Your money and your life! What greater gifts can a man bring? God cares more for men than for anything else in the world. It is life laid down for him which gives joy to the heart of the sacrificial Savior. But money represents life—nay, it is coined personality. Millions of money beyond any previous gift will be needed before the world can be won. Here is the hardest personal battle for a multitude of men. After the personal battle is over others must be persuaded by the victor to share in the enterprise.
A PLAN FOR THE ORGANIZATION AND WORK
OF THE CHURCH MISSIONARY COMMITTEE
FIELDS OF WORK
As a result of experience in thousands of churches in all parts of the United States and Canada it has been demonstrated that the Every Member Canvass is the most effective financial method now being employed by the churches. No program of finance in the local church is complete without an annual Every Member Canvass.
The adoption of sound principles of stewardship, and life brought into deepening harmony with those principles is a part of the price of victory in this war. Such principles are essential to the development and enrichment of character and necessary if there is to be proper expression of character in doing the will of God.
There is hardly any outstanding question in the Church about which there is such confusion and therefore so nerveless an appeal as the subject of stewardship. It is a difficult question and an unpopular one. Inadequate thinking is very common and practise is even more inadequate than thinking both in pulpit and in pew.
The fact that little constructive attention is being given to this subject by the leaders of the Church was well illustrated at one of the Silver Bay Conferences a few years ago. In a group of about seventy-five men, where the subject was under discussion, the leader of the conference asked how many of the men had ever read a book on Christian stewardship. Not more than one half of the men raised their hands. When asked how many had read a book on tithing not more than one fifth responded in the affirmative. If such a representative group of picked leaders is uninformed or uninterested in so vital a matter, the rank and file of the Church must surely need their attention powerfully called to the subject.
The Bible gives a much larger place to the matter of giving than is generally supposed. Some one who claims to have counted the Scripture references says that giving is mentioned 1,565 times in the Bible. One of the significant things about the parables of Jesus is that thirteen of the twenty-nine have some reference to property.