Notes from 1st March: The simple question of ‘why did you choose this Breathing Space?’ kicked us off and here were the wide variety of responses: How do you talk about personal finances in a real way? How do you live on less? What does it mean to be generous? What should we do about pensions and how do you tackle fear of the future? What are the guiding principles and values we should live by with our finances? How do you become disciplined and develop generous habits as opposed to ad hoc generosity? If God wants us to live abundantly why should we live frugally? What is a generous lifestyle anyway? What about ethical finance and the ethics of investing? How do I budget?

By the time we’d completed that list it was clear that here is an area where we felt under resourced and ill equipped to follow Jesus in our consumer culture. Next we tackled the issue of guiding principles and came up with a list of words we associated with God and finances: obedience, guilt, trust, faith, anonymous giving, grace, rich, stewardship, sacrifice, envy, blessing, generosity, cheerfulness, accountability, holding things lightly, letting go, judging, God’s ownership and lastly but by no means least, love. Although we were all a bit sheepish at nearly forgetting that last one.

(Phil Whittall)