Where does your money go when you give to the church?
Your gift is used to help fund building and maintenance, worship and Sunday school classes, clergy and staff, office expenses and ministry programs. From turning on the lights to streaming our services on Sunday morning, your pledge makes an abundance of things happen at Annandale UMC.
Pledges allows us to plan with a degree of certainty what we can afford in next year’s budget. Pledges also represent our tangible support for God’s kingdom work here on Earth. It’s a way for us to celebrate God’s gift of grace and express our gratitude in return..
Your gift is used to help fund building and maintenance, worship and Sunday school classes, clergy and staff, office expenses and ministry programs. From turning on the lights to streaming our services on Sunday morning, your pledge makes an abundance of things happen at Annandale UMC.
Pledges allows us to plan with a degree of certainty what we can afford in next year’s budget. Pledges also represent our tangible support for God’s kingdom work here on Earth. It’s a way for us to celebrate God’s gift of grace and express our gratitude in return..
The Five G's of Stewardship
Are you ready to experience Christian Stewardship in a new way? A small group at Annandale UMC is working to reframe our vision and understanding of stewardship. God’s grace is the foundation for living a life of stewardship and is at the center of our relationship with God. In addition, gratitude, giving, generosity, and growth flow out from experiencing grace and form a network that supports a broad vision of stewardship in our lives. Presto – the 5G (Grace, Gratitude, Giving, Generosity, and Growth) Network is born! Just as the new 5G wireless network technology will efficiently connect everyone and everything, providing exciting new experiences to technology users, we pray that the 5G Network at Annandale UMC will connect a broad vision of stewardship ideals to create a new stewardship culture for the congregation. The focus will broaden and grow with time. For now, we invite you to embrace God’s unconditional grace in your life. Where does God’s grace lead you?
Grace: God's Redemption at Christ's Expense
As we say at baptism, grace is God’s gift offered to us apart from any earning or deserving on our part. It’s the unconditional, no-strings-attached, irrevocable promise of the Gospel: pardon for sin and perfect righteousness on Christ’s account. Grace is not cheap. It’s not even expensive. It’s free. On account of God’s grace, neither our sins against God and neighbor nor our failures to live according to God’s commandments can condemn us. Because the Bible says the wages of sin is death, grace also frees us from death having the last word. You are redeemed and free to live joyfully, abundantly, radically.
Gratitude: Responding to God’s Grace
Freed from the need to earn God’s salvation or atone for our sins, we simply live lives of joyful gratitude for this free and life-giving gift. The Christian life becomes a life of response rather than responsibility. We give not to earn God’s favor. We give because of our gratitude for already receiving God’s favor forever. We live out our faith, therefore, not in terms of obligation or under the burden of expectations but in gratitude for having received a gift we could neither merit nor scarcely imagine.
Giving: Expressing Christ’s Love
God’s grace sets us free to love. Importantly, love in scripture is seldom understood in subjective terms of feelings or sentimentality. The Bible’s word for love is most often the word, caritas, from which we get the word charity. It’s a love expressed as benevolence towards others. Moreover, Jesus instructs us to caritas as he has caritased us. As I John puts it, “We love because he first loved us.” Therefore, we caritas— we give to the work of Christ’s Church in order to give the gift of grace we have received to one who has not yet received and believed it. Thus, we love our neighbor by sharing the Gospel of God’s grace as a church by word and deed, through our gathered worship, Bible study, Sunday School, evangelism and fellowship, as well as our service to the poor.
Generosity: Living According to Abundance
One of the dominant lies in our world is the myth of scarcity; that is, our world operates according to the assumption that resources are limited, that there are only so many slices of the pie, and that time and treasure are finite commodities. Grace, by contrast, frees us to live according to abundance, for the God who has gratuitously given us everything in Christ (pardon and perfect righteousness) is a God who can be trusted to supply our every need. Jesus teaches that our love of neighbor is analogous to our love of God, so we strive to love generously and give generously of our time and our presence, not just our treasure, for this is the way God, in becoming our neighbor in Jesus Christ, has loved us. We not only give generously to those the world deems undeserving, we give sacrificially as Jesus gave sacrificially for us.
Growth: Living as Saints and Sinners
We never advance to a stage of life where we no longer need God’s grace. We never become someone for whom Christ did not need to die. In this life, we always remain simultaneously saints and sinners. The knowledge that everyone is always a mixture of the two is what allows us to grow in our compassion, patience, mercy, and generosity towards others. As the Protestant Reformers liked to say, the Christian life is a daily dying; that is, it’s a continual return to the fact and good news of baptism. We grow in our faith, and possibly in our Christ- likeness, by keeping God’s grace at the center of our lives and, especially, at the center of the life of the Church.
Are you ready to make the 5G Network a part of your life?
Our 5G Network Committee invites you to start a new journey with us, embracing these 5G’s—grace, gratitude, giving, generosity, and growth—as an important part of your life. We pray you will be blessed by the joy that comes from living as a steward of all that God has generously given to us. Going forward, here are some of the goals we have for the congregation:
For more information about the 5G Network, contact Bill Iwig at bethesda.duo@verizon.net. Members of the 5G Network: Bill Iwig (chair), Richard Bass, Jerry Beyer, Mike Bizer, Tracy Carney, Randy Gordon, Paul Hartley, Beckie Himes, Debbi Iwig, Pam Jones, and Jay Morris.
Acknowledging God as the source of all we have inspires deep gratitude that motivates us to give back to God and to others not out of obligation but out of love.
- Making stewardship—of time, talents, and resources—a year-round, life-long commitment based in faith.
- Encouraging more people to give—and in different ways.
- Encouraging people to give at all ages and in all stages in their life.
- Helping people better manage their finances and to think of the church in their estate planning.
- Understanding our gifts and talents and how they can be used to help those in need.
- Being more transparent and regular in our communications regarding the church budget and our financial needs.
- Creating a culture of stewardship that sustains the needs of our church and provides opportunities to love our neighbors.
For more information about the 5G Network, contact Bill Iwig at bethesda.duo@verizon.net. Members of the 5G Network: Bill Iwig (chair), Richard Bass, Jerry Beyer, Mike Bizer, Tracy Carney, Randy Gordon, Paul Hartley, Beckie Himes, Debbi Iwig, Pam Jones, and Jay Morris.
Acknowledging God as the source of all we have inspires deep gratitude that motivates us to give back to God and to others not out of obligation but out of love.