Fr. Thomas Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today! This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad you’ll be with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit, at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be answering your calls tonight, so please make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. To participate online, we encourage you to go either to the AFM Facebook page, at facebook.com/ancientfaithministries, and place a question in the thread for tonight’s show, where it is now being live simulcast. Or you can also go to to facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday and place a question there in the thread for tonight’s show. You can even send us an email at aft@ancientfaith.com. So let’s get started.

There’s an amazing passage in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter eight, where Moses reminds the Israelites that God led them through the wilderness for 40 years, and that they had to rely on God to get them through that ordeal, and he’s leading them into the promised land, that is, the land that God himself promised to the Israelites. Now here’s what’s fascinating about this passage. After he reminds them of that, he gives them a warning. He says this:

Beware, that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments, his judgments, and his statutes which I command you today, lest (listen!) when you have eaten and are full and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, when your heart is lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage, who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, then you say in your heart, “My power and the might of my hand has gained me this wealth,” and you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.

It’s so easy for us as Christians to feel like we are the creators of our own wealth. It’s true, we do work hard for our money, but, as Christians, we see everything we have as God’s grace, whether it is the work of our hands or pure serendipity. That’s very hard for us to understand, and it kind of flies in the face of the Western notion of constantly being reminded by the commercials that “we deserve it all.”

And so, as we head into Thanksgiving this weekend in the United States, it’s good for us to talk about the idea of stewardship of our material wealth and how that relates to the mission of ourselves as Christians and the mission of the Church. How can we be good stewards of everything that we have?

So tonight to talk about that is Fr. John Dresko. Fr. John is currently rector of St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church in Las Vegas, Nevada. He possesses a BA in history from Iona College and an MDiv from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York. In addition, he’s a graduate of the Meyer Institute of Christian Stewardship and The Center for Philanthropy of Indiana University. While in the Air Force, he also graduated from Academic Instructors School at Air University with post-graduate credits in education.

And he is the president of the Orthodox Church Capital Improvement Fund, and we’re going to be talking about that near the end of the program. It’s going to be something that parish council members and priests and parishioners really are going to want to hear about, because this is something completely different. It’s something you’ve probably—the kind of concept of pooling our money together to support the Church and grow the Church—it’s an amazing idea, and I can’t wait to get to that.

So, with that, Fr. John Dresko, welcome to Ancient Faith Today!

Fr. John Dresko: Well, thank you for having me.

Fr. Tom: I’m very glad. I understand that you’re not in Vegas right now; you are with your family on the East Coast, yeah?

Fr. John: I am. I’m in Connecticut with my four children and my seven grandchildren.

Fr. Tom: That’s great. That’s your old stomping grounds, right?

Fr. John: My old stomping grounds, but I don’t remember it being this cold!

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] It is very cold! It’s really—it’s below 32°. It’s been about 25 or 28° here in Pittsburgh, so I can imagine it’s a little colder there. Well, thanks for joining us tonight. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I think I have said before in your presence I don’t like talking about money to my parish, and I remember you being very stern with me and telling me, “Hey, this is something that we have to talk about, because it’s so important.” Talking about stewardship—and I know a lot of the churches are talking about that particular topic right now as we head into the year end.

But before we go, Fr. John, down the road of stewardship, I want to ask you a question that hits home personally for us, and that is: Does God care about how we handle our money? And if he cares, why does he care?

Fr. John: Well, I think it’s not a simple answer, like most Christian things. I think that it’s—you have to begin by looking at whether you are an integrated person. If you are integrated in your life with faith and with church and with your day-to-day life in the community—if all of that is integrated somehow in you as a person—then you can’t help but say, yes, God does care what we do with what we have. We can say, even, I think, that we—part of our Christian life, part of the way that we exercise being a Christian is the way that we use the resources that God has given us. If I choose to use my money simply to, in the vernacular, kind of feather my own nest and not care about the poor and not care about my neighbor and not care about the least of the brethren and certainly not care about the Church, I may amass for myself a very vast fortune, but then we’re reminded of the words of the Lord himself when he tells the parable about the rich man who built the barns and said, “I will sit back and take it easy and eat, drink, and be merry,” and then it says, “Fool, your soul is required of you tonight.” And what becomes of the riches? Nothing.

Fr. Tom: Right.

Fr. John: Yeah, God does care what we do with our money. You could use obvious examples of, if we’re helping the poor and we’re helping the Church, or we’re going to—well, I live in Las Vegas! If you’re going to just casinos and bars and other places, there’s no way that you can claim to be a Christian if you don’t use the resources that God has given you in a godly manner.

Fr. Tom: Right, yeah, it is ironic that this past Sunday we had that gospel reading, of the rich fool. And I guess that brings up the question, because I think in people’s minds they see money as one thing and they see their spiritual life as something else, like sometimes people compartmentalize their life. I have my spiritual life, and I do that thing on Sunday; and I have my work life and I have my money life, and I do that Monday through Friday, and I relax on Saturday—or whatever it is. But there doesn’t seem to be, like you said, integration of these principles into that.

So what is it about money? For instance, in that particular gospel reading, where he says, “I’ll pull down my barns and I’ll build greater ones, and I’ll store all my crops and take ease: eat, drink, and be merry.” And God says, “You fool! This night your soul will be required of you. Then whose will those things be which you have provided?” Why is there this dichotomy? In other words, why can’t we have both?

Fr. John: [Laughter] “Why” I’m not positive. You and I both are cradle Orthodox that have been around all sorts of church life that has this separation between what is perceived as spiritual and material, and in reality there is no separation at all. In reality, everything is spiritual. How we take care of our bodies, how we take care of our neighborhood, how we take care of our money, how we take care of our children—all of these fall somehow into what we might call stewardship, but ultimately it falls into what is spiritual. The things that are material are the things that we handle or we have to care for, but how we care for them, what we do with them: all of that is spiritual.

I’m of an age where I remember enough conversations in church where I’ve heard people say, “Father, you take care of the upstairs and we’ll take care of the downstairs.”

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. John: And there is no upstairs; there is no downstairs. I remember it was a huge controversy when I started having annual parish meetings in the church. I actually had one person say to me, “Father, we don’t want to have meetings in the church.” I said, “Why?” And they said, “Well, because we don’t feel that we’re free to say what we want to say.”

Fr. Tom: Wow.

Fr. John: And I said, “Well, if you can’t say what you want to say in the church, you probably shouldn’t be saying it.” But it shows that separation, that I would even say disintegration, between spiritual and material, when in reality there is none. Throughout Scripture, God has made it very, very clear that possessions—people don’t realize Jesus talked about possessions for 55 times in the gospels—what to do with possessions, how to use possessions, what happens if you use them wrong. It’s a very, very common theme in Scripture, and so it’s obvious that the Lord himself, beginning in Deuteronomy which you quoted… I could go back even further into Exodus, and it’s very clear from then all the way through the New Testament that how we use all the different resources that God has placed into our hands is something that’s going to be judged. It’s going to be judged.

Fr. Tom: Let’s remind our listeners: you can give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346, if you have a question for Fr. John, if you want to get in on the discussion, if you have an opinion about material things, material wealth, the accumulation of it, the use of it. Of course, we’re going to talk more about giving to the Church and growing the Church, but right now we really want to ponder this idea of money. So if you have a comment or a question, feel free to call in.

So, Fr. John, there’s that Scripture that says in—I think it’s by St. Paul. I think it says, “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The love of money is the root of all evil—why is that? Why is the love of money the root of all evil? What is it about the love of money that makes it so destructive?

Fr. John: Well, of course, I mean, that’s one of the more misquoted verses in the Scriptures, because we always hear “the love of money is the root of all evil”—or, no, “money is the root of all evil.” And St. Paul says, no, the love of money is the root of all evil. Essentially, I think it’s two things. I think one is that it reminds us that it’s so very, very easy to turn money, wealth, possessions, into an idol, that we slave after and run after and serve instead of God. The other thing, too, is simply the passion of greed. In America, all church thinking aside, in America… I talk to people all the time about why we have so many fasting periods in the life of the Church, and one of the things I remind them is that in America, in contemporary American culture today, essentially no one is denied anything. If we want something, we have it. If we want to feed an appetite, we feed it. If we don’t have the money to get what we want, we charge it. There is not an ounce of self-denial in contemporary culture, at least not in the way culture promotes itself to us. We’re certainly seeing that now as we move into—well, we’re already in the Christmas season, and this orgy of spending and this orgy of charging. The average American is going to regret their credit card bill in January, that kind of thing.

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] Right, right!

Fr. John: It’s true. But what happens is, that all becomes an idol, and that passion of greed takes over. And all of a sudden, we have redefined for ourselves wants as needs. And God is very, very clear in the Scriptures that if we follow his commandments, he will always provide what we need. Always. He doesn’t always say he’s going to give us what we want, but what we have done is we’ve reversed it and we’ve changed the meaning of “want” into “need” so that there are very few people who have wants. Everybody has “needs.”

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and it seems like the advertisement with the constant media, of course, not only on television but now on our phones, on the internet, on social media, we’re constantly encouraged to consume more and more and more, and especially at this season of the Nativity, there’s such tremendous pressure, where people expect bigger and bigger gifts. And I even joked this Sunday about the Lexus in your driveway with a bow on it. That’s what seems to be the kind of quintessential American Christmas gift. Everybody wants to wake up with a Lexus in their driveway.

Fr. John: Or the Mercedes with a cute puppy. [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: Yeah, it’s just sort of like a sickness that we get caught up in, and we don’t realize how destructive it is to us.

Fr. John: Yeah, I think there are two things that came to my mind just as you were saying that, and one is that Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory, he used to say that the sign of the fall was when man stopped having dominion over creation and started consuming it.

Fr. Tom: Wow.

Fr. John: I remember very, very clearly that he hated the idea that in the government there was a department for consumer affairs and things like that, that we weren’t meant to consume creation; we were meant to have dominion over it and care for it. And then this whole—I think the whole way that America, or maybe even the world, approaches the Christmas season versus the way the Church faces the Christmas season… Right now, since way before Halloween, we’ve seen Christmas ads, Christmas music, everything else, and this is all spinning up and spinning up and spinning up, and on Christmas Day it all comes to a big-bang celebration and that’s it! The Orthodox Church has called all of us to soberly prepare by laying aside our passions, by laying aside our foods, by laying aside our appetites, and then we will celebrate Christmas—and then we will celebrate for twelve more days. And then all of a sudden it’s fast-free until Theophany.

And so the Church has always known this idea of preparation and fulfillment. You can kind of use that as an image of how we use our resources, too. How do we prepare our lives? How do we prepare the things that we have, and what is the fulfillment of that preparation? I just think it’s interesting, the idea that we are not meant to be consumers; we’re meant to have dominion over creation.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, it’s really—it’s a very good point. 1-855-AF-RADIO. We’d love to hear from you this evening.

So, Fr. John, from a theological standpoint as we approach this idea of stewardship, there are aberrations, especially in America, since we’re talking about the sort of forced idea of constantly consuming things. So now—and of course it’s not really anything new; it’s been around for decades, but you have in certain Protestant denominations this kind of “health and wealth” gospel. You see it on TV and you’re encouraged to give more so that you’ll get more, and God is “blessing” you because he wants you to have the best, because he was the best. So let me ask you: if we have a lot of money, does it mean that God has blessed us more than those who don’t have a lot of money?

Fr. John: Well, a blanket answer is of course no. This probably has very little to do with that. St. John Chrysostom actually had some very interesting comments in his sermons on wealth and poverty, and if I can paraphrase him, audaciously, and very simply, St. John said that wealthy people have money for two reasons: one is so that they have the resources to help those who don’t have money, and then, two, it’s so when they stand at the judgment seat, they have no excuse. St. John Chrysostom said that one of the reasons that wealthy people have money is so that when they stand at the judgment seat, they will not be able to say to God, “I didn’t have enough; I couldn’t take care of myself,” and this and that. No, God’s going to say, “You had everything. You had everything and you squandered it.” So, very simply put, that’s what St. John said.

You know, getting back to the prosperity gospel: it’s such an easy thing to fall for, because we always like this idea of kind of a quid pro quo relationship with God. “If I do this, you’ll do this, and if you do that, I’ll do this.” And the relationship, as we know, with Christ and ultimately judgment, is not quid pro quo. It is, as a matter of fact, very nuanced and very difficult to understand sometimes. But the idea, a very simple idea of saying, “If I send this much money there and I do this, then I’m going to be blessed with all these wonderful things.” But it’s very, very clear in Scripture that when God says that—well, St. Paul, for example, in 2 Corinthians… If you ever want to tell anybody what Christian stewardship is, read 2 Corinthians 8-9.

But St. Paul says that God has blessed us with the abundance of everything so that we can give to the things that need giving, and we will never run out of that abundance as long as we give—I’m paraphrasing, of course. I don’t have it in front of me. But it’s very, very clear that God promises either himself in the Scriptures, or through his Apostle, that if we are faithful and do good things with what he has given us, then he will provide the resources to do more good things. But it doesn’t mean that we are going to accumulate wealth, and the rewards that we are going to get is not necessarily a big bank account and not necessarily the Lexus with the big bow on it, but it is going to be the kingdom of heaven.

And so when even as basic as the Sermon on the Mount, when he talks about—we hear this every year on one of the Sundays—“Do not worry about what you eat, what you drink, what you wear. Don’t you know your heavenly Father knows you need all those things? Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all of these things will be given to you as well.” And he always promises to give us what we need, but the kingdom of God and its righteousness is what we need to be seeking, not a bigger bank account.

Fr. Tom: Right. Just the idea of wealth, in our Western society, how do we measure that? In other words, there is a worldly… Well, let me put it this way. There is a worldly way of measuring it. Even the government has a measure that says: If you make over— and I don’t even know what the number is. It’s like: If you make over 140K a year or 400,000 a year or whatever it is, you are officially wealthy. I think it’s 400K. If you make over 400K a year, you are officially wealthy.

Fr. John: [Laughter] I’d agree with that!

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] Right. I guess the game that we play with ourselves, our mind, is we look at our wealth and we say, “Well, then, I’m not wealthy, because I only make 100K a year,” or “I only make—” whatever it is. So how do we as Christians sort of temper this idea of making excuses for ourselves so that when the time comes around that we’re going to talk about stewardship and I’m going to—I’m encouraged to think about what am I going to give to the church next year, and I say, “Well, you know, I’ve got to get my cable, I’ve got to get my gym membership, I’ve got to get the golf membership, I’ve got to make my three car payments…” and then whatever I have left over, maybe I’m going to figure out what I’m going to give the Church.

Is it possible that most of us as American Orthodox Christians—certainly not all of us, because there are truly people that are very, very poor, but is it possible that we’re playing a game in our minds, justifying that we’re not wealthy, when in fact we are unimaginably wealthy in terms of material riches, even if we don’t consider ourselves wealthy?

Fr. John: Well, of course! Yeah, the simple answer is of course we are; we’re playing games with ourselves. But I’ll tell you two things. One is that the most modest of earners in America is wealthier than 98% of the world, and no matter how much we make, we always want more. We have a grand capacity for convincing ourselves that we don’t have enough. I’m constantly amazed at the insecurity that people feel when I can look and see—now, maybe they’re leveraged to the hilt; I don’t know. But I can look and see… You’re a priest. You visit people, and you see things, and you can tell. I don’t have demonstrably poor people in my parish. I don’t have anybody in my parish that’s standing on a street corner on my way home from church, looking for a handout. And yet, I have many, many parishioners that are concerned about getting to next week.

And we have this grand capacity for consuming—there’s that word again—everything that we bring in. And we read articles about—

Fr. Tom: So we’re spending, is what you’re saying.

Fr. John: Well, it could be.

Fr. Tom: We’re just living beyond our means.

Fr. John: Yeah, maybe that, but, I mean, even if we aren’t over-spending, we’re spending everything we have. So there’s no kind of concept of modesty in the way that we live and in the way that we save our money. But at the same time I think it begins with what you said, the idea that you have the cable bill and you have the three car payments. I’ve always told people: If you really, really want to be honest with yourself and find out what you think about Christ and the Church, look at your checkbook. Look at what you are using your resources for. If you do have the three car payments, if you do have the cable bill, if you do have private school for your kids, and then at the end of that month you have a hundred-dollar check to the church or to charity or to some other good cause or something like that, it tells you a lot. It tells you about where your heart is.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, we’re going to talk about that on the other side of the break, Fr. John. We’re going to get to now the topic of stewardship. Now that we’ve kind of set up the idea of how do we see our own personal wealth, now let’s get into the mission part of the title of this program, which is “Money & Mission: How to be Good Stewards.” We are talking with Fr. John Dresko. He is the president of the Orthodox Church Capital Improvement Fund. You are listening to Ancient Faith Today, and we will be right back.

Fr. Tom: Welcome back to Ancient Faith Today. We’re talking with Fr. John Dresko, and we’re talking about “Money & Mission.” So now we’re getting to the topic of the actual stewardship of our money and how we manage that. So, Fr. John, as I said in the intro, this is the time of the year when many churches are approaching their parishioners, and they’re talking about stewardship. I guess I want to ask you: help us understand what stewardship is. And I know we talked a little bit about it, but what is the idea of stewardship, and is stewardship related only to money, because we’ve been talking about money so far.

Fr. John: Yeah, well, first of all, no, it’s not only related to money. That’s actually one of the criticisms of the yearly drive, but it’s important to talk about it in other ways. But as far as stewardship itself, you know, the word “steward,” it’s just someone that is set over something that doesn’t belong to them. So the steward of a household in the Scriptures would be… The master of a household would depend on this person to manage his affairs and his resources and everything else and to do well for him. And we have to look at all of Christian life as if we are stewards of life. Yes, money is one of the great measurements of how we live, but if you look at the Scriptures, the sacrifice of the Old Testament was right from the beginning. And so a steward was one who offered something back to God and understood that what he was offering was not his, but God’s in the first place.

And so we are called to look at our whole life as stewards, and if we’re going to get into theology and especially how it relates to the Church, then we have to begin with that idea of sacrifice. And it begins with the idea that a sacrifice is supposed to be blameless, it’s supposed to be pure, it’s supposed to be firstfruits. It’s not supposed to be—if we get back to money, it’s not supposed to be after the cable bill, after the mortgage; it’s supposed to be the first thing that you do. It’s supposed to be the best that you do. The lambs that were offered in the Old Testament were not the sickly ones that were not able to be sold at the market; they were the best ones, and they were given to God because they were his.

And so the idea of stewardship is intimately tied with the idea of sacrifice, and the idea of sacrifice is that we are offering something to God. It begins with the understanding that what we offer is his in the first place. Now, you and I, I’m pretty sure—I can speak for myself, and I’m pretty sure I can speak for you—we don’t have a bunch of sheep in our backyard, so we’re not going to go and take our firstborn and offer it to God. We’re going to offer from whatever the blessings we have today are. And essentially that’s money, but it also means that you’re supposed to take care of yourself, you’re supposed to take care of the church. In church you don’t talk about just treasure; you also talk about time and talent. Do we offer time to the Church? Do we offer our talents to the Church? Do we offer everything to the glory of God? All of that is wrapped up in this whole idea of “steward” and the idea that we’re going to be called to account.

When I was young and married, first married, we rented apartments. And the landlord expected to receive the apartment back as good or better than he gave it to us. We understand that in our culture—I think, I hope—but we don’t seem to understand it with our relationship with God, that he expects us to take the life that he has given us, and use it and give it back to him in a way that’s even better than he gave it to us. And that’s ultimately what stewardship means.

Fr. Tom: So, in other words, what you are saying is, seeing everything that we have… Sometimes you hear this idea of “time, talent, and treasure,” and you are looking at all of these things, and you are offering them to God as a firstfruit. So how does that…? Let’s look at each one of those categories and talk about what it means to offer firstfruit.

Now, I think sort of the lay-up here is the treasure. What does it mean… And you alluded to it before, but let’s drive that home—what does it mean to offer our treasure, our finances, to God as a firstfruit? Sort of be very specific. What does that look like?

Fr. John: Specifically, it means that you look at your personal budget, and you look at what you make, and you take a proportion of that—and the biblical proportion is a tithe—and you set that aside, and you offer it to God in the Church. And that’s before everything else. You learn to live—in fact, most Christian models of personal finance say you give the—you take the ten percent for God, you take ten percent for savings, and you live on 80%, and that’s being a Christian. And firstfruits means you literally set that aside at the beginning, and you pay that, and you pay all your other bills after that. And if you can’t afford three car payments after you tithe, then you shouldn’t have three cars.

Fr. Tom: Since you brought up the idea of tithing, sometimes there’s a discussion about that. “Oh, tithing, that’s a Protestant concept; that’s not an Orthodox concept.” Give us your understanding of that. Is tithing something that a Christian, an Orthodox Christian, should be doing?

Fr. John: I think, pastorally speaking, it’s something that Orthodox Christians should at least be working toward. Many, many places have never, ever talked about pledging and proportional giving and tithing and things like that, so if you are in a situation like that, or you yourself were raised like that, it’s a very difficult ask to say, “You need to go from giving $500 a year to 10% of your salary.” But you can say, “You can go and give three percent, and four percent, and try and work your way up.”

I do think it’s Christian. I do think it’s Orthodox. I don’t think it’s Protestant to say that tithing was the biblical standard in the Old Testament. And Jesus reaffirmed it during his Passion, when he challenged the scribes and the Pharisees, and he said, “You tithe all these things. You tithe mint and cumin, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law: mercy and truth.” And he said, “You ought to have done mercy and truth, while still doing the others.” He doesn’t absolve them of the tithe. And he says to the rich young man, “You lack one thing: sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and come follow me.”

And so if you want to say tithing is Old Testamental and it’s not Orthodox, you can say that, but then you say, well, New Testamental means you give everything. So what God really wants from us is us. To talk about tithing, I can just tell you a simple little story. When I went to my parish in Connecticut, they were trying to transition from an old dues system to pledging, and I told them, “We can’t do this in one jump, so let’s just start a program,” and we started preaching and teaching about tithing and proportional giving.

And my wife and I had never tithed before, but I learned in the air force, you can’t ask to do something you’re not doing as a good leader, as a good general, so we started proportionally giving. We had four little children, and we just kept increasing the proportion, increasing the proportion. We tithe now, but we had many, many years… We had a couple of years when we had three kids in college at one time, and I sat down every month—back then we wrote checks; nobody writes checks any more, but I used to write the check to the church, and I would think, “Holy mackerel, this money could be going to this college!” [Laughter] But I still wrote the check to the church, and I still put it in the plate. And we made it through, and my kids are all raised. They have their own kids now. And I’m convinced that it’s because we ourselves didn’t hold back from God, and so he didn’t hold back from us.

It’s not a prosperity gospel; it’s not a quid pro quo. All I can tell you is that people that I know that tithe never have a problem. I’ve never had a problem with anything I’ve given; I’ve only had a problem with anything I’ve taken or tried to hoard.

Fr. Tom: Interesting.

Fr. John: So, yeah, bottom line, I think tithing is. I think it’s Orthodox.

Fr. Tom: Yeah. I would love to hear from our listeners. If anybody here is a proponent of tithing, if you have a similar anecdote or story that you’d like to share with us about your experience in tithing, give us a call at 1-855-AF-RADIO.

Fr. John: One other comment that I can make, Fr. Tom…

Fr. Tom: Yeah, please, sure!

Fr. John: In the last few years, probably last eight or nine years, we’ve had numerous, numerous converts in my parish, many of them—most of them—from fundamental Evangelical Protestantism. Almost all of them tithe. Almost all of them tithe. They brought that with them to the Church, and Orthodox are learning that now.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, it’s kind of a sad situation, of course. I’m in the East Coast, so we have a lot of older parishes. My parish is over a hundred years old, and there are old attitudes that kind of come with that. And one them, you mentioned there, the idea of dues in a parish. Why are dues wrong? Because I’m sure that there are still many churches that have this kind of financial arrangement with their parishioners; they have dues: you pay $100 a year or whatever it is, because you have to be a “voting member.” So why are dues wrong and why is stewardship, as you describe it, superior to that?

Fr. John: Well, if you want to just get to where the rubber meets the road, stewardship is superior actually because you have more resources at your disposal. There’s one basic rule that I learned at the Center of Philanthropy in Indiana, and that is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And I think that—you mentioned before that I chastised you when you mentioned you don’t like talking about money. I don’t think I chastised you; I might have said, you know… [Laughter] We need to talk about it.

Fr. Tom: Gently, gently,

Fr. John: Gently, we need to talk about it. But the bottom line is that a dues system essentially is—I think the fault of the dues system is twofold. One is very, very basic. It’s that you ask someone for a certain amount of money, that’s what you get. And so if people say you need to pay $250 to be a member of the church, they give you $250, and they’re never meant to think about anything else, they’re never challenged to think about anything else, and that’s a problem.

The other thing, of course, is just the whole distasteful idea that your membership can be—that there can be a price on it. And the problem, the deeper problem with that of course is that it’s inequitable. You have the little old lady who’s getting $800 a month on social security, and she has to pay $250 to belong to your church; and you have the guy who has the three Lexuses, and he has to pay $250 to belong to the church. So there’s this disconnect between the ability that God has given some people to be generous, and the lack of that ability in others. It’s just not fair; it’s not a fair system.

Fr. Tom: Yeah. It is interesting when you have this kind of transformation of the way that you see your parish, because I do want to ask you next about the… how someone should actually determine and how parishes should understand and approach this idea of stewardship. But we had a situation in our parish for decades where they had a picnic every year. And the picnic was basically like a money-raiser. You would go, and you’d be paying two bucks for a hot dog, and you’d have sausage and halupki and whatever it was. You could easily drop, like, $80 or $90 going to this picnic. Year after year, what happened was, [fewer] and [fewer] people were coming. And so I approached some of the young people and they said, “You know, by the time we get out of there, it’s like $125, and we just wanted to have a picnic!” [Laughter]

And so it brought to mind a saying that I heard Fr. Peter Gillquist say on an old tape—I’m aging myself here—an old tape, where he talked about tithing, and he said— He painted this picture and he gave this vision, and he said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, instead of charging everybody for a dinner, that the church would actually have enough to just say: Hey, come to dinner, and we’re just going to have a big party and we’re going to have fun!” And that’s kind of how I approached this with the parish council. And I said, “Let’s try something different. Let’s just take it out of the treasury. Let’s have a picnic. Nobody’s going to pay anything.” And, honest to goodness, Fr. John, people loved it. It was a whole different atmosphere, where we didn’t have to worry about nickel-and-diming people to death. It was just a wonderful day of fellowship, and no one was burdened with constantly being reminded to give this, give that, give this, give that, because they had already given. So we wanted to just enjoy ourselves.

Fr. John: Yeah, I think one of the big problems with fundraisers is that it ends up being, excuse the word, incestual. You just keep dinging yourself; you just keep going back to your own family, again and again and again. And people get sick of it.

I think the other thing that also is a big problem with fundraisers is it tends to create the atmosphere in the parish that you’re not a good parishioner if you’re not pitching in. If you’re having a picnic and someone is not pinching some pierogies or picking up and grilling the hot dogs or something, and all they’re doing is showing up and eating, well, they’re not very good parishioners; you’ve got to pitch in and help. And I don’t think people need that kind of guilt in a parish. I think that you need—you have to transcend some of that, and these—any kind of events that we have… If you have a decent stewardship program in your parish, you don’t need fundraisers. Or if you want fundraisers for social atmosphere, have it for special projects; better yet, have it for something outside the parish. Have it for IOCC or OCMC or the icon fund or something, but nothing to make sure that the parish can open next Sunday, that kind of thing.

Fr. Tom: Good, good. 1-855-AF-RADIO. So, Fr. John, if a parish wants to start a stewardship program, and let’s say that they’ve never done this before; they are still on the dues system or they’re using envelopes or whatever—how would a parish actually—how would a parish priest and a parish council—how would they actually start that process where they could get to the point where they start a kind of a stewardship program or a pledge system or however you want to talk about that.

Fr. John: Well, I think the priest has to be comfortable in talking about money! [Laughter] No dig there, Fr. Tom.

Fr. Tom: Well, I mean, I’m just not very good at it, but God provides.

Fr. John: And you know what? You’re not unusual. You’re not unusual, and it’s not unusual at all. Believe it or not, the OCA has a stewardship handbook that I authored about 20 years ago. It’s still available online, I believe, and if not I have it if anybody wants to contact me. It actually sets the process that I used to change a parish from dues into stewardship, and then ultimately into pledging and proportional giving. So it’s more probably than we have time to talk about in detail here, but it’s certainly something that can be done. There are tons of scriptural basis for the things we talk about; there are scriptural references listed in the handbook. There are materials available, but you’ve got to want to do it.

Fr. Tom: I see it right here. I’ve actually found the link; I’m going to put it right in the Facebook comment right here, so if people want to grab that, you’ll be able to download. That’s in a PDF format. Thank you very much for that, Fr. John.

How is stewardship, though, related to the mission of the Church? How is it that…? Why does the Church need money, then?

Fr. John: [Laughter] Well, you know, ultimately… [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: It’s like that old joke, right? There’s that old joke about the guy that comes once a year to church, and he comes… Every time he comes, it’s Christmas, and the priest comes out and he says, “We’d like to get money for flowers,” and he said, “Every time I come, all they do is ask for money for flowers, and there’s flowers everywhere!”

Fr. John: “All they do is talk about money.” [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: But, really, in terms of the growth of the Church, how is that stewardship related to the mission of the Church?

Fr. John: I think two things. I think you cannot have a vibrant missionary, mission-minded parish if you don’t have a vibrant, mission-minded budget that allows for a parish to pay a priest, to have a choir director and a vibrant liturgical service, things like that. Obviously, the simple answer is that everything in this world costs money. But I think there’s one thing that I was a little surprised with years ago. I talked one woman in my parish into being the treasurer, and after a couple of years she said to me, “You know, Fr. John, everybody in the parish should take a year as the treasurer, because I had no idea that the parish had this kind of cash flow and these kind of bills about this.” She had no idea. She said, “I think every parishioner, if they could be treasurer for a year, would double what they gave.”

Fr. Tom: Wow!

Fr. John: Yeah, money is just one—money is just what we use now to pay our bills. But I also have to say that time and talent are really important. If you’re a teacher, teach church school; if you’re an accountant, help with the parish council and the treasurer; if you are retired, come to the services. Find out the list of sick people in your parish and pray for them when you have the time. There’s all sorts of ways that you can make the parish alive in stewardship that doesn’t just include money, and that goes for college students and stuff that don’t have a lot of money. There are people that don’t have a lot money, but they have a lot of other stuff.

Fr. Tom: Sure. And actually, I apologize, because I didn’t follow up with the other two things about time and talent in terms of offering that as firstfruits. But, Fr. John, we have a caller here; we have Mary Lou from Tucson, Arizona. Mary Lou, welcome to Ancient Faith Today. You’re on the line with Fr. John Dresko.

Mary Lou: Hi, Father.

Fr. John: Hi!

Mary Lou: I’m watching the program, and I am new to the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Tom: Oh, wonderful.

Mary Lou: I’ve been baptized and chrismated, and it’s been such a wonderful experience. Now, I came from a background of originally Protestant, then Roman, and there’s a really special program there, and it talks about stewardship. What really impressed me was that everything we have comes from God. It’s not our money; it’s God’s money. And he provides for us, and all he asks for is ten percent back, to be used for his purposes in the Church. And so it makes it a lot easier, I think, to realize that it’s not our money; it’s God’s money. And how are we going to handle it? Are we going to be good stewards? I guess that’s all I can really say about it. It’s pretty simple, really.

Fr. John: It is simple, but it’s also complex, because to say that it’s God’s money is one thing, but then to reach a point, spiritually, in your mind and in your heart, where you don’t feel guilty about spending God’s money in another way is a different thing. And in the prophecy of Malachi in the Old Testament, I think it’s the third chapter, the prophet says—God says through the prophet—“Will you rob God?” And no one would answer, “Yes. Yes, I would rob God. If God was standing in front of me, I would rob God. I’d stick a gun in his ribs and take his money.” No one would say that. But then the prophet goes on to say, “But you are robbing God by withholding your tithes. You are using God’s money for your own purposes.”

And until we reach a change in our own mentality, where it’s easy to give lip service and say that everything is God’s and ten percent of it is his money and that’s all he asks back—I might argue with that if people have exceptional wealth, ten percent is not much. But it’s one thing to say that, and it’s another thing to actually make the transformation in your mind, saying, “That ten percent isn’t mine. It isn’t mine.” I think it’s a good transition for some people.

Mary Lou: None of it’s ours, really. Everything comes from God.

Fr. Tom: Mary Lou, did you go through a kind of change of attitude about finances in your Christian walk? You said that you had grown up Protestant. Had you always had this understanding, that everything belonged to God?

Mary Lou: No, no, it wasn’t until—well, I’m 69 now, and I probably learned it in my 40s. It’s amazing, because—well, I actually give a little more than ten percent now, but I don’t know… It’s just a wonderful thing. It’s so… I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s a freedom there. There’s a thankfulness that I had never had before.

Fr. Tom: That’s a good thing.

Mary Lou: And just knowing that I’m trying to be a good steward because God has blessed me so much, and even times when I wasn’t blessed, I still tithed, and everything was okay. I don’t mean to say, “Well, you’ve got to give back because you want all the blessings,” but, dang, I really have had a blessed life. And I’ve had problems like everybody else, and I’ve had some pretty dramatic things that have happened to me. But just knowing that God is there for me, it makes it so much easier to—and that he owns everything, and I’m just a steward. I’m just to use it in ways that are pleasing to him.

Fr. Tom: Amazing. Mary Lou, thank you so much. I appreciate your phone call very much. We’re running out of time here, but thank you so much for both your comments and your testimony. It’s very, very encouraging. And congratulations on your entrance into the Orthodox faith. Welcome home. We’re happy to have you.

Fr. John: Yes, welcome home!

Mary Lou: It’s so wonderful. I feel like I’ve—heaven on earth.

Fr. Tom: Glory to God. Excellent.

Fr. John: It is!

Mary Lou: It is; it really is.

Fr. Tom: Thank you, Mary Lou. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Fr. John, as we wrap up the program this evening, we really want to encourage everyone to learn more about the organization that you lead, called OCCIF, the Orthodox Church Capital Improvement Fund, occif.org. Tell us what OCCIF is and how both people and parishes can participate in it.

Fr. John: In a nutshell, OCCIF was founded about a decade ago to be a resource for Church organizations, especially parishes and some other organizations—we haven’t had any yet but parishes—to have a source of funding for capital projects. So we have become essentially, in the place of a bank, a resource that parishes can go to that need to build a building, that need to refinance their mortgage, that need to make an addition, things like that. We fund it by the investment of qualified Orthodox investors who invest money with us, and we pay them an interest rate, and then we turn around and loan that money out at just a touch higher interest rate to help cover costs.

And we’ve become a valuable resource for people that don’t want to go to a bank. Many, many banks do not want—most banks do not want—to deal with parishes, with churches, and if they do, they often require a personal guarantor. And so we are an Orthodox resource that an Orthodox parish can come to, and we are not going to say to you, “Well, what do you mean you get a lot of money in April but you don’t get a lot of money in August?” That kind of thing.

We have a loan committee that has professional financial people on it, and a parish that applies for a loan has to qualify, just like they have to qualify for a bank, but we have an Orthodox understanding of their situation. One of the things that’s most important is that, first of all, anybody—any parish that is interested, and you do need to be in a canonical Orthodox jurisdiction in America, but if you’re interested, all you have to do is go to occif.org (o-c-c-i-f.org) and just start the process. There’s a little button that says “start the process.”

And there’s a pre-qualification questionnaire, and our loan committee will look at it, and if you qualify we’ll move on with a formal application; and if you don’t qualify, we’ll explain why you don’t qualify, and we’ll work with you to get to the point where you do qualify. So if you’re interested even remotely, just click that button and start and we can get the ball rolling.

As far as investors are concerned, if you want to invest in OCCIF, you can invest various amounts of money at various interest rates. All of the loans and investments are done with promissory notes, and they are five-year commitments, both investments—if you borrow money for a parish to build a building, it’s a 20-year amortization schedule, but it’s paid out for the first five years and then either refinanced again or paid off. So, in a nutshell—I know we’re running out of time; I wouldn’t mind coming back again and talking more about both stewardship and OCCIF.

Fr. Tom: Absolutely!

Fr. John: But OCCIF has the possibilities of being an amazing resource for our Church. And it’s not just OCA; we’ve funded Antiochian churches, ROCOR churches. We’re trying to broaden our base.

Fr. Tom: Do you talk at all about—? I’m curious what your—the number of loans you have out currently, the amount you currently are loaning out. Do you ever disclose that?

Fr. John: Yeah, of course! We have right now, I believe it’s nine loans out—I believe. The total’s a little more than $3,000,000. We are approaching $4,000,000 in capital, and we have, I think, three active applications and a fourth that has just contacted me. So as more and more word gets out, more investment comes in; as more and more investment comes in, more and more loans are made. So we’re trying to get this steamrolled just a little bit more and become a true valuable resource for the whole Church, the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Tom: Well, I think you are now, and it’s really amazing work. It’s an amazing concept. I know that there are other faith traditions that do this, and it’s about time that we are helping our own in this particular case; we’re using our money, investing our money, to grow the Church. So, Fr. John, again, if anybody is interested in that, go to o-c-c-i-f (as in Frank) dot o-r-g, the Orthodox Church Capital Improvement Fund, and there’s also a phone number on there. If you have any questions, you can click the “get started” button and start your application there.

Fr. John: And it costs nothing.

Fr. Tom: And it costs nothing! Wow, that’s amazing. Thank you so much.

Fr. John: At the beginning. [Laughter]

Fr. Tom: Right. Thank you so much for your time tonight. Really outstanding. I wish you and your family a blessed Thanksgiving. Thanks for everything that you do for the Church, and we do want to have you back and continue the conversation.

Fr. John: I would love to do that, and happy Thanksgiving to you, and to everyone out there listening, may God’s blessings be on all of us.

Fr. Tom: Before I share a few final thoughts, I want to thank Fr. John Dresko for joining us tonight. Thanks also to Matushka Trudi for engineering the program for everybody that’s listening in and for our callers.

Here’s a few final thoughts from St. John Chrysostom.

The possession of wealth involves an unavoidable contradiction. By the spirit of greed, men are attached to material things, but God teaches us to despise things and to renounce them. There is harm not only in trying to gain wealth, but also in excessive concern with even the most necessary things.

Chrysostom writes:

Christ has demonstrated what kind of harm can come from the passion for money, but his commandment goes even beyond this. Not only does he order us to scorn wealth, but he forbids us to be concerned that the food we eat is the best we can possibly get. “Do not worry your soul about what you eat.”

This does not exhaust the subject. He writes:

It is not enough to despise wealth, but you must also feed the poor and, more importantly, you must follow Christ. Thus another contradiction is revealed. The worldly drive of greed and the desire for accumulation and preservation of material goods is opposed to the command of the Gospel to give all you have to the poor. Against this background we see with greater clarity the injustice of the social inequality in the world. In the face of poverty and misery, all wealth is an unjust and dead thing. It testifies to the hard-heartedness and the absence of love.

And that’s our show for tonight. Remember to like us on Facebook at facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday. Share out our program after that’s posted, give us your feedback, and contact us with any ideas or topics that you might want to hear about. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving this Thursday, and join us next Tuesday evening for another edition of Ancient Faith Today. Good night, everybody!