Kids’ dollars

The good news here at WORLD and its related media forms is that the year 2021 ended with a higher level of gift support from our readers and listeners than we’d ever known before.

The bad news is that in the midst of all that generosity we gave far too little attention to the task of insuring that such support will continue into the future—and I’m referring specifically to financial support from our children. Those children are in what will be almost certainly the wealthiest generation in the history of the world. Those children will, over the next few years, be inheriting much of that wealth. The manner in which they do that will radically affect the well-being of thousands of Christian ministries. How many times will your favorite charity be able to report, “We just had our best year ever!”?

The challenge comes back to me: What am I doing to see that my children and grandchildren will have been exposed to the Biblical principles of stewardship? Here are several facets I think are pertinent.

(1) We need to teach them that all wealth is God’s wealth. The millions of folks who call themselves billionaires, as much as the homeless man going through garbage cans in the alley, has what he has, only on loan from his Creator. That realization changes everything.

(2) There’s no limit to the amount of wealth just waiting to be developed. There’s no pie in the sky waiting to be distributed fairly to millions of participants like us. Instead, our Creator stands watching us pursue our stewardship assignments of nurturing new contexts in which God’s creation is displayed in ever-expanding dimensions.

(3) The tithe has always been, and will continue to be, a teaching tool used by God to coach his children as they adventure into creatively exciting wealth-building assignments. “Just see,” God says in Malachi 3, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven—and pour you out a blessing so big that you will not have room to receive it.”

(4) Our children need to know that apart from God’s intervention, they will not live in as wealthy a nation and culture as we have. We have already begun squandering the wealth we’ve inherited, and we have begun feeling the contractions. Our children will have to exercise more discipline than we did. We need to be gently relentless in passing that assignment on to them.

(5) Paying interest (some call it “carrying charges”) on a loan of almost any type is simply a not-so-clever dodge for paying a significantly higher price for some goods or service than you first agreed to. Realistically, agreeing to an interest charge is to say that you were too impatient to wait until you could afford to pay cash for what you were buying. This is largely true even if you’re buying something urgent like a hospital charge. The Bible doesn’t seem to frown on all debt; but it does warn us of the dangers involved. Our children will be well served if they hear those warnings from us.

(6) All of these concepts will be manageable by your children only if they are also versed in at least a rudimentary form of bookkeeping and accounting.

My sense is (and this is a totally nonscientific survey!) that all this suggests a teaching assignment that has been effectively ignored by our nation’s parents. More ominously, it’s an assignment that has been ignored even by Christian parents—or, at best, deferred as if unimportant.

My point here is that the support base enjoyed by thousands of Christian organizations may be in serious jeopardy. Our local churches—not to mention our missions organizations, our Christian educational institutions, our relief agencies, and many others—could all be in financial jeopardy because our present generation didn’t bother to educate the parents of tomorrow on this very important matter.