Thirty & Broke is a great Business Week article about the economic plight of thirty-somethings in today's economy.
Almost two-thirds of students have to borrow money to get through school; as many as one-quarter may be accumulating credit-card debt to help pay for tuition. The median debt for college graduates in 2004 was $15,162, an increase of 66.5% since 1993. That may not seem like a crippling sum, but plenty of individuals owe much more. Back in 1993, only 4.2% of graduates had loans exceeding $25,000. A decade later, 17% did.
One of the issues churches need to focus on is stewardship (in the wholistic biblical sense of the term; not as church fundraising.) I read one of Henri Nouwen's books a while back, where he related the experiences of a friend who is a therapist. The therapist said that fairly quickly and easily, he could get patients to open up to him about their sex lives. Yet, when he would ask questions about finances, patients would immediately become defensive and ask why he was invading their privacy, even after several sessions dealing with the most intimate matters in their lives! The point being that our finances are central to who we are for most of us. I also suspect that many of our pastors (at least in PCUSA circles) have taken on enormous debts to complete seminary. I suspect there is personal soul-searching among some pastors about their own financial matters, making them timid about elevating wholistic stewardship as a theme. What do you think?
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