Jesus-Shaped Generosity: Living in the Abundance of God
I first arrived in Richmond to intern with the Urban Doxology Songwriting Internship – a two-month program based in the Church Hill neighborhood of RVA and closely connected with a local church called East End Fellowship. It was the summer of 2019, and I had just graduated from a small Christian college in Arkansas called John Brown University. At that point in my life, I knew that God’s calling for me had something to do with musical worship and church work, but I was also right in the middle of a challenging spiritual season.
Having grown up in an unhealthy and somewhat fundamentalist Christian culture, I was unpacking and discarding elements of my faith that were more harmful than helpful, and my feelings about the church were complicated at best.
Before coming to Richmond, I had never been in a community with Christians who cared for their neighbors as generously and hospitably as the folks at East End Fellowship in Church Hill. It felt like a foretaste of the Kingdom of God that I didn’t even know I’d been longing to experience, and I honestly believe that it saved my faith in the Church as a whole. This beautiful community has provided me with the space to heal enough to do the church work I feel called to do, and I will be forever grateful to them for that.
My wife Elena and I both work at different churches on Sunday mornings. While I’m leading worship at Crestwood’s Richmond campus, she is leading a choir at First Baptist Church in Ashland. Because we’re regularly split apart on Sunday mornings, we’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity to worship together on Sunday afternoons at East End Fellowship. We’ve both been attending this church for many years now, and an element of the service that we both love is a short tithing liturgy adapted from a passage in 1 Chronicles 29 that says:
“But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand…. Lord our God, all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.”
The dominant mindset of our culture as modern Americans is often one of scarcity rather than abundance and greed rather than generosity, but this is not the way of life that God invites us into. Instead, our good and gracious Father invites us to embrace a radical expression of generosity that can only flow out of a deep trust in God’s abundant life and love. But this is much easier said than done.
Living out the type of radical generosity God calls us to embrace can be terrifying. How can God expect us to give abundantly like this when it could jeopardize the abundant life we want for ourselves and our loved ones? There’s no shame in asking this because it’s a valid question. We all want to live full and abundant lives, and none of us want our loved ones or ourselves to lack the necessities. It’s natural to desire enough food, clothing, housing, and money to care for ourselves, but why do we cling so tightly to our extra resources when those needs are taken care of? Even after we’ve acquired everything that we and our families need to live contented lives, it’s still never enough.
I think this issue boils down to trust. In the same way that a child with good and loving parents learns to trust them for their every need, we too must learn to trust that our Heavenly Father will provide us with everything we need. In Matthew chapter seven, Jesus asks, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
Our God is a good father who promises to provide for our needs, but this doesn’t mean he won’t ask us to make sacrifices. God is not only our good father; he is everyone’s good father, and his invitation to those he has blessed with much is to be a conduit of his blessing to those with little.
Learning to trust God’s abundance in my own life has been a long and challenging process – I often struggle to fully believe that God will take care of me more holistically than I could ever care for myself. However, during my time at East End Fellowship, I’ve learned that God often provides through this cross-shaped community we call the Church. During seasons when my wife and I had plenty, we always tried to use our resources to help those in our community who were struggling.
And now, in a season when we have less, we know that we’ll never lack the basic necessities because our church community is there to look out for us. Because of this, I currently feel like I’m living the most abundant life imaginable because I’m surrounded by people who would give me the shirt off their backs if I needed it.
What I now know to be true is that real abundance doesn’t come from the resources we’re able to store away for ourselves. Real abundance comes from a community of Jesus-shaped people who love each other as Christ loved us: by giving up everything so that we could flourish.
My prayer for you and me is that rather than responding to God’s invitation to radically sacrificial generosity by saying, “Okay, I’ll give a little, but not so much that it hurts,” is that we would learn to respond by saying, “Who are we that we should be able to give so generously? For all things come from you, and what we now give back is already yours.”
Written by: Hayden Hobby on May 28, 2024
Hayden Hobby serves as the Worship Director for Crestwood’s Richmond Campus. He lives in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond with his wife, Elena, and is finishing a Master’s in Public Theology at Bethany Theological Seminary.