Simply passing the collection plate during Sunday
services in order to help meet the budget was not good enough for the
leaders of a small church in Mississippi.
So two years ago, the
pastor and leaders of Traceway Baptist Church in Clinton began to pray
about how to better serve their community. After two months of praying
and fasting, they decided they needed to take all of their
congregation's tithes and offerings and give it to those in need for an
entire year.
"At the end of 2009 our leadership was praying and
trying to figure out how we could better represent Jesus Christ in our
community," Pastor John Richardson told The Christian Post.
"Essentially, our prayer was 'God, what can we do so that when people
look at us they will see you?'
"The more we prayed the more we
felt like God was saying, 'If you want to show me to the communities,
then become generous because I am generous,'" Richardson explained. "The
way that we interpreted that was that we were to give away all our
tithes and offerings for an entire year."
Just 50 people, many of
them transient in nature, regularly attend the six-year-old Traceway
Baptist Church. Yet, from April 2010 to April 2011, the church was able
to give away $60,000 to people in the community that were hurting in
many ways, said Richardson, who has written a book on the story and
subject of generosity called
Giving Away the Collection Plate (June 2012).
"Everything
that was given to our church in the offering plates was given away to
abused mothers that got out of bad situations basically with the clothes
on their backs, or people that were trying to break free from
addiction, or people that had lost jobs or facing foreclosures, or had
extreme medical bills, or anything like that," he said.
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