The journey to generosity is paved with one faithful step at a time.
Andrew and Ruth, Summit members who recently answered God’s call and were sent with the church plant to Charlottesville, Va., had always given the “baseline” tithe.
Andrew, a Summit member for eight years, was part of the North Raleigh campus. He served as a small group leader and with the production team. His path of generosity and giving began with the Gospel.
“Hearing about giving in response to God’s grace to us, that started challenging us,” Andrew said. “We weren’t giving with a grudge, and we were trusting God. But I felt God calling us to trust him more, take a step of faith and give a greater percentage.”
Trust was a bit of a roadblock, Andrew confesses. Finances were tight. There were needs that had to be met.
“We had a lot of conversations about God’s faithfulness and how we’d seen him provide in miraculous ways,” he said.
After God led the Castles to take a step of faith and increase their giving, Summit’s giving initiative “All In” was a confirmation that God was calling the whole church family to give in this way.
“It was a faith stretch, but that was an affirmation,” Andrew remembers. “We wanted to give our first and our best.”
God was faithful to provide when the road got bumpy. Through Andrew & Ruth’s journey, they remembered that they had seen God’s faithfulness – over and over again, without fail. He and Ruth saw God’s hand at work through a whole series of very trying circumstances in life and finances.
He also provided through the giving of others to fund a mission trip their family took to central Asia.
“We saw him leading others to invest their lives in generosity and give sacrificially. That’s one of the themes of our lives -- we want to see God reproduce in others what he has put into us.”
Through the years of “All In” and “Multiply,” Andrew and Ruth started to see generosity, not just in terms of an increased giving percentage. They began to see and desire to meet other giving opportunities – giving to mission trips or people doing ministry within the church.
“It’s become a joy for it to become an overflow from us and not just an obligation,” Andrew said.
“Our whole life and how God has drawn us closer to him has been an unbelievable journey of knowing Him more and more, being built around steps of faith and depending on Him when there’s nothing else to hold onto.”
Written by Mary Moorefield, volunteer writer.
The Summit offers a variety of stewardship classes to help equip you to become a faithful steward.
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