All Practices
Generosity
Practising open-handedness with money, time, and resources — training the heart to hold things loosely.
Step-by-step guide
1
Begin by reflecting honestly on your relationship with money and possessions. Do they feel like gifts held loosely, or security you cling to? Bring what you find to God without judgment.
2
Make a deliberate act of giving this week — not from surplus alone, but from something that costs you. Generosity practised only from abundance rarely transforms.
3
Practice spontaneous generosity. When an impulse to give arises — to a person, a cause, a stranger — act on it quickly before the mind talks you out of it.
4
Give quietly when you can. Jesus was explicit: generosity done to be seen loses its formative power. The anonymous gift trains the heart differently.
5
Give your time and attention, not only money. An hour of genuine presence with someone who is lonely may cost you more than any financial gift.
6
Notice what you resist giving. The things hardest to release reveal where your trust still belongs to yourself rather than God.
Tradition & history
Jesus spoke about wealth and possessions more than almost any other subject — because, as Dallas Willard observed, money is 'the primary rival to God in the human heart' (*The Spirit of the Disciplines*). Richard Foster devotes a full chapter to 'Simplicity' in *Celebration of Discipline*, arguing that open-handed living is not primarily about rules but about a reordered heart that has found its security in God rather than in things. The Franciscan and Celtic traditions both practised radical generosity not as duty but as joyful participation in the abundance of God.
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