Preaching, teaching, worship, prayer, children & youth
Generosity is a spiritual gift, and we need to encourage people to seek this gift as they grow in their faith. We all learn in different ways and so we need to offer as many ways as possible for people to explore God’s generosity towards them, and the generosity He is calling us to show to others.
Below are a range of materials to help church leaders encourage and teach people to live lives that are full of God’s love and grace. There are also a number of additional resources on our Fundraising and Giving for Individuals webpage.
NEW Lent
Living Generously Through Lent poster
The aim of the poster is to encourage people to do one thing differently this Lent. You could use it as an image - or just pick out one activity a week from the list and include it in your newsletter, notices or sermons. The poster above was created in the free Canva design programme.
If your chaplaincy uses the Canva design programme and you would like to adapt this poster, you can access the template here.
The 40Acts Challenge was an annual initiative from a UK Christian organisation called 'Stewardship' during 2014 to 2019 to encourage people to take up a daily 'generosity challenge' during Lent. It is no longer running but they have archived all their resource packs from each year. You may just want to pick one or two activities from the packs as an example for people.
Video resources
A Handful of Rice: an inspiring story of daily giving from Mizoram in North East India
Life is a Gift: a simple teaching video about Christian Generosity.
General resources
Generous Lent on the Diocese in Liverpool’s website includes sermon notes, liturgical and prayer resources for two Sundays.
Individual study resources
Generous God, Generous People is a 5 week course of daily reflections covering Generous God, Generous people, Generous giving, Generosity towards others and Principles for generous people to live by. It was produced by the Diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich.
Living Generously is a booklet of 7 days reflections on the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet and how this illustrates seven different ways to live generously. It was produced by the Diocese of Oxford.
Generosity and the inheritance of Lent is a series of reflections/activities produced by the Church in Wales. It is bilingual: English = odd-numbered pages and Welsh = even-numbered). It is for individual study – but you could pick out one or two of the activities here for use in sermons or newsletters.
Harvest
Some resources to help you to support any annual giving review during the Harvest season.
Church of England's Generosity Week
Generosity Week is a new initiative from the Church of England in the UK. It takes place during the Harvest season so that, as we thank God for his generosity to us, we also have the opportunity to think about how we might respond to that generosity – within our churches and communities.
A range of resources is available (though some may need adapting for the European context). These include Sunday services on themes of generosity and gratitude, morning prayers, evening prayers and compline, intercessions, podcasts and reflections, plus children’s materials.
Generosity Week could also be held at any other time of the year.
Diocese of Winchester: Sermons
A five sermon series from the Diocese of Winchester on Luke chapters 14 to 17; including “The Cost of being a Disciple”, “The Lost Sheep & The Lost Coin” and “The Rich Man and Lazarus”.
Diocese of Liverpool: All-age service materials and prayer station materials.
There is also some guidance notes which suggest some ways in which harvest festival can be integrated into an annual giving review programme.
Advent and Christmas
Christmas is a time of remarkable generosity and God gave the most generous gift of all when he sent Jesus to us as a baby. On this page we have inspiration, suggestions and resources to help us all experience the joy of generosity this Christmas, whether that is in giving, receiving, or both.
The Dioceses of Liverpool and York in the UK have been working on some great resources for Advent and Christmas on the theme of generosity, which they are happy to share.
So, if you are looking for some inspiration - liturgical materials, sermons/preaching notes based on the Book of Haggai, or all-age prayers/activities - visit the Diocese in Liverpool website here.
A particular mention for this resource guide on all-age prayer stations and activities, including ‘Stir-Up Sunday’ (based around the English Christmas pudding), the Traditions of St Lucia, and The Jesse Tree stations.
The Diocese of York has just uploaded a Generous Advent bible study to its website.
The UK organisation 'Stewardship' has produced some reflective blogposts over the past few years, which may be useful to include in sermons, magazine articles etc.
The Diocese of Bath & Wells also has a nice ‘Chat Mat’ for families to colour in as they think about the Christmas story.
The Church of England has produced an online Follow The Star calendar (you can also download a PDF file of all the daily activities) which contain activities looking at generosity. The Diocese in London has also suggested some Advent Calendar activities on its website too. At this stage, you may just want to pick out one or two ideas to include in your services, events or children's talks etc.
'Messy Church at Home' has a family/children's resource (written during Covid but still relevant) focusing on God’s gift to us in Jesus.
Enabling generosity through the season of Advent
If you are lo
oking to encourage generous online giving, then here are some easy-to-adapt Christmas posters for giving via QR codes. These are in Word format - so just download them and add in the QR code to your church's online giving page on your website. You can then use them as posters in your church – or add them to your Christmas service sheets or newsletters.
NEW: For those of you who are promoting JustGiving there is a ready-made template for you. Just insert your church logo at the bottom of the page.
Alternatively, if you use the free Canva Design programme, you can download this template and adapt it for your chaplaincy.
NEW: The Church of England has also produced some Canva templates to tie in with its Follow the Star campaign for this year, to encourage generous donations.