Step One: If you are married, talk to your spouse about it. This is a journey that you should take together. If you do, and if you talk about it sometimes, then not only will your relationship with Christ grow stronger, but that with your spouse will also. And that is a blessing too.

Step Two: Talk to God about it. Most of us feel guilty about not tithing and it helps to pray and ask for forgiveness. You should also ask for guidance. And you should ask for help. Once you share this burden with our Lord, you will find that any guilt you have goes away. You are sharing the burden. It is not yours alone. You will be able to talk more openly about it. And you will be able to focus on it, instead of avoiding it. This is what we found, anyway. Remember, ultimately this is a journey toward Christ and you're going to have to pray about it often.

Step Three: Figure out where you are going. There is a lot of ambiguity these days about what tithing is. Is it 10 percent of your net income or your gross income? Should you include giving to other charities or only to the church? Our search for an answer to these questions left us with the recognition that, as Episcopalians, it's largely up to us to decide. Our recommendation is this: Make it net and yes include what you give to Christian charities. This is the easiest of the options. Given what a big step it is for most of us, it's okay to start here. And if you are like us, once you get there, you will decide to reconsider and keep growing your giving. One final point: if you decide to include Christian charities, sit down with your spouse and figure out which ones you want to support. We do this once a year and it is a very exciting and fun thing to do.

Step Four: Figure out where you are currently at. I'll admit it: this step is painful. Still, before you can move forward, you have to look the Devil in the eye. Take your total income and divide it into your total giving, based upon how you defined those terms in Step Three above. You can use monthly income and monthly giving or annual income and annual giving. This doesn't matter. The answer is the percentage that you currently give. You will probably have mixed feelings about this number. It will be higher than you thought, but lower than you hoped. (The average income of a member at St. James is over $100,000 and the average pledge to the church is about $2,000.) We can assume that each family is also giving another $1,000 to other Christian charities, which, when considering the net income on $100,000 places the number at between 4 and 5 percent. If yours is lower than that, don't despair. Ours was lower than that when we began, too.

Step Five: Evaluate whether you can do more right now. Some of us are giving everything we can already. Others are afraid to give more, or at least to pledge more. This is because we don't like to fail. We want to keep our commitments to our church. So we set the bar lower than we should. I know this because it is exactly what my wife and I were doing when we began. During the year our son was born, we had greater expenses than expected, and we were unable to fulfill our pledge. Every year after that, we carefully ensured we had not pledged too much. In retrospect, this was the wrong way to go. Every Sunday we would pray "Give us each day our daily bread" and yet every Sunday we would worry about whether we'd have enough if we gave too much to the church. Where's the faith in that?

We are not in this alone (See Step Two, above). Christ has joined with us. Don't be crazy, remember all of your other commitments, too, and don't dramatically change your lifestyle. But be bold. The first year we took this journey, we sheepishly tripled our pledge from the previous year. We had been way too conservative. Essentially, though, it doesn't matter whether you can give more or not at this point, as long as you go on to Step Six, the most important step.

Step Six: Make a commitment to Christ. In Step Two, above, you asked for forgiveness, guidance, and help. Here you make a commitment and ask for help again. The commitment has two parts: First, you commit to proportional giving, then you commit to giving 20 percent of any "found money" to Christian efforts.

Proportional giving means that you tell our Lord that you intend never to give a lower proportion of your income than you calculated in Step Four above. If your income goes down, the amount you give may go down and if your income goes up, the amount you give goes up. The goal is to keep the proportion the same or higher.

"Found money" is our term for all the additional blessings you receive from this day forward. I'm assuming that your income at this point is taking care of all of your bills and while you wish you were doing better, you're not doing badly. Let that part of your income continue to take care of those needs. But, as you earn a higher salary or pay off debts or receive a bonus or receive an inheritance or in any other way increase your household income, give 20 percent of that increase to the Church or charities. Take the other 80 percent and increase your saving for retirement or pay off bills or enjoy a nice vacation, but always give the first 20 percent to Christ as your way of catching up and meeting your goal of tithing.

It's important that this commitment be made in prayer to Christ and that you ask for help in recognizing all of the gifts given to you and in fulfilling this commitment. This is not between you and (St. James). It's between you and God. And again, if you are married, you should make this commitment with your spouse.

Step Seven: Follow through on your commitment. Pray. Pray some more. Ask for help often. And when you are blessed, recognize it, say a prayer of thanks, and fulfill your commitment.

"Our journey was filled with pay raises, new jobs, home refinancing, paid off loans, bonuses, and many other financial blessings. Each time we would receive such a blessing, I would journey to the church and say thank you and then give more to the church or one of our selected Christian charities. There were times when I seemed to be sitting in that darkened Nave once or twice a week, just saying thank you. You cannot recognize that many blessings without growing still closer to Christ. You can't recognize that many blessings without seeing still other blessings that have nothing to do with money -- the handshake of a friend, the smile of a child, a good laugh when something funny happens to you.

At the end of each year, my wife and I go back to Step Four, recalculate the percentage and then proceed through Steps Five, Six, and Seven again. Gradually, we got closer and closure until we reached the tithe. And we have continued to do so, even after reaching the tithe.

We don't believe there is really a miracle here. Pay raises and bonuses were a part of our lives long before we began this process. The Lord has blessed us with time, talent, and energy, and our employers have rewarded us accordingly. We do think, though, that we each just fail to see how often we are blessed. This process demands that we see those blessings. And once we see them, then we see so many others. That's why it is so rewarding. You cannot recognize your blessings and say thank you for them without growing closer to our Lord.

The other day I was asked how our perspective had changed since beginning this journey. I remembered feeling angry and guilty. I remembered that once I had shared the burden with Christ, I no longer felt that way. I remembered feeling a small sense of satisfaction once we had achieved the goal, but then almost immediately feeling just small.

My feelings change every day. But right now I feel like a young man who's working in his Father's store. I'm trying to do the right thing, to work hard, to live a good life, but I've noticed that often when I do something -- I fail.

I've noticed that every time I don't have enough talent or energy, my Father quietly slips behind me and makes things right. And as the week goes on, I notice that every sale, every satisfied customer, is the result of his efforts, not mine. I'm just there and largely in the way. And then payday comes, and my Father invites me in and we sit across from each other, with all the store's earnings on the desk between us, and he says, "Here. You take 90 percent of it. Enjoy life and your family. I love you. And I only really need this other 10 percent to change the world."

How can you respond to that? How can you ask for more?

In the end, that's why you feel small. All you can do is say thank you, and I love you, and I'll try to do better. And you mean it.

That closeness, that feeling of love -- that's why we're asked to tithe."