Living FrugallyMy wife and I were married in August 1979. Three weeks after our wedding, we left for a three-year honeymoon in Scotland, otherwise known as doctoral studies. We had very little money, and what we did earn went straight to the university to pay our bills. By our second and third years there, we were living in what in this country might well have been called inner-city conditions. To our surprise, we discovered that local evangelical Christians simply considered this good stewardship—almost normal Christian living. We learned firsthand why “Scottish” has often been considered a synonym for “frugal”!
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When we returned to the U.S., we struggled with how to apply the practices we had become accustomed to in Scotland. Whereas we could get by with public transportation overseas, not enough parts of town are serviced in the typical American metropolitan area for people not to own cars. At least we didn’t have to aspire to the fanciest cars but could look for something modest. When we settled in Denver, it made sense to buy a house rather than to continue to “waste” our money renting. But unlike many of our peers, we settled on a 25-year-old home in good condition rather than looking for something new. We also avoided the temptation to buy the trendiest technology, whether in home entertainment or computers or, once they were invented, in cell phones or digital cameras or numerous other “toys.”
In Scotland, we had committed to giving 10 percent of our annual income to the Lord’s work, with an emphasis on a church and other ministries that supported a holistic gospel—meeting people’s physical as well as spiritual needs—and that targeted the particularly needy in the third world or the worst of urban or rural blight in the first world. Once we returned to the U.S. and actually had full-time employment paying a decent wage, we committed to try to up that percentage each year that our income increased above what was necessary to keep pace with inflation or cost of living increases.
Some years we added 1 percent; many years we added 2 percent. The increases were small enough that they never seemed onerous. In recent years, we have been well over 40 percent in our annual giving and often closer to 50 percent. Now that we have one daughter in college and another soon to start, we have reached a temporary limit in our increases if we are going to be responsible in meeting all our family commitments.
We would never have come close to reaching what we have if it were not for more extra income than I ever imagined possible coming from book royalties, additional speaking and teaching engagements, fortunate investments, and an inherited estate from my grandfather. We would never have even thought of trying to give so much if it were not for the exemplary models of two pastors, one in the U.K. and one in the U.S., who quietly modeled giving 25 percent of their earnings back to the Lord’s work. We were also challenged by the writings of Ron Sider, who first introduced to us this principle of a “graduated tithe.”
We Can Do BetterThe point is not that we expect anyone else to give exactly as we have. But I am profoundly convinced that most Americans can do considerably more than the 3 or 4 percent a year that the average American evangelical Christian gives to all charitable causes, including church and other Christian ministries put together. I am even more convinced that the average church can do better than the 7 percent they give to missions of all kinds.
The suffering of the more than 1 billion people in the world who live beneath the U.N. poverty line demands that we do better. That conservatively, one fourth of the world’s population has never heard anything remotely resembling the gospel requires us to do more. If we realize that all we have has been given to us simply as a loan from God so that we can be conduits of it to do His work in the world, we will want to be good stewards. The joy that comes from seeing how our giving can transform others’ lives for the better will make us want to do more and to do so gladly.