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Introduction: "The Good Steward"
“The first fifteen years of the twentieth century,” historian Gaius Glenn Atkins wrote, “may sometime be remembered in America as the Age of Crusades. There was a superabundance of zeal, a sufficiency of good causes, unusual moral idealism, excessive confidence in mass movements and leaders with rare gifts of popular appeal.”[1] One of the “crusades” from that era decisively shaped contemporary American religious thinking about faith and money. The Protestant teachings about giving took on its modern form in those years.
The “stewardship movement” got off to a relatively quiet start in a time, when as Atkins noted, “the air was full of banners, and the trumpets called from every camp.”[2] Its founders were not “leaders with rare gifts of popular appeal.” The celebrities of early twentieth century Protestantism – John R. Mott, for instance – played only marginal roles in this cause. For the most part, the creators of the movement were largely unknown church bureaucrats who worked behind the scenes in denominational agencies. Yet within the span of a few years, a handful of executives deftly buried the tired language about “systematic benevolence” and substituted in its place an old and familiar Biblical notion. Their adroit rhetorical surgery helped make “stewardship” into the most powerful symbol of giving in Protestantism in recent times.
Here is an early twentieth century enthusiasm that has far outlived most of the other crusades of that era. Ask any contemporary Protestant to name the one word that sums up the meaning of giving. Many will give the same answer. Stewardship has become a byword not only in the churches but also in American society. The sudden emergence and enduring popularity of this notion is a story that tells us something important about both American religion and American culture.
By and large, the tale as told here embodies the spirit of American idealism at one of its peak moments. The “stewardship” boom of the 1910s came amidst a surge of heady optimism in both the mainstream churches and the larger society. In Atkins' words: “The people were ready to cry ‘God wills it’ and set out for world peace, prohibition, the Progressive Party, the ‘New Freedom’ or the ‘World for Christ in this Generation.’”[3] For a brief interlude the World War – the struggle now called World War I – became the “war to end all wars.” In all these ways the “age of crusades” celebrated the untrammeled possibilities of the future.
In that same spirit, the stewardship enthusiasts believed that the Protestant Establishment had finally found the remedy to end its struggles with money. So in 1919 one Methodist executive declared: “The old history of church finances going on the rocks, of the silly and frenzied methods of carrying on the Lord's work . . . has at last had its legitimate effect and brought Christian people to their senses.”[4] With an evident sense of relief (and premature certainty) he announced that “Strawberry festivals and rummages sales have had their day in church finance.”[5] As the reader will soon discover in studying one of the following documents, this Methodist was even willing to use the venerable Wesleyan phrase, “going on to perfection,” when describing the consequences of stewardship.
These ebullient proclamations of a new day in church finances reflected not only the temper of the times but also the elation that comes with the sense of discovery. The first generation in the stewardship movement believed they had hit upon something of profound importance. By unearthing the treasure hidden in the notion of stewardship, they hoped to create new and authoritative teachings about giving that would convince even the most hardened cynics and skeptics in their midst.
Irrelevant and Overblown?
Over the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the various Protestant efforts to answer the question – Why give? – had attracted considerable criticism. But no one in those decades had ever dismissed this whole enterprise as irrelevant or unnecessary. Then came the 1870s. In this account I will focus on the perspectives of a cynic and a skeptic, both of whom in their very different ways raised fundamental questions about Protestant teachings concerning giving.
The cynic was one of America's most beloved authors. The famed American humorist, Mark Twain, gave this period its best name when he published his scorching assault on the mores of his time in the novel entitled The Gilded Age. It was a time, as Twain said of one of his characters, “when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation. . .. He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich today, who had come into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified among any of the regular occupations of life.”[6] Graft and corruption seemed to rule politics as well as business.
Twain's revulsion for the America of the post-Civil War era was so deep that he resorted to religious parody in describing the extent of the national sickness. In an 1871 piece written for a New York newspaper, he summed up his reading of the true religion of the era in “The Revised Catechism:”
What is the chief end of man? – to get rich. In what way? – dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one and only true God? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock – father, son and the ghost of same –three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme and William Tweed is his prophet.[7]
At the same time, Twain felt the spirit of that credo at work in his own personal life. “The code he detested was also, in part, the one he lived by,” according to Justin Kaplan. “He wanted to get rich, not just get along. . . . It is hard to think of another writer so obsessed in his life and work by the lure, the rustle and chink and heft of money.”[8] His own bouts of compulsive spending, those misbegotten schemes to get rich quickly and the struggles with bankruptcy provided another wrenching example of what he found so appalling about America during the Gilded Age. In a curiously ironic way, his life bore the marks of the disease that he had already named as the brand of shame.
No matter which way Twain turned, he could not escape from the tyranny of money. In turn, that sense of imprisonment contributed to his despair about both the country and people like himself. Was there any other god beside Mammon? Did anyone have wisdom about money? There were no ready answers forthcoming from any quarter. Not from the Protestant churches which loomed so large on the American landscape in those years. And certainly not from the Protestant visions of giving.
Though not a church member, Twain had been exposed on various occasions to appeals for money in different congregations. His response ranged from wry amusement to boredom. What he gained from those chance encounters was, at most, the stimulus for another yarn for publication or a tale with which to regale his friends. Otherwise the conventional religious approach to giving had little meaning for him. Mark Twain never made that point explicit, lest he arouse the suspicion of the pious. As an entertainer he could ill afford to bring the wrath of the churches down upon him. But his disdain for most of the talk about God and money was unmistakable. It was, in brief, irrelevant.
Mary Dodge, a journalist active in the 1870s, had no reason to conceal her skepticism about the churches' way of talking about money. Her sharp-eyed observations about “grace and greenbacks” included here as Resource 4.9, constituted a blistering attack upon the prevailing Protestant talk about giving. Like Twain, she found it predictable, tedious and boring.
In some more important ways, however, Dodge was closer to Catharine Beecher than to Mark Twain. Like Beecher, Mary Dodge called attention to the necessary role of reason in any decision about giving. We can not rely alone on the Bible, she declared. “The Bible abounds in precepts and principles and illustrations; but it steadfastly refuses to give us rules.”[9] There are no absolute and fixed commandments that govern giving. “There is nothing for it but to use our own reason.”[10]
Once we began to reason about these matters, Mary Dodge believed, we would notice the contradictions and pretensions that mar the usual teachings about giving. Protestantism had fallen into some deeply rutted habits of speech. What does it mean, she mused, when church folk describe “the money which we devote to teaching and extending the gospel” as “money given to the Lord,” “while the money which we devote to other purposes is money kept to ourselves?” Are we serious in calling people to give “sacrificially?” Dodge lampooned facile chatter about “sacrificial” giving, especially those appeals aimed at women who were asked to give up their jewelry. Why should this burden fall more upon women than men?
Her most revealing complaint concerned the issue of authority. There was no possible justification for one Christian to tell another how much to give. “You have no more right to dictate a man's charities,” she noted, “than you have to dictate his courtship.”[11] The equation of charities and courtship is quite illuminating, for it helps us understand one of the deeper cultural shifts that was taking place in Victorian America.
Just as courtship or romantic love has become a profoundly personal or private concern, so any decision about giving money is now made in the private domain. No one can infringe upon my privacy when it comes to money. Any effort on the part of another person – no matter how well–intended – to establish standards that govern my giving amount to an invasion of privacy. I give what I want to give, just as I court whom I may want to marry someday. In short, money is a private matter. And the churches have no right to intrude into that territory.
These convictions effectively undercut the whole effort to teach about giving. It becomes increasingly hard to mount persuasive arguments for giving if one doubts the possibility of arriving at shared and presumably authoritative standards that would guide all members of a community in their decisions. I suspect that Dodge would not have been disconcerted by that observation. The import of her skepticism raised doubts about whether the elaborate enterprise of Protestant fund-raising was really necessary. It was cumbersome, she believed, largely because ministers seemed incapable of being forthright about their own needs or the essential expenditures of the local congregation. If the ministers could mend their ways, then there would less of the incessant whining and preoccupation with money in church circles. “Religious beggary” had become a nuisance. “In the Protestant Church,” she declared, “we have abolished priesthood; but mendicancy, prevented from concentrating itself in a single order, has become diffused through all orders.”[12]
In different ways Mark Twain and Mary Dodge were posing the same sorts of questions. Many of them were old queries that were becoming increasingly hard to answer in the post-Civil War era. Who gave you the right to tell me how I should think about money? Does anybody else know better than I do about what I should give? Why should I pay any attention to the clergy on this matter? In short, the familiar question – By what authority? – had clearly never been put to rest.
But now there was another deeply troubling matter that would haunt middle class America for decades to come. The spiritual legacy of the Gilded Age and its preoccupation with “money power” pressed church leaders (and others in American society as well) to ask a powerful question.
Can the Powerful Become Responsible?
Like most mission agencies in the 1880s, the American Home Missionary Society was always looking for ways of informing the Christian public about its work – and, of course, about its need for money. In 1886 the Society published a book written by one of its staff members. Josiah Strong's assignment was to make a case for supporting the “evangelization” of America. There was nothing unusual about the task of writing another tract for the time. Countless authors had explored this theme earlier in the century. When it was printed, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis was just another example of Protestant teachings about giving.
Yet something unusual occurred soon after this book became available. It quickly garnered a vast audience. Intended to be a tract for the time, Our Country became the tract of the time for much of the Protestant Establishment during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. The American daily press reproduced portions of the book, and so its message reached well beyond the regular supporters of the “home missionary” cause. For various reasons this book proved to be enormously exciting to many Protestants in turn-of-the-century America. Let us examine some of those reasons.
The mission agency could hardly have chosen a better time to publish this work. It came along precisely at the moment when a fresh surge of energy was re-igniting the missionary movement. A new generation of missionary enthusiasts, some of whom would later become world-famous, was then in college. Within a few years after Our Country was published, such promising young leaders as John R. Mott would begin making the touchstone of their student-led movement – “the evangelization of the world in this generation” – into a vision that captured the allegiances of Christians all across the globe. So much depends, they believed, on what American Protestants do and how they respond in this pressing moment of unprecedented opportunity. Once again the mission movement seemed on the verge of exciting growth and expansion.
In this historical setting Strong's argument made sense because it represented, in effect, an up-to-date version of the older appeal, once rendered so passionately by Lyman Beecher almost sixty years earlier: Convert America and thereby prepare for the conversion of the world. Whenever he asked for money, Josiah Strong – like Beecher – appealed to the authority of the mission movement and its compelling image of the future. Like his predecessor, he stressed the importance of making “sacrificial” contributions right now rather than waiting for some more convenient time. Strong shared Beecher's sense of overwhelming crisis. The time for giving is always in the present. The “world's emergency” requires everything that we have right now. While the “system” in systematic benevolence is “both reasonable and scriptural”, it does not follow necessarily that ‘duty has been done’” when a certain proportion has been given – “be it a tenth, or fifth, or half.” (See Resource 4.10
The crusade would also have beneficial side effects. Strong believed that his strenuous calls for total giving would help America master its obsession with “money power.” It did not make any difference how rich the country had become since the Civil War. “Our wealth is stupendous,” he wrote. But if others warned of its demonic powers, he was optimistic about taming the beast. The tyranny of money can be broken. Our renewed devotion to mission will make the difference, he kept insisting. Both the mission and the movement it has inspired can ultimately “Christianize” the money power. And that meant that a new and far better future was in the making.
Josiah Strong was among the first of turn-of-the-century Protestants to advocate “Christianizing” the money power. Later the pioneers of the Social Gospel, especially Walter Rauschenbusch, would probe that same theme in a more radical fashion. Whatever their differences, Strong and Rauschenbusch both believed that “Christianizing” the money power opened the way toward the Kingdom of God on earth. Rauschenbusch foresaw the need for ensuring economic equality between classes so that there would be no unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor. In contrast the author of Our Country assumed the powerful in American society – even the wealthy – could become responsible by giving sacrificially to church-related causes.
The powerful can be responsible. That theme runs throughout Strong's book and accounts for some of its appeal to a large audience. The spiritual aftermath of the Gilded Age left some middle class Protestants weary of cynicism and therefore ready for an alternative. Here was a positive ideal, one perfectly suited to the tastes of individualistic America. Moreover this same hope could inspire an individual's participation in political and educational reform, as indeed it did motivate some during the forthcoming Progressive era.
Josiah Strong also anticipated another coming fashion. Although the word “stewardship” was mentioned only once in Our Country, that Biblical notion is compatible with the thrust of the book. All of us, he insisted, are accountable for what we have been given. God's money has been entrusted to us for a short while. During our life we are the trustees and managers of that divine trust. Trusteeship – or stewardship – is the first step toward human responsibility and eventually toward the Kingdom of God.
In many ways Our Country was a forerunner of much of the stewardship literature that would start to flood the country a quarter of a century later. Written by an idealist for a presumably idealistic-minded audience, the book had an enormously ambitious reach. What began as a promotional piece for the “home missionary” cause ended up planting guideposts to the Kingdom of God. Along the way the reader encountered large-scale crises and opportunities. Strong's idea of an emergency was nothing less than a "world emergency." Generous giving could solve huge social problems. The solutions were total in nature just as the giving was supposed to be total. There was little sense of the limits of giving as a social strategy, or of the myriad complications that can inhibit progress when one encounters unintended consequences. It was a world without irony or tragedy.
Josiah Strong believed in the power of ideals. Create a large enough ideal, he implied, and then one can better sway the course of history. At its worst this kind of teaching about giving produces bloated prose and expectations; at its best it lifts the gaze of readers so they can see the faint outlines of a far off horizon beckoning them onward. Our Country contained a little of the best and some of the worst of Protestant teachings about giving, both of which is evident in Resource 4.10.
Another idealist at work in the later part of the nineteenth century was the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie. At first glance he may seem like an odd soul mate for the likes of Josiah Strong. Carnegie had a well-deserved reputation for being ruthless as an employer and competitor. Moreover he counted himself a realist, particularly in matters related to giving. In the essay “Wealth,” included here as Resource 4.11
But in one respect at least he was every bit as much an idealist as Josiah Strong. Andrew Carnegie believed it is possible to curb the money power of the rich by persuading the wealthy to give their surplus capital away. He offered what he called the “true antidote” for the temporary inequality between the rich and the poor. The rich person will become “the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.” Along with Strong, Carnegie relies upon the concept of trusteeship as the means by which he can woo the rich into “returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.” Thus is the problem of “Rich and Poor to be solved.” And thus can the powerful be responsible.
Carnegie's solution for “the problem of Rich and Poor” aroused the opposition of a fair number of critics in the years following its publication in 1889. Almost twenty-five years later Walter Rauschenbusch, the outstanding theologian of the Social Gospel, offered the most discerning rebuttal of this sort of argument.[13] He pointed out that modern trustees should be held legally liable for any misuse of the trust under their management. Yet the rich person who acts as a “trustee for his poorer brethren,” to repeat Carnegie's phrase once more, is not subject to the democratic process of “Recall.”[14] No one can fine or even seek the dismissal of this kind of trustee.
This strange definition of trusteeship, in Rauschenbusch's view, meant that the modern philanthropists and church leaders were not serious when they invoked such notions as “stewardship” and “trusteeship.” Although he praised the churches for attempting “to cure the hard selfishness of our commercial life by quickening the sense of responsibility in men of wealth,” he dismissed the “doctrine of stewardship” as irrelevant to modern times. “The word ‘stewardship’ itself comes down to us from an age of great landed proprietors. It has an antique dignity that guarantees it as harmless.”[15] While trusteeship could mean something in contemporary America, it too is rendered harmless in pretentious talk about rich folk volunteering to be trustees for the poor. Any trustee who always has the final word is really no trustee at all. In effect, Rauschenbusch was asking the wealthy – Who appointed you to be trustee for the “poorer brethren?” By what authority do you act on behalf of the poor?
This line of questioning went unanswered and even unheard amidst the hosannas for Carnegie and his essay. Ever since its appearance over one hundred years ago, “Wealth” or the “Gospel of Wealth” as he entitled a second edition, has enjoyed a measure of popularity in most generations. Indeed, I know of no other example of the teaching about giving from the turn-of-the-century era that is still being rediscovered, read and analyzed in the new turn-of-the-century era.[16] Carnegie's solution of “the problem of Rich and Poor” remains a quintessential expression of a conservative American idealism.
Another survivor from that earlier period is the phrase, “tainted money.” This battle slogan came out of one of the major church fights early in this century. It all began in an argument over a handsome Rockefeller gift to the Congregational Church. If the denominational leaders had expected thanks from other Congregationalists for their success in snaring a grant from America's richest man, they were in for a rude surprise. Washington Gladden, a renowned Ohio pastor and Social Gospel exponent, led the fight against accepting this donation. In the course of challenging the fund-raisers, Gladden introduced the taunt, “tainted money.” A fuller account of that phrase and the struggle it embodied is offered in the Introduction to Resource 4.12.
Here I will focus upon Washington Gladden as a strikingly distinctive figure in the succession of idealists who did so much to shape the churches' teachings about money. He broke from the conventional wisdom that had dominated Protestant visions of giving throughout the nineteenth century. Most of his predecessors or his contemporaries like Josiah Strong had focused almost entirely upon two questions–“Why should we give?” “How much should we give?” Anybody who could answer those queries, so it was assumed, could unlock the purses of Protestants. Therefore those questions became imperative concerns in the America religious marketplace where one had a hard time escaping from “bottom line” anxieties.
Gladden's implacable idealism freed him to ask some other equally significant questions that were not nearly as popular among his contemporaries. The latter-day reader will not find these queries made in an orderly fashion in Resource 4.12
The first of the new queries concerned the moral identity of the givers. Who are the givers? What is their history? Are their beliefs and actions compatible with the commitments of the church? Would their gift strengthen or diminish the integrity of the church? Is every gift acceptable?
The second question involves a turn in a new direction. Who are the ones asking? Our authority to ask others to give to certain causes depends, at least in part, upon our personal integrity. In turn, integrity requires honesty on our part with both the potential giver and others involved in our institution. The thrust of his piece, as I state more fully in the Introduction to Resource 4.12, called more for communal self-criticism among the Congregational leaders than it did for just another attack upon John D. Rockefeller. By implication Gladden was suggesting that our “ethics of asking” are fully as significant as our advice to donors about the “ethics of giving.” Gladden doubted whether the oil billionaire could ever be held responsible, but he had no doubts that such a powerful cultural force as the Protestant Establishment could be more responsible.
What will the churches’ fund-raising activities teach the public about the Gospel? This final question expressed Gladden's deepest concern. All our acts of asking for and giving money, he intimated, could become public occasions in which people learn about Christian faith and the work of the churches. In this particular instance, for example, he worried greatly about the response of skeptical college students and an alienated working class to the news that the Congregational Church had accepted money he considered “tainted.”
Whatever the merits of his arguments about this episode, Gladden's larger point was quite telling. The churches' way of asking for and receiving gifts can be a potent form of public teaching about money – perhaps even more persuasive occasionally than the formal teaching on that subject offered in their educational institutions. American Protestants have had frequent opportunities to remember the sting of that truth during the rest of the twentieth century.[17]
The “tainted money” controversy also pointed to another truth that was becoming slowly evident to some in the early 1900s. The voracious hunger of Protestant institutions for cash was driving church leaders to indulge in dubious tactics and high-pressure campaigns. There must be a better way. The churches needed a new system that would reach the fast growing numbers of middle class laity.
A "New" System
Like other modern organizations, especially the corporations, the early twentieth century denominations were caught up in the excitement of becoming large national institutions that could respond efficiently to crises and opportunities. That push toward modernity produced a cascade of changes in some sectors of American Protestantism. One of those changes, in turn, set in motion certain forces that decisively shaped the story told in the rest of this anthology. After decades in which the task of teaching about giving had been no one group's special responsibility, it suddenly acquired its own interpreters, defenders and promoters. From the 1910s onward, successive generations of church bureaucrats would dominate its development.
This turn of events was no accident. One mark of the emerging modern organization in early twentieth century America was a burgeoning bureaucracy. Without clusters of specialists working together in an orderly fashion, a corporation or a denomination could not keep changing its national or international programs in response to the swift pace of history. Progress would not come apart from efficiency. Efficiency required clear chains of command, job definitions and adherence to budgets and standard procedures. All of these improvements, in turn, called for more money to pay for the inevitable staff expansion as well as the new programs.
While there was nothing novel about the denominations' hunger for money, these changing circumstances did call for a new kind of church bureaucrat or manager. The old-style traveling financial agents had long since passed off the scene. Now the in-breaking era of efficiency demanded experts who could help the churches become truly business-like in fundraising. Just as the corporations and business firms had developed new standards for their leaders, so the denominations must find managers who could convince Protestants of the need for “system,” “method” and “planning.”
The work of planning was particularly important. No self-respecting denomination could be without a plan of some sort. The northern Methodists, for example, were among the leaders in advocating planning both at the national and local levels. “If a well-systematized financial plan can be presented in the local church,” a northern Methodist Board declared in 1912, “we have confidence that the church will respond in generous measure.”[18] The congregations will only respond if everyone is educated in systematic giving. That is a “tremendous task” the Methodist bishops concurred, “but it must be undertaken. And the first step toward it is to find a rational, Scriptural, systematic basis for asking.”[19]
In one way, of course, there was nothing unusual about that quest for “the” system. As I have already indicated, American Protestants had been talking about taking that “first step” for at least seventy-five years. In fact, some in the preceding generations thought they had already discovered the “Scriptural, systematic basis for asking.” The magical words–“system,” “method” and “plan”–had appeared in numerous tracts and essays about “systematic benevolence” ever since the 1850s.
Even so, the bishops apparently believed the time had arrived for a fresh beginning, or at the very least, an up-to-date version of the systematic benevolence of an earlier time. Some elements of an emerging new system were already in place. Decades after Samuel Harris and others had talked about the rhythms of giving, increasing numbers of congregations across denominational boundaries were asking members to make an annual pledge and to pay it in weekly installments. The Sunday collection was becoming a familiar rite.
One sign of the future came in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The “duplex” envelope for the weekly offering arrived on the scene. Still used in some Protestant congregations, this two-pocketed envelope allows the giver to divide the offering between current expenses of the local church and missions support. The envelope system offered another advantage. The passing of a collection plate through a congregation allowed people to inspect – discretely, of course – the amounts given by their neighbors.[20] The envelope system afforded a measure of privacy from prying eyes; no one else in the church can know the amount given except the teller who opened the envelope after the service. Privacy was becoming increasingly important in money matters.
Another element in the new system can be traced back to the Y.M.C.A. In the waning years of the last century a few Y.M.C.A.'s staff members became experts in running what they called “whirlwind” campaigns while raising money for either “Y” building projects or annual expenses. The heart of these intensive, short-term campaigns was the activities of volunteers who would visit every prospective contributor in his office or at home. “With team play, competition, and mass psychology and publicity,” said one of the experts, “an entire city was made so interested and ready to give that a large number of men, many of whom were probably poor solicitors, could successfully solicit subscriptions in a short length of time.”[21] In due time the notion of a campaign – another martial metaphor, by the way – served as the prototype for financial campaigns in twentieth century organizations of quite different kinds.
One of those institutions was the Laymen's Missionary Movement. This popular lay-run coalition took on the daunting challenge of arousing Protestant men to a deeper commitment to the cause of missions. In its short lifetime from 1906 to 1920, the organization spawned various innovations in church life.[22] Among those was the idea of an “every member canvass” among men in a local church. Volunteers would fan out across the congregation and visit with every male member about both the need for a church budget for missions and also a personal pledge to that cause. The results of this experiment, wherever it was tried, were so encouraging that the denominations were soon ready to include every member in the canvass. Just as the national churches adopted this practice, their income increased sharply enough so as to encourage high hopes for an even better future.
There was, however, one crucial element missing in this emerging system. It lacked a name or a dominant symbol. The phrase, “every member canvass,” hardly filled the bill. No matter how useful, an organizational procedure seldom fires the imagination or serves as a rallying cry for a movement. For that matter, those Latinized abstractions – “systematic benevolence” and its kin phrase, “systematic beneficence” - were not the stuff of which crusades are made. It was in these circumstances, therefore, that the denominational leaders turned to “stewardship” and embraced it as their new motto. In the years leading up to World War I, this notion came to embody the promise of a new vision of giving.
Stewardship became popular for at least three reasons. It offered, first of all, a relatively fresh way of talking about faith and money. To be sure, the word “stewardship” had appeared occasionally in earlier American Protestant writings on this theme. A long line of New England divines from Cotton Mather to Leonard Bacon[23] in the nineteenth century appealed to this notion. But no cohort before the champions of stewardship arrived on the scenes in the early 1900s had converted it into the motto for a national program of giving. In any event, this concept seemed far more lively and promising than predictable talk about systematic benevolence.
Stewardship also had a Biblical lineage. That claim carried considerable weight in an era when adult Bible classes and the Sunday school movement were thriving. While the advocates of systematic beneficence depended largely on the slender reed of I Corinthians 16:2, the stewardship enthusiasts could roam through the New Testament parables about stewards, unjust and otherwise, or refer to Paul's use of the term. Those Biblical references, they believed, would broaden the appeal of the teaching about giving that in its previous incarnations had often seemed abstract and bereft of visual symbols. These folk were hard at work in rendering the Biblical language in concrete terms that twentieth century Protestants could understand.
By way of illustration: the “landlord and tenant” theme in the New Testament parables about stewards provided them with a way of interpreting the relation between God and the human race. So God becomes the “universal proprietor” [24] and our responsibility, in the words of one interpreter, is to “Pay your Divine Landlord his rents and royalties.”[25] The Biblical world they portrayed in the new teaching about giving was very much like the commercial one they already inhabited as Americans. Any businessman could understand contracts and payments.
And that brings us to the most important reason for the popularity of this notion. Stewardship blended in nicely with the values of white middle-class America. Earlier I noted how the Biblical theme of the steward appeared almost interchangeable with the secular concept of the trustee. Likewise stewardship resonated with another word in those years before World War I. The good steward was the effective manager in addition to being the trustee. Although the Scriptural translations available then did not explicitly suggest this equivalence (as does the New Revised Standard Version in several passages), the stewardship gurus often found a connection between the Biblical theme and the managerial values of the1910s. In their estimate, stewards–whether of the first or the twentieth century–cherish order, efficiency, planning and taking responsibility. The stewards of every age feel comfortable in hierarchical structures.
The steward as trustee, the steward as manager – but what about the steward as giver? After all, one might expect that to be the point of discussing stewardship at such length in these reflections upon Protestant teaching about giving in America. During the last seventy-five years, church folk have come to assume that stewardship means giving. But was that a common assumption before the twentieth century? That should remain an open question until more historical research is done.
In the meantime I am willing to venture a few preliminary suggestions. A responsible interpreter in our time can stretch the Biblical images of the steward to the point where one can find intimations of the notions of trusteeship or management. It is a very far stretch, however, to include giving within that range of possible meanings of the Scriptural texts.[26] Furthermore, the identification of stewardship with voluntary giving is probably a modern creation. That equation of meaning has not endured for any significant length of time in church history until a very recent period.[27] Hence the first generation of stewardship bureaucrats in the 1910s were among the first to describe the steward as the giver. Without that added layer of meaning they would have had no reason to make “stewardship” the emblem of their crusade.
Their core message about stewardship was nearly complete. When stripped of its rhetorical plumage, it offered three bare propositions: Christians are called to be stewards of what God has given them. The good steward cares for the temporary possessions given in trust. And not least, the good steward returns to God that portion of money required by Scripture. All that was needed now was clarity about the Biblical standard of giving.
But of course there was not just one version of that Scriptural mandate. Each option attracted its own zealous defenders. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, the promoters of systematic benevolence had insisted upon the wisdom packed into that single phase – “As God hath prospered him.” In their view the “law” of proportionate giving seemed clearly the full revelation of God's will. Its advocates in the 1850s were, in effect, social realists in their forthright recognition of the differences in income among members within the churches. They were also social idealists in their belief that a devotion to the common good and a sense of justice should prompt the prosperous to give at a far higher rate than the poor.
That same view of giving informed the Social Gospel movement. Washington Gladden, for instance, worried about any “insistence upon the tithe” since it could well “obscure the Christian principle: ‘Every man according to his several ability.’”[28] Walter Rauschenbusch was of a similar conviction, though he doubted that the rich as a class would ever be consistent proportionate givers as the poor.[29]
Furthermore, that view of giving to the churches prompted these Social Gospel leaders to embrace the graduated income tax. Proportionate giving in the church and progressive taxation by the state–those two convictions reflected the same “progressive” mentality. Note, however, the instructive differences. The church could only ask for voluntary compliance while the state had could always summon coercive power, if necessary. But even the Federal government took a long time before the graduated income tax could become the law of the land.
In retrospect, one can see various reasons why the “progressive” or proportionate view of giving gradually fell into disfavor in the early decades of this century. It offered, first of all, almost no specific guidance for hard decisions. The fundraisers found it far too vague and indefinite for their purposes. A stingy giver could easily escape with a token contribution.
The second reason was far more troubling. How would church members know what their fair proportion was, apart from full and candid discussion with others? And yet open talk about money – especially when it exposed differences in income – could crack the egalitarian veneer of many American congregations. The etiquette of privacy inhibited conversations about so delicate a subject.
There was another reason why proportionate giving never became the prevailing version of the Biblical “law” for giving. It had to compete with a revival of interest in the ancient practice of tithing. The growing popularity of the tithe toward the end of the nineteenth century represented a surprising reversal of opinion among some American Protestants. In previous decades tithing had been the subject of fierce debates. Old memories of the tithe as a hated symbol of imposed religious taxes in Europe still lingered in different quarters. By the early 1900s, however, tithing was making a strong comeback.
In the last third of the nineteenth century, a few passionate believers in tithing created the outward appearance of a popular movement sweeping the country. A flood of pamphlets and books, all aimed at reaching a broad array of lay folk, created a populist-like outcry against the seminaries. “There will be . . . no permanent change for the better while our religious teachers are taught to teach us a lot of generalities,” declared one enthusiast.[30] While the seminaries and denominations offered only tepid “generalities,” the apostles of tithing believed their teachings were specific, clear and the embodiment of God's law.
This turn-of-the-century dispute reminds one of the late twentieth century political debate between the defenders of the graduated Federal income tax and the flat tax enthusiasts. The apostles of tithing were offering, in effect, an ecclesiastical version of the “flat tax.” And like their counterparts in our day, they argued that tithing was a simple law everybody could understand. The tithe is fair, they claimed, because it requires the same rate of payment from all people, whether poor or rich; it stresses our similarities rather than our economic differences.
The impact of the tithing movement prompted the “stewardship” pioneers in the 1910s to advocate the practice of tithing in the mainstream denominations. That fact became abundantly clear in the new stewardship programs of the denominations. The architects of these programs usually treated tithing as the necessary first step toward fulfilling the Christian's duty toward God. Proportionate giving, if it figured at all in these schemes, was for those adventurous souls who willingly ventured beyond tithing. The tithe was fast becoming known as the Biblical standard for giving.
Despite all these changes and presumed improvements, the stewardship ideal still bore a striking resemblance to its mid-nineteenth century predecessor, systematic benevolence. The hidden continuities linking the 1850s to the 1910s become evident in the persisting embrace of that now familiar phrase – “the system.” What truly mattered in both versions were the themes of regular giving and the ensuing blessing of order in the life of the giver and the church. Even more important, the focus of attention remained upon the conscience of the individual believer. The only court of appeal beyond the individual was the “law” of giving that could be found in the Scriptures. Once again, the problem of authority had been “solved.”
A Movement Comes of Age
If there was any major difference between the old and the new, it was in the public's first response to them. In the 1850s the advocates of systematic benevolence did not cultivate a mass audience. Samuel Harris and Abel Stevens, for instance, had other interests besides promoting systematic benevolence. No group of church leaders took on this cause and devoted its life to it. The American Systematic Beneficence Society, formed in 1856, left no noticeable trace of its influence. In the decades following the Civil War, the language associated with this effort gradually began to creep into the denominations' vocabulary. But the absence of a vigilant core of promoters and defenders hindered its spread among the far reaches of the Protestant laity.
In contrast stewardship quickly became a cause that inspired loyalty as well as great expectations for the future. From the 1910s onward, its followers talked about the “stewardship movement.” (In fact, that practice continues into the present some eighty plus years later, amidst quite different historical circumstances.) By the end of the decade, according to one of its leading interpreters, “the Stewardship Movement has increased from a trembling whisper in the desert to a commanding voice in the councils of the churches.”[31]
If all that drama could transpire in such a short time, think of what could happen in the years ahead. The future took on a dazzling luster. Almost overnight, it seemed, that sober word “stewardship” had been transformed into the living symbol of a crusade on the move. While that watchword could not match the appeal of the most famous Protestant banner of that era (“the evangelization of the world in this generation”), it did arouse excitement and passion among a growing band of followers. And so it was that stewardship came to fit naturally into the pantheon of causes in that “Age of Crusades.”
Actually the meteoric rise of the "Movement" reflected, at least in part, the institutional muscle of its founding generation. Its founders were strategically placed bureaucrats who know how to use denominational channels in reaching out to a large population. There was a ready audience out in the hinterlands. Increasing numbers of congregations wanted to know how to run an every member canvass. Obviously enough, there is always a hunger in American Protestantism for fresh language and new techniques in fundraising. The stewardship executives could supply manuals and tracts, recruit volunteers from across the country, arrange training sessions for them and thereby create a national network that would lend credence to claims for an expanding movement. Meanwhile the coincidental rise of denominational receipts during the early phase of the stewardship boom in the mid-1910s also strengthened the reputation of the denominational staff. The crusade appeared to be well under way.
Among the leaders in this cause were the northern Methodists. The Methodist Episcopal Church enjoyed a special preeminence in the movement, thanks in part to the presence of two outstanding bureaucrats, Harvey Reeves Calkins and Ralph S. Cushman. These two men were comrades in arms for only a short period of time, 1915-1920. Yet during those eventful years they produced a torrent of articles, books, a magazine and denominational programs of all sorts. Calkins's varied writings included a book, A Man and His Money[32] that proved to be one of the influential works on stewardship written in the first quarter of the twentieth century. One chapter from that book comprises Resource 4.13
One theme shone through all of Calkins' writings. “To have is to owe,” he was fond of declaring. “Life is a trust.”[33] Therefore, we finally own nothing and owe everything to God the Creator. At the core of the Christian life is an overwhelming sense of owing, of oughtness, duty and obligation. Praise and gratitude are secondary. From the moment of birth, every human being is a debtor and lives out the terms of an inviolable contract until death. The language of commerce and of legal transactions between owners and renters shaped his thinking. “Christianity repudiates the pagan doctrine of ownership, and recognizes possession, honorably acquired, as a token of confidence on the part of the Divine Owner, and its own pledge of fidelity in return.”[34]
Calkins feared that the “pagan doctrine of ownership” had taken root in Christian America. Its spirit had become visible in fierce boasts about the sanctity of private property. There are some, he wrote, who think and act according to the following credo: “I am absolute owner of my property, and who shall hinder me in my lordship over my own affairs, so long as I obey the law, and respect the property of other men?"[35] In lampooning such arrogance he revealed his covert sympathy for the Social Gospel. That sort of declaration enraged the socialists and the Social Gospel apostles, for they had seen how reactionaries had employed it to thwart economic justice in turn-of-the-century America. While he appreciated the thrust of the Social Gospel, he nevertheless doubted that schemes of collective ownership would ever touch the deeper problem afflicting the populace. Was there any way of taming the willful and capricious spirit of American individualism?
In his own inimitable way he was attempting to help Protestants face the consequences of that devastating challenge in the midst of their fund-raising activities. Calkins and his contemporaries were struggling with the question that had confronted every generation of church leaders since the early days of the Republic. By what authority can one Christian tell another how much to give? There were several obvious answers that he apparently dismissed without second thoughts. It was clear to him, for example, that neither the American clergy nor the denominations could issue credible edicts about how much one should give.
Calkins' search for an answer took one in a direction that none of his predecessors had seriously explored before. Unlike Beecher and Strong he did not appeal to the authority of a movement, not even his beloved “Stewardship Movement.” Nor did he rely upon a law dependent upon a single Scriptural verse, such as I Corinthians 16:2. His interpretation of the tithe, as set forth in Resource 4.13, illustrates a willingness to venture in new directions.
By 1914, when Calkins published A Man and His Money, the controversies surrounding Biblical criticism were starting to tear at the fabric of church life. Although open warfare between the “fundamentalists” and the “modernists” did not break out until after World War I, there were still growing tensions in many of the denominations in the 1910s. Therefore any discussion of tithing represented a potentially divisive matter. Modern textual critics of the Bible, by and large, had assumed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distill a few simple, uniform rules about tithing out of the varied practices recorded in the Scriptures. But the “Biblical Verbalist”[36] was not about to concede that point.
In these embattled circumstances Calkins chose a third option, one that delivered him from taking sides in this fray. He claimed that the tithe is “one of the primal laws of God,” just like the law of the Sabbath. While both the “sacred tenth” and the seventh are mentioned in the Scriptures, these are “essential” laws, “more binding than code or statue.” The “average man” can come to know the primal laws without dependency upon any written text. “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib – shall not a man with the breath of his Creator in him, though there be neither book nor parchment, recognize that God owns the world?” The tithe represents our deepest recognition that “God owns the world.” If we deny the law of tithing, we thereby deny God's sovereignty over our lives. Even a casual neglect of this order of creation becomes an act of impiety toward God.
Just as Calkins finessed endless wrangling over Biblical texts by interpreting the tithe as a responsibility grounded in natural law, so he also avoided arguments about which New Testament parable best captured the meaning of stewardship. Indeed, he understood stewardship in much the same manner he viewed tithing. Or, to put the matter more correctly, tithing was an integral part of only one of the three dimensions of stewardship. Stewardship, he wrote a few years later in his career at the Methodist headquarters, is manifest through the “stewardship of possessions” (where tithing belongs) the “stewardship of prayer” and the “stewardship of personality.”[37] These three “P's” – alliterative slogans have often been popular in this sector of Protestant bureaucracy – covered the gamut of human responsibility. The “stewardship of personality,” for example, reached from “healing, helping and housing” to “community service, social uplift and amusements” through “teaching, preaching and inspiring” and extended even to “missions, politics and business.”[38]
Harvey Calkins was among the first to test the elasticity of stewardship as an expandable notion. In stretching this image as far as possible, he helped start a tradition in Protestant bureaucracies that have flourished ever since. The phrase –the stewardship of ________ (fill in the blank) - has provided a home for many a good cause. Shortly after Calkins wrote about the three “P's”, other church managers in the late 1910s and early 1920s moved in the same direction. They filled in the blanks with such concerns as prohibition, the League of Nations, time and credit.[39] That routine is still popular in some Protestant headquarters.
In Calkins' case, this practice reflected his devotion to high standards. Since stewardship, in his estimate, represented the most exalted ideal available, it made sense to link every important human concern and activity to this one theme. A stern idealist, he scorned those who thought of a stewardship program “merely as an efficiency plan to bring about habits of ‘systematic and proportionate giving.’"[40] The money will eventually come “as apples come in October.”[41] But the first and major task is teaching American Protestantism about the meaning of stewardship. Calkins always thought of himself as an educator and not as a fund-raiser. (That same distinction between “stewardship education” and “development,” as it is now usually labeled, persists to this day in most denominational bureaucracies.)
Calkins believed stewardship education meant something quite different from raising money. The agricultural metaphor – raising money – became popular in the nineteenth century when a fair number of Americans knew first hand the rigors of farm life. Like raising crops, raising money could be very hard work with more than its share of heartbreaks. Even the ablest fundraisers occasionally acknowledged that reality. For instance, Dwight L. Moody was fond of saying, “Blessed are the money raisers, for in heaven they shall stand next to the martyrs.”[42] In coining this new beatitude, the great evangelist was not indulging in self-pity, for he enjoyed his considerable successes as a fund-raiser. “I like to talk to rich men, particularly if they don't want to give.”[43] Still, Moody understood the sacrifices involved in this demanding craft. Raising money required abundant energy, lots of time and a willingness to keep trying despite the inevitable disappointments. Moreover, the money-raisers lived under the shadow of great expectations. Others depended upon their successes and resented their failures. It was seldom an easy assignment.
In his book, A Man and His Money, Harvey Calkins hardly mentioned “raising money,” much less such techniques as “whirlwind campaigns,” pledge cards and the like. The stewardship educators were, first and foremost, teachers. Whatever their teaching method, they led individual believers in the search for the “law” of giving. Once the students encountered the law, the focus then shifted to the inner drama within the consciences of the “students.” Calkins entertained no doubts about the nature of the law, or its plain demands upon Christians. He also had no doubts about the freedom of the students to understand or obey that law. Free the stewardship educators to do their work, he believed, and eventually the money would come in.
Harvey Calkins was, in sum, an incorrigible optimist.
The Crest of Optimism
Another Methodist leader was Ralph S. Cushman, a colleague of Calkins and also the founder of the first inter-denominational association[44] solely devoted to promoting stewardship in North America. Cushman's enthusiasm for the cause knew no bounds. “'Stewardship’ is God's word for the twentieth century,”[45] he declared. At the very least “stewardship” should replace “service”[46] in the everyday vocabulary of Christians. It was the “road to holy habit” that would eventually lead to “systematic religion” and finally to the Wesleyan goal of “going on to perfection.”
In 1919 when Cushman invoked that classic Methodist affirmation in his stewardship sermon (Resource 4.14
There seemed to be ample precedent for this venture. In 1917 the southern and northern Methodists had joined together to launch a joint appeal known as the Methodist Centenary Movement. With the help of Calkins, Ralph Cushman played a major role in encouraging the practice of stewardship throughout the two-year campaign. Church leaders pressured them to find a million tithers among the members in both branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the words of one bishop, “If we recruit our tithers to a million we shall insure our benevolence for all time.”[47] When the drive concluded with a huge gala celebration in Columbus, Ohio in the summer of 1919, the Methodist had far exceeded their ambitious goal of gathering $100 million in pledges, even though no one knew for sure how many Methodists were tithing. The apparent[48] success of the Centenary campaign augured well for the future of the forthcoming Interchurch drive that would officially commence in 1920.
Another reassuring sign of the times was the astonishing results of the interfaith United War Work Campaign launched on Armistice day, November 11, 1918. President Woodrow Wilson asked the missionary leader, John R. Mott, to step in and head up the drive to secure $175,000,000 in pledges by the end of the month. Despite a raging flu epidemic and the time spent on celebrating the end of World War I, the drive turned into what some called at the time “the largest voluntary offering in history.”[49] If that large sum could be gathered in few weeks, then - so some Protestants leaders reasoned – imagine what the churches could do together over a few years.
Out of those speculations came a dream born in a passing moment of idealism. Idealists became boosters and set fanciful goals. Thirty denominations vowed to raise better than one/third of a billion dollars over a three-year period for home and foreign missions as well as other church concerns. “The promoters were under the spell of the prodigious action of the war,”[50] wrote Gaius Glenn Atkins years later. They even assumed that Americans, whether they were church-going Protestants or not, would cheerfully support this venture much as they had backed the large Liberty Loan drives or the Red Cross or the United War Work campaigns. In fact the Interchurch staff expected “friendly citizens” (a hopeful euphemism for the larger public) to subscribe the $40 million fund that would underwrite the costs of a very expensive drive. In a New York Times advertisement the Movement tested the friendliness of those “citizens” by asking – “Will you do your share for a better America and a better world?”[51]
The campaign also represented a huge test for the stewardship enthusiasts. At last they had an opportunity to prove themselves in their first major interdenominational venture. Cushman presided over a staff that offered conferences, classes, reading courses and millions of pamphlets.
Among other ambitious efforts was the Ten Million League of Christian Stewards. Each of these ten million stewards would carry a card that set forth the standards of the League. The principles summed up a decade's thinking about stewardship. Listen to the first three: “(1) God is the owner of all things; (2) Every man is a Steward and must give account for all that is entrusted to him; (3) God's ownership and men's stewardship ought to be acknowledged.”[52] But the next standard reflects a small but significant compromise with the realities of running a mass campaign. (4)“This acknowledgment requires, as part of its expression, the setting apart for the extension of the Kingdom of Christ, such a portion of the income as is recognized by the individual to be the will of God.”[53] What is missing, of course, is any mention of the tithe. Another sign of slippage was evident in the increasing preoccupation with giving. Despite all the previous talk about the multiple dimensions of stewardship, this plastic notion – amidst the enormous pressure of a massive fundraising drive – was coming more and more to be equated with pledging money to the church.
After a year of intense preparation, the national campaign opened officially on January 1, 1920. January was devoted to prayer and February to stewardship and the offerings of Cushman and his staff. Then came a month of missionary recruitment and a month of evangelism. All of these preparatory stages led up to the grand beginning of the financial campaign in May. Within a few weeks after the beginning of the financial canvass, the Interchurch leaders knew they were in deep trouble. The “friendly citizens” were far more diffident than “friendly” and the “Movement” sank into debt at a dizzying rate.
The final collapse came several months later. What looked so beguiling and heroic in late 1918 and in 1919 dissolved into a humiliating embarrassment by the spring of 1920. During those scant eighteen months, America had shown other signs of weariness with idealistic causes. The United States Senate rebuffed President Wilson's plea for American participation in the League of Nations. In the weeks when the Interchurch debacle was unfolding, the country was responding enthusiastically to Warren Harding's call for a “Return to Normalcy” in the 1920 presidential campaign. The Interchurch World movement suffered the misfortune of being born, as one church leader put it, “in an hour of spent enthusiasm.”[54] It turned out to be the “last crusade.”[55]
The legacy of unexpected debts and damaged morale made it hard for the denominations to sift through the ashes of the Interchurch defeat and discover what went wrong. While some of the stewardship bureaucrats blamed each other, few dug below the surface. If they had inquired deeper, they would have arrived at some troubling findings. Obviously enough, their favorite new banner word did not arouse mass excitement. That discovery would have hardly surprised Harvey Reeves Calkins, for he had warned his colleagues that their message would take years, if not decades, to find a receptive audience.
But the more worrisome lesson concerned the future of the notion of stewardship itself. When this concept becomes a slogan bandied about in the midst of a pressured campaign for money, it takes on the odor of propaganda. “Stewardship” was in danger of becoming a pleasant-sounding, polite way of talking about awkward realities such as money and pledges and regular payments to the churches. In an advertising-soaked culture that used up new words like disposable Kleenex tissues, the advocates of this word would have to work ever harder to keep its meaning fresh and relevant.
Some Protestants began to doubt whether stewardship could ever be made relevant to the complexities of life in a modern industrial society. Ten years after the burial of the Interchurch World Movement, a young and immensely gifted professor of Christian ethics offered an astringent assessment of this concept and its idealistic supporters. “Is stewardship ethical,” Reinhold Niebuhr asked in the title of a 1930 Christian Century article. (This essay is Resource 4.15
In the months after Niebuhr wrote the Century piece, it became clear that the churches, along with all American institutions, were entering into a desperate scramble for survival. The maelstrom of the Depression years forced Protestant leaders into new ways of thinking. In these circumstances the expansionist mentality that had so long dominated American Protestantism seemed to belong to a fast receding past. The “Age of Crusades” was over.
[1] Gaius Glenn Atkins, Religion in Our Times (New York: Round Table Press, Inc., 1932), p. 156.
[2] Atkins, p. 156.
[3] Atkins, p. 156.
[4] Ralph S. Cushman, D.D. and Martha F. Bellinger, Adventures in Stewardship (New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1919), p. 11.
[5] Cushman and Bellinger, p. 11.
[6] Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1873, 1899), p. 192.
[7] Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 96.
[8] Kaplan, p. 96.
[9] Gail Hamilton, Sermons to the Clergy (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1877), p. 96. Dodge sometimes used the pen name of "Gail Hamilton."
[10] Hamilton, p. 96.
[11] Hamilton, p, 137. This sentence came in the midst of a discussion about asking other people to contribute goods to a charitable cause. During this discussion Dodge stressed that goods given were the equivalent of a cash contribution. From what she said here and implied elsewhere, I have concluded that this sentence represents a general principle that applies to all decisions about giving.
[12] Hamilton, p. 174.
[13] See Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912), p. 45.
[14] Rauschenbusch, p. 45.
[15] Rauschenbusch, p. 44-45. His views in the book vary from his earlier stance in which he seemed more hopeful about the possible applicability of stewardship to twentieth century life. See Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), p. 380 f..
[16] For example, see The Responsibilities of Wealth Dwight F. Burlingame ed., (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). In particular, consult Barry D. Karl, "Andrew Carnegie and His Gospel of Philanthropy: A Study in the Ethics of Responsibility," pp.32 -50.
[17] Recall, for a moment, the money scandals in the ministries of a few televangelists during the 1980s. The antics of televangelist Jimmy Bakker were probably the biggest single story about money and religion during that decade. If any "mainstream" Protestants assume that Bakker's troubles could only affect the future work of other televangelists, they might want to consider how his behavior breathed new life into the stereotype about "money-grubbing preachers." Bakker helped to keep alive the "Elmer Gantry" view of the ministry in various sectors of American Protestantism, including the mainstream precincts.
[18] Ben Primer, Protestants and American Business Methods (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979), p. 71.
[19] Primer, p. 71.
[20] The stories about this common practice occasionally appear in the autobiographical accounts of Protestants who lived in late nineteenth and twentieth century America. For one amusing account in a novel, see John P. Marquand's Point of No Return (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1949), p. 374.
[21] C. Howard Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), p. 598.
[22] Another important organization was the Men and Religion Forward Movement which launched massive campaigns for enlisting men between the fall of 1911 and the spring of 1912.
[23] Leonard Bacon, A Sermon Preached at the Request of the Young Men's Benevolent Society (New Haven: Nathan Whiting, 1832). The subject of the discourse is the "Christian doctrine of stewardship in regard to property." p. 5.
[24] George Elliott, "Concerning the Collection," Modern Stewardship Sermons by Representative Preacher ed. Ralph Cushman (New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1919), p. 65.
[25] Albert F. McGarrah, Money Talks (New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company), p. 27.
[26] The major possible exception is Luke 16:1-13, one of the most notoriously difficult interpretive challenges in the Bible. In that story the one known as the "unjust steward" - or in the NRSV, the "dishonest manager" - gives away some else's money apparently in order to save himself.
[27] In his helpful survey of the various meanings of "stewardship" or the Greek word "oikonomia," John Reumann notes a possible exception to this generalization. Reumann declares that "oikonomia also came to mean the administration of alms, and at times the alms themselves" in the early church period. See Stewardship and the Economy of God (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), p. 29.
[28] Washington Gladden, The Christian Pastor and the Working Church (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898), p. 376.
[29] "It is rare that a rich man gives as much, proportionately, as many a laboring man gives habitually." See Walter Rauschenbusch, Righteousness of the Kingdom, Max Stackhouse, Ed., pp. 220-221.
[30] E. B. Stewart, The Tithe (Chicago and Winona Lake: The Winona Publishing Co., 1903), p. viii. This sentence appears in the "Introduction," written by the "Laymen" or Thomas Kane of Chicago. More than any other person, Kane made this cause into a successful crusade.
[31] Harvey Reeves Calkins, "Introduction," in Modern Stewardship Sermons by Representative Preachers (New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1919), edited by Ralph Cushman, p. 7.
[32] Harvey Calkins, A Man and His Money (New York and Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern, 1914).
[33] Calkins, p. 59.
[34] Calkins, p. 59.
[35] Calkins, p. 35.
[36] See "Stewardship Foundations and How to Teach." Men and Money (Vol. 5, July, 1918), p. 216.
[37] For example of this formulation, see "Stewardship Foundations and How to Teach." Men and Money (Vol. 5, July, 1918), p. 216f.
[38] Men and Money, p. 220.
[39] John Errett Lankford, "Protestant Stewardship and Benevolence, 1900-1941: A Study of Religious Philanthropy" (Madison: University of Wisconsin, an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1962), p. 269.
[40] Harvey Reeves Calkins, "Meaning of Christian Stewardship," in Modern Stewardship Sermons by Representative Preachers, ed. by Ralph S. Cushman, p. 27.
[41] Calkins, "Introduction," in Modern Stewardship Sermons, p.7.
[42] See John R. Mott, "The Greatest Evangelist of the Last Century - Dwight L. Moody" in Addresses and Papers of John R. Mott, Volume Six: Selected Papers and Addresses on Evangelistic, Spiritual, and Ecumenical Subjects, and the Outreach of Life and Influence (New York: Association Press, 1947)
[43] William R. Moody, D.L. Moody (New York: the Macmillan Company, 1931), p. 428.
[44] The United Stewardship Council of Churches of Christ in the United States and Canada was the "grandfather" of the North American ecumenical agencies that have done so much to foster a literature about stewardship. The current representative of this tradition is the Ecumenical Center for Stewardship Studies.
[45] Ralph S. Cushman, The Message of Stewardship (New York and Cincinnati: Abingdon Press, 1922), p. 74.
[46] Cushman, p. 73.
[47] John Errett Lankford, "Protestant Stewardship and Benevolence, 1900-1941: A Study of Religious Philanthropy," p. 263.
[48] In fact the Methodists denominations were only able to collect 70% of the amount pledged for a five-year period, even after various "postscript" campaigns in the early 1920s.
[49] C. Howard Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America, p. 599.
[50] Gaius Glenn Atkins, Religion in Our Times, p. 165.
[51] Eldon G. Ernst, Moment of Truth for Protestant America: Interchurch Campaigns following World War One (Missoula, MT: American Academy of Religion and Scholar's Press. Dissertation Series, Number 3, 1974), p. 74.
[52] Ernst, p. 108.
[53] Ernst, p. 109.
[54] Ernst p. 158.
[55] Gaius Glenn Atkins' fine phrase in Religion in Our Times, p. 165.
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