Themes like abundance and celebration do not come naturally to me. I grew up in a practical Midwestern home with a father who had a BA in accounting and a lifetime career in auditing. There is a story about how he got run over by a car, missed half a semester at Michigan State and still ended up getting a 4.0. His admirable work ethic has been a shaping influence in my life.
Spiritually, this upbringing has bent me toward understanding disciplines such a stewardship and hard work. The spiritual disciplines associated with the lavishness of God, on the other hand, have been slower to show up in my life. No one modeled those for me. Since my sabbatical last fall, I have been trying to lean into God to strengthen these underdeveloped spiritual discipline muscles.
I believe a well-rounded life of spiritual discipline matters. I’ve noticed that my disciplines influence my posture as a minister as they speak to the way I see and experience God. If I believe God is only concerned with my stewardship and work ethic, and know nothing of God’s abundance, then that is the God I worship and proclaim to the world.
The InterVarsity I have known, loved, and grown up with has felt pretty similar to my family of origin. I have experienced our movement as practical—concerned with hard work and good stewardship. I’m thankful for those values, but we also need to pay attention to our underdeveloped muscles.
When I think about abundance versus scarcity, I think about my grandmother. My grandmother lived through the Great Depression. As a result, she never stopped living with a scarcity mindset, pinching and scrimping, letting other people know how much something cost, or judging other people for their financial choices. My interactions with my grandmother did not inspire a vision of abundance. And, unfortunately, her scarcity mindset peppered her generosity, depicting it as a burden.
Imagine my surprise, then, when she, a mother of five with no college degree, died with over a million dollars in the bank! I could not understand this disconnect between the resources Grandma had and the way she experienced resources. Her relatively brief experience in the Great Depression shaped her life more powerfully than her overall experience of ample provision.
In a sense, I see some of this in InterVarsity. We praise God when he provides in our fundraising, but our fundraising goals are preset according to what we believe we can individually be responsible for. God provides generously for InterVarsity as an organization, but, at the same time, we often stop short of sharing that provision in a way that cancels deficits. We let a lens of limitation override the biblical truth that all resources belong to God.
In this season, God has been opening my eyes to the resources and generosity of the community around me. I am newly convinced that there are finances out there available to fuel our mission fully if we are willing to ask. I have had to question myself as to why I frequently sized my expectations (in NSO, growth, or MPD) according to a goal I thought I could hit instead of what is really needed for the ministry the Lord is calling us to? Why is human limitation shaping me more than knowledge of our Abundant God? There’s something broken about that, no different than my grandmother living in a Great Depression mindset with a million dollars in the bank.
I’m certain responsible frugality in InterVarsity began as a healthy strength, but I believe that, when coupled with our underdeveloped muscles, it has also led to a scarcity mindset that impacts our mission. I see this in myself.
But a God of scarcity is not good news for the campus. And worshipping a God of scarcity is dangerous for us because it leads to a view of ministry that is dependent upon human effort and limited human resources.
Yet, God is not stingy! God’s love is lavish and God’s resources are abundant.
Worshipping a God of Abundance will lead to a ministry that seeks Divine action and draws upon unlimited spiritual resources.
I’m encouraged to see our national leadership invite us into a spirit of abundance in InterVarsity this fall. I hear them encouraging new actions of generosity, calling us to Sabbath keeping as an act of faith, and inviting us to prayer and fasting as a declaration of dependence on Jesus as the Source. This may feel contradictory as they lay out a call for us to reach 2500 campuses by 2030 under our “Every Corner of Every Campus” initiative.
I hear this call as renewal of our vision to be a redeeming influence among the people, ideas, and structures of the university, but with an increased emphasis on an Abundant God instead of a limited God. It’s a vision that is possible only by God’s action. In this vision I’ve heard the call from Jesus again to give myself to our mission—this time, with vision of a scope and scale that cannot be manufactured by our hardest work and most careful stewardship.
This, I believe, is the invitation to us all. Will we worship the scarcity God and depend upon ourselves, or the Abundant God in complete dependence upon the Source?
I pray it’s the latter. Because the justice, generosity, and never-ending love of God flows to the campus from Abundance, not scarcity.
Photo credit: Thanks to Jeff Liou for the Harvest Berries and Succulents photos.
About the Author
Lisa Liou currently serves as Regional Director for GFM West. She lives in Monrovia, CA with her husband Jeff and their two kids, Emma (12), and Jesse (9). Lisa Liou has served with InterVarsity on campuses in Michigan, Illinois, and California since 2002 and served as co–Area Director of the GFM team in Southern California.
