Episcopal Press and News
Bishop Burrill Says Stewardship is a Matter of Balancing Checkbook with Baptismal Covenant
Episcopal News Service. August 7, 1990 [90209]
Ann Scott, Editor of Pacific Church News in the Diocese of California
"The church has made a huge mistake for decades by teaching that the reason people should give to the church is to support the parish," says Bishop William Burrill, co-chair of the national church's Standing Commission on Stewardship and Development.
"And people do give enough to support the parish -- we have very few congregations that are going out of existence because they don't have money. Even little rural congregations, you couldn't kill 'em -- they've learned how to survive," says Burrill, who will be the keynote speaker in Los Angeles at the late August meeting of Province VIII of the Episcopal Church.
Burrill is a man whose rat-a-tat-tat voice betrays his impatience with the status quo. The diocesan bishop of Rochester since 1984, he's on a mission to change the attitude of the people who support the Episcopal Church. Before being called as bishop, he was rector of St. Martin's in Davis, California; archdeacon of the Diocese of Northern California, and Episcopal campus minister at the University of California in Davis.
"We find that Episcopalians give because they want their parish to be there for them," Burrill says. "That means that when they're unhappy with the rector or have some major reason to be angry with the parish, they cut their pledge or take their pledge away. That just tells you that they are not pledging primarily out of a sense of thanksgiving or a commitment to the mission of the church."
Burrill says this is wrong. "The mission of the church is the reconciliation of human beings with one another and with God -- that means all human beings, everywhere," he adds.
That mission may start on the parish level, says Burrill, but only in the sense of what he calls a "basketball team" philosophy. "Basketball teams spend a lot of time practicing. But they practice so they can play the game," he says. "Most Episcopal churches spend all their time practicing and never play the game. That's why they spend so much time complaining about the practicing -- Rite I, Rite II, the color of the carpet, the organ, and on and on."
"Community building is important, but it's a self-centered sort of thing," Burrill says. "The parish exists so that through word and sacrament we can be nurtured with the grace of God. With that nurturing and empowering we then go forth to proclaim the Gospel. Most parishes are totally focused in on that first part, and they never get to the last part.
"You know, I just came back from China, and the Chinese have an incredible sense of thanksgiving -- and they have a lot less to be thankful for. I never heard a complaint from a Chinese Christian," says Burrill. "They're always proclaiming the wonderful word of God. Most Episcopalians are not doing that."
"And just notice what things Episcopalians call Outreach," says Burrill. If he could, Burrill would get rid of the term Outreach because he says it means that parishes still have a parochial mentality. "It says, 'our parish is the focus of our lives, and every now and then, because we're compassionate people, we reach out -- like a bird,"' he exclaims, flinging his hand out and gesturing like a mother bird feeding a fledgling a particularly squirmy worm.
Burrill would also like Episcopalians to examine the structure of the church. "For a long time, without consciously talking about it, we thought parishes existed to support the diocese and that dioceses existed to support the national church," he says. "The fact of the matter is, the dioceses and the national church only exist to support the local congregations," he contends. "The question is, does the structure of the national church and any particular diocese basically serve the local church?"
Burrill says that he believes that now all too much of the mission of the church gets done through the national and diocesan structures rather than through local structures. This, he contends, reinforces the idea that mission is something to send money away to, rather than to do locally.
"That doesn't make for a lot of personal motivation," says Burrill. "As we work with congregations in the area of stewardship, we try to get them to write mission statements. Of course, they always start out with a nice pious quote from the Baptismal Covenant, and God knows, that's all true. But what we have to do is help them find out 'what's happening in their town that really needs God's loving reconciling.' Sometimes, they will have to do things regionally, of course, but the primary mission of the church is a local reality."
Motivating people to change their way of viewing their congregation and then insisting that it change its priorities is a tough job, says Burrill. "The first thing you have to do is help people realize that baptism symbolizes the need of every single human being to die to their self-centeredness in order to become a loving human being.... I know I'm on a pilgrimage from selfcenteredness to love -- and that which is the biggest indicator of my journey is my checkbook."
"This is the best picture of Bill Burrill," the bishop says, gesturing with his checkbook, "this is identity.
"You'll also find that one of the biggest idols of our culture is housing. It's an interesting idol for me because I've just come back from China where we showed them a family picture. We have four children, two married, and one grandchild, so there were nine of us. Then they saw a picture of our house and said, 'Only your family lives in this house? How wonderfully lucky you are!"'
Burrill says that he and his wife were so embarrassed that only two of them live in that house that they fudged their answer.
"All right, I'm not going to change the world tomorrow, but we have to begin to realize that our checkbooks are an expression of our values," adds Burrill. "In my case, what I need to say in my budget at home is that the first column has to be the money I'm giving away because it represents the story of the pilgrimage of my life. I'm a person trying to learn how to be a living, loving, giving human being, and we say that to be fully human is to be Christlike."
Burrill says that he thinks now is the time for parishioners to take stands on what their church does with its money. "The first step is to motivate people to realize that they need to give to break out of the idolatry of self-centeredness, and the only way I'm going to do that is to give substantial amounts of money. The person who says, 'I'll give when I feel like it,' just write 'em off.
"But I also tell people that I wouldn't give it to the church until the church is doing mission," Burrill says. "I tell them to give it somewhere else that's doing something more important."
Burrill also says he doesn't think the church is likely to attract many newcomers "as long as we're just a nice group of self-centered little entities. There's no idealism in that. It's just a club -- and it's a club that most people wouldn't want to join, to quote a man in my diocese.
"Yet look at the church in China. It's growing so fast, it's unreal," says Burrill. "Five years ago when we visited a parish in Beijing it had two hundred members. Today, it has 2,200."
Burrill tells a story of a rural mission in western China where members decided to tithe a part of each of their crops to support a disabled nonChristian in their village. Many other non-Christians heard about their caring and came to see what made them do such a thing.
"They had decided what was important," says Burrill. "To put it in my language, they put the need to give in column one. And I never heard a single complaint. You just can't be an evangelist while you're complaining."