Dec. 2000

After my column last month about stewardship, I found myself giving a bit more thought to the various aspects of this vital principle of our faith. The last column was about the material aspects of stewardship, which is certainly a broad enough topic to merit much more than just one column. But I would be remiss if I didn't share a couple thoughts about another facet of stewardship. One of the ways it was expressed by the literature we used this year was "Time, Talents, and Treasure." Last month was about the "Treasure" aspect, so what about the others?

I think that "Time" and "Talents" are, for our purposes here, two sides of the same coin. That coin could best be described, in my mind, as "giving of ourselves" - and now in a sense other than financial. We have twenty-four hours each day because of God's grace in giving us life in the first place. Just as we are called upon to give back a portion of our material bounty, so does our Creator call for us to put a portion of our time into His work. If we accept the principle on the material side of life, we can hardly ignore it on the temporal side. We are called upon to dedicate a portion of each week just as much as we are expected to dedicate a portion of the dollars we earn during that week.

Of course, it wasn't too many years ago that society expected one day a week to be a day of worship, contemplation, and rest from our worldly endeavors. That has certainly changed! Nowadays there are many of us whose employment requires us to work on Sunday, leaving days off from work at other times of the week. And there probably aren't very many of us who object to being able to run to the supermarket or gas station on Sunday, either - another change here in America in just the last forty years or so. But it has definitely left us all with a more complex world than the one that we, or at least our parents, grew up in.

So how should I go about making my payment to God for the time he has granted me here? That's the question I have been pondering, and I have a few answers that seem good to me in the context of our church. There are a lot of ways to go about it outside of our strictly religious institutions, of course, since there are many organizations that seek to improve the lot both of humanity and of the many individual members of it who need help at this point. But my job, as the current President of the Congregation, is more focused on Mindekirken and the challenges and opportunities that present themselves to us here.

The first activity I can suggest is obvious, but also central to us as Christians: Attend worship services, and attend them at a church where the service makes a difference to you. The worship service is the single feature that differentiates a church from a well-intended social club. I have personally found Mindekirken to be a church that particularly speaks to me, but we are all different, and we each need to do what is right for us.

Beyond that, I think we need to look to the things we can do with our time that help our church to grow. Some of those at Mindekirken would be to volunteer for the activities that assist or enhance the Sunday worship service, such as ushering, altar guild, or helping with church coffee. Another area of service is on the Congregation Council (which happens to be very topical at this time of year, with openings to fill before our Annual Meeting at the end of January!). There are always volunteer opportunities in the church office, and a variety of other groups - the choir, the Alle Kvinner Mission, the prayer group, and the quilting group to name only a few. Time contributed to any of the above helps to enhance the health and life of our church.

I'd like to close this already-too-long message with a brief final thought: God promises us that as we give back to him he will keep giving us even more. We'll never know for ourselves, from our own experience, how true that really is unless we give it a try. Let us be daring!

John Casey

Congregation President

The Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church ·  924 E. 21st St, Minneapolis, MN 55404-2952 ·  (612)874-0716