Generosity

Although written from a Lutheran/Christian perspective, Adam Copland, Director, Center for Stewardship Leaders, Luther Seminary, St Paul, Minnesota has excellent insights on giving in his weekly e-newsletter. His topic this month is Generosity.

e-newsletter, 28 July 2015

What is Generosity?

In a class exercise, David King asked us to stop and consider the generous people we’ve encountered in our lives. When we did so, financial giving was perhaps part of their story, but just as likely to surface were other forms of generosity. People might be generous by sharing their time, skills, knowledge, or even their gift of listening well and asking good questions.

When we address generous giving in our congregations, it’s important not to limit our imagination of those so-called “generous givers” as those who give the highest dollar amounts. Generous giving takes many forms. Plus, when it does come to financial giving, let’s not forget members who depend on relatively small incomes streams, but who give a large portion of those financial resources to ministry. These generous folk may not show up on our list of “top ten givers,” but surely we should describe them as generous.

In the book The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose, Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson describe generosity this way:

“Generosity is the virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly. It is a learned character trait that involves attitude and action entailing both the inclination and actual practice of giving liberally. It is not a haphazard behavior but a basic orientation to life…”

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