Offering for our hardship fund
The Cost of Living crisis is hitting harder than ever. Many of us are able to get by, but some in our community are stretched to their limits in various ways – food or energy poverty, or have dwindling savings or rising debts and are one car problem or appliance breakage away from hardship.
We want to set up a hardship fund. In the past the leadership have come to the church to take an offering for a family with a specific larger need. On occasion we’ve provided a supermarket voucher to help a family who just need help feeding their kids until their next payday. The reasons are many and varied, but they are also increasing.
Rather than continually coming to the church and asking for more, we want to instead look to build up a hardship fund.
Let’s ground this in the Bible a moment. God, throughout Scripture commands care for the poor, and at the birth of the church we see this bubble over:
"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need."
We’ve been trying to build our community around Communities (our small groups), so we would expect most needs to be raised through our Community Leaders somehow. There will be many exceptions! And in some cases, we’re aware of Communities taking care of needs amongst themselves, and we pray this remains the case (and of course, God’s miraculous provision – which we also see in our community).
Once we’re aware of a need, facts are established, the leadership team will prayerfully consider each request. We’d anticipate having smaller needs (e.g. a voucher for a food shop) and larger ones (e.g. a broken appliance to replace), so each case has to be weighed on merit.
Periodically we’ll feedback how much of the fund has been given away.
The Hardship Fund isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ of our generosity toward one another. We are aware of plenty of 1-to-1 generosity, or generosity amongst our Communities – the hardship fund isn’t meant to replace that.
We also want to begin to do work in the year ahead around finances and financial education, sharing possessions and helping mitigate the cost of living crisis for us all. There is plenty of creative ways we might work this out as we pray and explore these ideas. We’d love to hear yours! (But remember, the answer to your idea might be “you go and do that!”)
This may sound odd – but the early church was so ‘other’ than those around them, that some of the reason the Gospel spread was how the Christians lived. What a testimony of an ‘upside down Kingdom’ invading our world for our good!
As stated above, each request will be carefully considered and prayed over by the leadership. But, there may also be questions that arise.
We would want to engage with each request to see that personal responsibility is also factored in, and to establish if other support is needed – e.g. connection to CAP, someone in the church to help keep them accountable or maybe they need help using online bill-cutting tools, perhaps on investigation their need doesn’t require funds, but 2nd hand/donated goods etc.
This may sound like a harsh process, but we want to take seriously the call to help one another. And sometimes more money may not be the most appropriate course of action. We see Paul advise Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:3-18 how to decide who amongst the widows needs help, who is ineligible etc. All that to say, we want to be wise with this fund, and make sure we’re not just patching problems with money or actually perpetuating habitual problems.
- We want to take an additional offering on Sunday 16th March to form an initial pot.
- We recognise for some, making a large gift is difficult, but you might still want to contribute regularly on top of your normal giving – even if that’s a few pounds a month.
- We then want to get into a rhythm of a regular offering for this purpose – perhaps termly, every 6-month or so (it will depend on the level of need).
We’ll be taking a special offering for this fund during our worship on Sunday 16th March.
This is ‘above and beyond’ regular giving, and is a free-will offering meaning if you don’t want to give to it, you don’t have to. Our request is simply that you give prayerfully.