Beyond "Time, Talent, and Treasure"

Each year congregations gear up for their "time, talent, and treasure" campaigns. While these efforts were once the work of members of stewardship committees, in recent years directors of lay ministry and members of lay ministry committees have joined them. My career as a consultant, workshop leader, and author spans more than twenty years of assistance to congregations. Working together, we develop lay ministry systems and help members discover and use their gifts. I am consistently asked, "How can we strengthen our time, talent, and treasure campaign?"

I must admit, I always cringe when I hear the question voiced that way. The first problem is that this campaign becomes an annual disaster. We make an effort to have members check off a form indicating interest in assisting with a church ministry, and then they wait months without ever being contacted to begin that ministry. But my objections run fundamentally deeper still. I fear the words "time, talent, and treasure" long ago became background noise to members of the church—familiar words and accompanying activities that no longer capture attention or speak to hearts. As an intuitive person, such terminology bores me because it does not address the depth of what stewardship is all about. Time, talent, and treasure is a starting place only, not a final goal.

There is more to stewardship than giving an amount of time, skills, and money to my local church—more than filling job slots and meeting a church budget! As a staff member of a middle-sized Lutheran congregation in the late 1980s, I collaborated with a Shared Ministry Committee and other staff and lay leaders to change our whole conception of ministry. We struggled to describe what we meant by the then new phrase "shared ministry."

Shared ministry lives out the affirmation that God calls all people to ministry. As members of faith communities, we are invited to serve together in a spirit of mutuality as partners. Working cooperatively, we strive to discover, develop, and support the gifts of each person and, as responsible stewards, to participate in God’s ongoing creative and restoring activity in our communities and the world.¹

You will notice we stopped using the words "time, talent, and treasure."

Shared ministry does not obsess about filling volunteer slots; it is not what William Treadwell once called the "fuss and beg" method,² nor the approach used in my growing up years—crudely termed the "first warm body through the door." Rather, shared ministry incorporates a careful matching of the local congregation’s mission and ministry opportunities with the gifts of each member.

I am still haunted by the memory of a father, a Stephen minister in a local Lutheran congregation, whom I invited to make a presentation to a confirmation class about his ministry involvement. He spoke with great enthusiasm about his involvement in Stephen Ministry, where he lovingly cared for people in need. In response to my encouragement to tell the class a little about his ministry of parenting, however, he blurted out, "Well, that is hardly a ministry!" I cringed at the message he so quickly conveyed to these young Christians.

As we enter this new millennium, congregations face several challenges. They must catch a bigger and deeper vision. Then they must put that vision into operation. Congregations must be encouraged to see that stewardship involves more than sharing talents and time and treasure. They are important, but they only represent a portion of who we are and only a fraction of our gifts. We are better served by a more wholistic approach to gifts.

Gifts are sometimes clustered into three groupings:

Traditional gifts: talents, interests, money and possessions, preferences, life experiences and stories, relationships, and spiritual heritage.

Gifts of style: personality, learning, and motivational styles.

Gifts of vulnerability: our bodies, emotions, values, dreams, passions, weaknesses and wounds.³

Even though this fuller look at our gift package goes beyond time, talent, and treasure, it still does not encompass all of who we are.

A better description comes from this past summer. I was asked to teach a one-day seminar for church business administrators entitled "Stewardship of the Self." I was excited because the title spoke more thoroughly of my responsibilities and opportunities as a child of God, as a gifted person. I am to steward all of who I am—that includes my talents, my time, and my money—but so much more! All of who I am is a gift from God, and all of who I am is meant to be surrendered back to God. By the way, an archaic definition of surrender is to return or restore—it is not about defeat! It is about returning gifts we are given.⁴

Congregations are also challenged to see stewardship as a great deal more than sharing the gift of self with the ministry programs of the local church. Our calling to stewardship includes all of life’s arenas—family and friends, workplace, marketplace, local neighborhoods, and global communities. Unfortunately, congregations too often help people compartmentalize their lives. Congregations focus the bulk of stewardship education around issues of giving money to the church and ignore the rest.

Most congregations think of stewardship of gifts in much too narrow a way, and they funnel concern about gifts into much too small an arena. Scholars and authors James and Evelyn Whitehead once wrote that in our vocations we are "being imagined by God; God’s dream for [our] life comes gradually to light."⁵ As individuals and as congregations, we must open our perspectives to God’s larger imagination! God is dreaming us into a bigger picture than the tiny snapshot we cling to.

The Whiteheads also suggest that Christian communities lie at the intersection of three dreams—personal dreams each member brings to the church, the dream or vision of that particular community of faith, and the dream of the kingdom of God.⁶ In a similar way, the local congregation lies at the intersection of three gifts—the gift of self brought by the church member, the unique character of a local congregation, and the gifts of God’s presence and the dream of the reign of God in the universe.

The concept of "gifts-based ministry" grows out of this understanding: Gift-based ministry acknowledges that the heart of the ministry of each faith community is assisting people to discover the unique gifts embedded in them by the Creator—gifts that allow them to respond to God’s call to serve as partners in living out the dream of the reign of God in the world.

These days I think very little about the stewardship of time, talent, or treasure. Instead I ponder on the stewardship of self—stewardship of all I am and have and do. I steward my gifts, call, and vocation. I imagine a whole community of faith where individuals seek to be stewards of their communal "self"—a unique congregation.

But how does a local community—through its mission, leadership, structure, and process—facilitate movement toward shared and gifts-based ministry? How does the congregation do it within its own ministries and in how it extends into the ministries of each member? Ii is not enough to catch a larger vision. The challenge is to put it into operation!

The approaches that best serve today’s faith communities are wholistic and inclusive. They share a ministry systems approach and a menu approach to discernment of our gifts and call. They consider the wide diversity in our congregations. There are no magic bullets and no quick fixes.

A wholistic shared ministry system includes several leadership processes: planning, discovering gifts, designing, recruiting, interviewing, matching, training, supervising, supporting, evaluation, and managing data.

Each process interacts with all others. Too often church leaders obsess on recruiting. But in systems thinking, the results of recruitment reflect the interaction of the other processes. To address recruiting we must also pay attention to discovering gifts, designing creatively, supporting and supervising, and so forth. This systems model is depicted in the graphic at the right.

Churches are also well served by stopping their search for the perfect gifts-discovery instrument. Only a certain percentage of members fill out forms. Some who fill them out do so more out of habit or obligation than because the tool genuinely helps them discern their special gifts and call to ministry. Gift inventories have their place as one tool in a whole menu of approaches to gifts discovery.

Such a gifts-discovery menu might include interviewing, gift seminars and retreats, short community-building activities, at-home discussion tools for spouses and families, videos, mentoring, music, ritual, and experiential, try-out opportunities.⁷ A central focus of the mission and ministry of every congregation should be to help all members discern gifts and calls to ministry in the various arenas of their lives. No single method helps all members do so. The challenge we face is much greater—and more exciting—than simply beefing up a time, talent, and treasure campaign, or finding a good gifts inventory.

My dream is that helping members discern their gifts and call to ministry in daily life will be incorporated into all ministry programs in the church—in faith formation, worship, pastoral care, raising funds, evangelism, youth ministry, outreach, and so forth.⁸ As long as shared ministry development and gifts-discovery remains isolated in a separate department or program of the church, it will fail in its ultimate purpose. Instead, the processes described here must be integrated into every arena of congregational life. These processes must become like the air we breathe, like connecting threads throughout the entirety of congregational life.

This dream often becomes a reality through redesigned leadership teams. Their primary purpose becomes working collaboratively with church staff and other lay leaders. They develop processes for shared ministry and gifts-discovery and celebration. They get people involved, then watch time, talent, and treasure follow. Such teams are called Shared Ministry Teams, Gifts Teams, or Volunteer Ministry Committees. They often work as partners with Stewardship Committees to provide broader stewardship education. They have a much more exciting focus than running the annual time, talent, and treasure campaign. They are on the cutting edge of a whole new paradigm of ministry! They are not limited by an emphasis on institutional maintenance. They are freed to be leaders to bringing to reality the dream of God’s reign in our world.

__________________

Jean Morris Trumbauer is a widely recognized consultant, workshop leader, and writer. Among her most recent publications is the manual Created and Called: Discovering Our Gifts for Abundant Living (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998).  Visit her web site at http://members.aol.com/trumbauer .

© 2000 Ecumenical Stewardship Center. Used by permission. Reprinted from GIVING, Growing Faithful Stewards in Your Congregation, 2000 issue, a publication of the Ecumenical Stewardship Center, Indianapolis, Indiana. Individuals or congregations may subscribe to this annual magazine or purchase single issues by contacting ESC at ESC@indy.net or by calling 1-800-835-5671.

_________________________

Check out these additional resources:

_________________________

Notes

 2000-2010 New Life Ministries (www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org). All Rights Reserved.
(see information on our copyright policy)

Top of Page