generosity will go viral in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, transforming the church and the world around us. Some would argue that is a silly, unrealistic dream. “The PCC is dying,” they proclaim. “We need to be cutting back and downsizing. We need to adjust to a society in which the church, and in particular the aging Presbyterian Church, will become increasingly irrelevant if not extinct.” And yet the dream of growing the generosity of the church won’t let me go and continues to gnaw at me and tug at me and prod me.
The dream of growing the generosity of the church first took hold of me while I was leading worship at the first Stewards by Design conference held in April 1999. Having just led seven worship services during the conference, I returned home completely drained, thinking I would need days to recover from my exhausting schedule. To my surprise, I woke up the next morning, refreshed and invigorated with an odd thought in my head, “Herb, I am calling you to grow the generosity of my church.” It was just a fleeting thought and seemed like a preposterous idea, and yet as I allowed the idea to settle into my consciousness, an unexpected sense of joy leapt up inside me.
I believe that the Presbyterian Church in Canada has been crippled by a poor cousin mindset for far too long. I believe that even now God is preparing a vital future for the Church. And I believe that future will only blossom and grow as we discard the myth of scarcity, embrace the theology of God’s abundance and practice generosity in our individual lives and corporate life together.
Some say the theme of generosity has nothing to do with the gospel, but my answer is that it goes to the very heart of the gospel and to the very heart of God. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son …” (John 3:16) “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9) When the Spirit was poured out upon the church at Pentecost, a new spirit of generosity took hold of the people who began to share their resources for the common good. (Acts 2:44-45) As much as anything, it was this spirit of generosity that went viral in the early church and infused the nascent community with a sense of God’s abundant grace that simply could not be contained, spilling over and transforming the world around them.
In a recent Cardus discussion paper entitled, A Canadian Culture of Generosity, Ray Pennings and Michael Van Pelt issue a wake-up call documenting that the social fabric we cherish in Canada is in danger of eroding unless the private, public and voluntary sectors begin talking together and working together to grow the spirit of generosity within our nation. They present a challenging goal to our country: “To translate individual acts of generosity into a culture of generosity – a defining pattern of behaviour which becomes so engrained that it emerges as part of our collective Canadian identity, our DNA.” I believe that now is the time for the Presbyterian Church to take the lead, turning Pennings’ and Van Pelt’s dream for Canada into a reality. We can do this because generosity is already a part of our DNA: we are the body of Christ, and it is Christ’s DNA that shapes us and Christ’s Spirit that inspires us.
As I travel across the church, I am listening to the stories of generosity happening in congregation after congregation. I will continue to share what I hear in this column and on the moderator’s blog and in sermons and conversations. But this is not just my work as moderator. We must all become a part of the conversation as we celebrate the stories of what God in Christ is doing among us and share our best practices. Now is not the time to pull back into ourselves. Now is the time to move forward in a spirit of generosity, as we trust that God’s grace is sufficient for all our challenges. Let’s each of us do our part to make generosity go viral in our church. After all, if a frumpy, middle-aged woman can capture the imagination of the world, just imagine what God could do with more than 100,000 Presbyterians!
