Giving to church should be act of worship

Reflections on the Church:
Stewardship

When I was a child, my father would get up early enough on Sunday mornings to do two things. He would first sweep the floors of the whole house. Then he would go to a desk where checks and bills were kept. He would find a little box of church offering envelopes with our family’s name on it, pull out the one for the current Sunday, write a check for his pledged amount—always careful to date the check for the Saturday just preceding—and then place the check in the envelope and seal it. (I remember asking him why he dated the check for the previous day. He said he did that because you weren’t supposed to spend money on the Lord’s Day.)
When we would arrive at worship, he would hand me a coin to put into the plate as my offering. He would then place his sealed envelope into the plate himself.
When people speak to me of stewardship, I think of my dad’s weekly practice of giving. True, there were some times when our little family was more or less happy with the preacher. There were times when we were more or less able to give our intended offering. But I never saw a Sunday when Dad let the offering plate go by without our participation. I do not remember a Sunday when he did not go through his pre-worship ritual of check writing and envelope seal-ing. Making an offering was a necessary part of worship for him, as it became for me.
I know we live in different times. My dad’s generation was more duty-bound than succeeding generations have been. Currently, many Christians see their offering as payment for services rendered or expected. Others may want to be sure that the church is using their offering for projects of which they approve. Some members decide they will use their money as a weapon, giving to show their pleasure and withholding to show their pain. Some churches have decided not to pass the plate, lest someone be offended by the action. Money brings out the best and the worst in us.
Is it too late to recover the offering as an act of worship? Is it too simplistic to expect people to give regularly at worship because of their own love and adoration of God, as if the check or bill or coin were laid at God’s altar? I hope it is not too late. After all of our careful analysis of the uses that our gifts make possible, wouldn’t it be much more spiritually meaningful simply to offer up our gifts to the Triune One? Would this disciplined practice free us from our deadly consumer mentality? It would surely be an act of freedom to give without precise calculation of benefits.
Dad never explained why he swept the house every Sunday morning. He was not one given to housework. Maybe it was his way of putting the past week behind him as he began a new one.
I wonder.