In October 2022, Faith and Money Network relaunched our Trips of Perspective with a visit to Wise County, VA, to learn about the devastating effects of mountaintop removal and how local leaders are organizing for racial, environmental and economic justice. [Read More …]
The Best Hand-me-down Ever: A Giving Story
I chose to be a tither because I remembered that it worked for my parents, who struggled to make ends meet but first gave to God, who in fact did meet their needs on time, every time. As the last of six sons in my childhood home (though my second eldest brother died years before I was born), I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes while growing up. This made perfect sense, since my parents [Read More …]
Sharing “surplus” while embracing the spirit of “giving from want”
I never really knew my maternal grandmother Clara. She was deep in the fog of early onset Alzheimer’s by the time I came along, although I was given Claire as a middle name in honor of her. My mother, who would have been 95 this month, told certain stories about her mom, and one lit my imagination as a child and has remained with me. My mother’s family lived in a very small town in eastern [Read More …]
Living Simply in a Cohousing Community: An interview with Yvette Schock and Bob Francis
Bob Francis, a sociology professor at Whitworth University, and Yvette Schock, a Lutheran pastor and chaplain at Riverview Retirement Community, have a wide-ranging experience of shared simple living. They each lived in intentional communities as single people, and they have been thoughtful about how they think about consumerism and share experiences with other people in their lives. In 2019, the [Read More …]
Trip of Perspective to Central Appalachia
Join Mike Little and others from the Faith and Money Network on a Trip of Perspective to Central Appalachia this fall (Oct. 20-23) to Wise County, Va. to learn about the devastating effects of mountaintop removal and how local leaders are organizing for environmental and economic justice. We'll spend two days listening and building relationships with friends from Southern Appalachian Mountain [Read More …]
A Jubilee Fund replaces credit card debt with community trust — and frees everyone in the process
The Portland-based Jubilee Fund raised $100,000 to eliminate credit card debt for eight neighbors. The individuals who had their debts paid off then became donors, making payments to reparations efforts for five years with 0% interest. What would it look like to build equity and trust by freeing our neighbors from debt? How could we organize a community so that everyone could live with a [Read More …]
Spending our money: It’s a work-in-progress for us
Most people believe that having enough money is a prerequisite for living a good and comfortable life. For most of us, we need money for food, a home (or apartment), meeting our medical needs, buying clothes, obtaining an education for ourselves and our children, and having transportation to get to our jobs. Acquiring even more money opens the door to even more – perhaps a larger and more [Read More …]
Figuring out a new, faith-driven financial path
Trying to align our money choices with our deepest values was confusing, humbling, and complicated. But we weren’t (and aren’t) alone. A few years ago my husband Zach and I began having conversations about “faith and money.” We entered the conversations with some trepidation, as if we were entering uncharted territory. Simplicity and responsibility The conversations [Read More …]
A manna jar for your home
Over the last ten years, the Exodus story of the manna jar and God’s provision for the Hebrew people escaping slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt has become a powerful metaphor in the teaching ministry of Faith and Money Network. (Read more about this “living symbol” in this reflection by Paul Taylor and Lee Van Ham.) Through an arrangement with Kentucky artist and potter Mitchell Rickman, you can now [Read More …]
From anxiety to grace: How my thinking about money has changed
I have never matched most people’s image of someone enslaved to money. I have never thrown ethics to the wind to get or keep a high-paying position; I have never been interested in a high-paying position at all. I have never run up huge credit card bills which I could not pay off. Yet my heart has been in bondage to the idol of money. I grew up an only child in a home with an income that was [Read More …]
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