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January 2, 2008
Function Precedes Form
Don Campell is the Director of Stewardship for the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. He can be reached via phone at 1.804.672.2100 or via e-mail. After visiting with Don in his office one afternoon, he told me about his theory of "function precedes form" and how that impacts our strategic approach to stewardship and giving. I asked him to expand on that idea. Below is his response.
Imagine my disappointment when, as a young boy in my elementary school shop class, I discovered that you couldn’t just pick up wood and create something. It was a hard lesson to learn that I had to sit down, draw my ‘ship’ and then carefully print my plans for building it step by step. Later in high-school I hit the same snag when in Algebra I had to learn ‘how’ to arrive at the correct answers. I could figure the problems out but when I couldn’t demonstrate how I got to the correct conclusion I had to listen to my teacher’s counsel.
Through many years of formal education and working through many tasks those lessons from my early education have rung true time after time. An important part of stewardship development for the Baptist General Association of Virginia is writing and speaking with many about the need of going back to basics in the area of Stewardship Education and practices.
In architecture it is my understanding that "function precedes form." Knowing the function of an organization will inform the architect who will then go to the drafting board to design a building that will address the issue of function. The problem in much stewardship education over the years is that we have been designing programs (buildings) without considering the total picture (function) of stewardship addressed in the scriptures.
Douglas John Hall sees man as a steward from the onset of creation. Indeed the Genesis account of man’s placement in Eden’s blessed environment record’s his creator’s conferring responsibility on him for caring for all that we was being given. If this pattern is accepted then it means that the whole of man’s stewarding responsibilities have been wrongfully boiled down to tossing “coins in the coffer” not to build a cathedral but many times to make up for a shortfall or fix a leaking church roof.
It is as if stewardship has been compressed to a convenient, non-threatening brass container that is rubbed (gently) when things and money gets tight. Stewardship has been held captive, in too many churches, by the "tyranny of the urgent."
Hall’s thesis in Imaging God is that man is the image of God. As the image of our God we are to reflect what kind of a God we serve. A God concerned for sinful ancestors, a God concerned for a brother’s killer, a God concerned for wailing prophets and ailing mother’s in law. We have a God who gave everything and asks very little in return.
A steward is a metaphor, the image of his creator. As human stewards of all that our Lord provides we are to be as caring for creation as our Lord was. We are to be as loving in our living as our Lord was. We are to be as giving in our spiritual living as our Lord was. As the voluntarily connected children of the living God we are to be as committed to missions as our Redeemer was.
Someday the Lord will return after travelling on a “long journey” and he will summon a grand meeting of all living stewards. The tragedy for some will be that they will have lived with a misunderstood and imperfect view of stewardship as an annual response to urgent need fund-raising.
Back to basics is to go back to the book of beginnings (Genesis) and relearn the original assignment to mankind to be stewards, caring and tending for God’s creation. Real stewarding grows out of obedience, is strengthened by faithfulness and becomes motivating by the love of God recognized in a believing steward.
Posted by bstroup at January 2, 2008 1:23 AM
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