The East Tennessee
Episcopalian  August 1999

by Alan Ballew

Remember the feeling you get when you are planning to give someone a gift? Remember the anticipation? What will I give? How will they react when I give it to them? Won’t it feel great to see their face? Then comes the actual giving and receiving. The act of giving continues to give us pleasure into the future as we see the gift being used.

The Bishop Tharp Legacy Society has been created to support and celebrate and bear witness to a special type of giving called “Planned Giving.” It means planning now to make a future gift to your congregation (or to any other Episcopal institution) from your estate, from your accumulated earthly possessions.

The Legacy Society Steering Committee has been hard at work. So far we have:

• engaged the active support of our new Bishop;
• printed a brochure on planned giving for distribution to parishioners and clergy;
• designed and printed a short, easy-to-read enrollment form (also for distribution);
• discussed how to best lend support to planned giving committees in the individual congregations throughout the Diocese of East Tennessee;
• begun to plan a great celebration, a party for the founding members.

What we eagerly await is compiling the invitation list! Founding members of the Bishop Tharp Legacy Society will include all who provide for a gift by will, insurance policy or similar means, and who make known their plans by filling out an enrollment form and getting it to us by December 31. The brochures and enrollment forms are available now from your priest or planned giving contact person. If you have already made a provision for a planned gift, please fill out a form and submit it to the society.

What a concept! The gifts are made to the church, diocese, or to an Episcopal school or other similar institution, and the Bishop Tharp Legacy Society throws a party each year to celebrate all society members!

However, there is a deeper significance to our work, and that might best be stated using the word celebration in its more profound sense. We celebrate Christmas by giving gifts. We celebrate the Fourth of July with barbecues and sometimes, with fireworks. But the giving of gifts at Christmas and the fireworks on the Fourth are not what those celebrations are about. We celebrate the birth of Christ and the birth of our nation. What about our celebration then? What will it stand for? How will the members of the Bishop Tharp Legacy Society view their purpose? Is it the future mission of the Church that we are really celebrating?

Perhaps we will be a choir. A silent choir. Instead of singing, we are quietly standing, all of us together. There will come a time when we are no longer here, a time when we can no longer speak or sing or serve. So we are standing up now as if to say: “This is something I believe in.” Want to join the choir?

Alan Ballew is a co-chair of the Legacy Society Steering Committee.