Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 23
Jan 07
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
Our Saviour
in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
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"Stewardship is
everything you do after you say yes to Jesus Christ"
-- Clarence
Stoughton
How do we thank God?
We are eternally grateful and thankful for God's trust in allowing us to be stewards of His Creation. Weekly, as we participate in the celebration of the Eucharist, we offer our prayers of praise and thanksgiving for His many gifts.
Central to our liturgy of thanks is our offering of a portion of our God-given material wealth to the Lord and his work through our church. This is brought to the altar as a our gift, returning with thanks some of the abundance He has provided us.
And then stewardship comes full round. Our thankful offerings to God for the blessings He has bestowed upon us becomes the seed for the continued stewardship of God's creation. They sustain our place of worship, paying for all the material costs of maintaining our church. And they provide a helpful hand in our community, our state and nation and anywhere else God's creation needs the boost that our resources can provide.
Once a year we focus on financial stewardship within the church. Remember Jesus in the temple? How disturbed he was to find that this holy place had become a place of commerce. It is our intention at the Church of Our Saviour that we likewise do not become a place of commerce. We do not engage our congregation in fund raising that might divert ourselves from the work of the Lord. We do endorse your thank offerings for the work of the church.
This concept of thank offerings goes back to the Old Testament. In the 28th chapter of Genesis, Jacob had a vision of God. God promised to take care of him and watch over him. Jacob responds by accepting God's promise and promising to return to God a tithe of all that with which God promised to bless him (Gen 28:20-22 ) Then Jacob made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one tenth to you."
Even before the law of Moses established more strict rules and regulations concerning the tithe, it was a seen as a way of praising God for God's abundant gifts and care to us. The tithe was seen as a way of giving a thank offering to God and as a way of acknowledging God as the source of all our material blessings.
Jesus never specifically prescribed tithing. Neither did he ever say it was no longer necessary. He did say that we are to render unto God what is God's, which he surely would have understood to include the Old Testament laws regarding tithing and other giving.
Jesus preached in a community where
religion had become legalistic. People were practicing the
legal requirements of tithing and other giving, but their
giving was not from the heart. It only came out of a sense
of duty. Jesus commended those who gave from the heart, and
those who gave sacrificially. So do we.
Giving at our church
Christian giving from start to finish at the Church of Our Saviour.
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