Dear Friends,

What does you pledge do? Why is it important to pledge?

On a nuts and bolts level, this is an easy question to answer. OSA, like every non-profit or for-profit organization, needs to plan for its fiscal year. We need to know how much we can spend, plan what we can spend it on, guess at how much money we can take in, where it might come from. Your pledge, your giving goal, helps us make good plans for the year. We need to pay staff, keep the building from crumbling like a stale cake, buy supplies, and so on. 

But there is a different, more important reason to pledge—to promise. Promising makes us work to fulfill the promise. Our promises summon us to their fulfillment. By their nature, promises stretch us, build us. And promises are made between people. They are a way of commitment and care and connection. Keeping our promises makes us—both the promisers and the ones to whom we promise—human.

And promising, or pledging, is a spiritual practice because God makes promises to us: a promise in Jesus, that our sins are forgiven, that God’s love for this world will never run out, that God will always be with us. God’s promises come to us in the Sacraments and in Scripture, and when we make promises for good, we are growing into the image God has planted in us.

So, make a pledge, make a promise. Promises help us grow in every way.

                                                                                        Pastor John