Cerulean Sanctum Series

Banking on God: Church Finances, Part 2

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Yesterday, I mentioned the problem of cost overhead in our churches. It’s a big problem, too, as many of you thought your church should spend its money on more important things than mortgages and office supplies.

Let’s not talk about those first. Instead, I want to alienate every pastor who reads this blog by tossing out one word: bivocational.

I look at it this way: We should most definitely pay our pastors. We should also pay the head of the children’s ministry. In fact, we should pay a lot of people, because, let’s face it, the church secretary is truly the one who runs the church. Next to the Lord, that is.

I think those folks are worth money. However, I also think we spend too much money on staff salaries, especially at these massive churches that have 100+ people on staff. That’s nuts. And it’s a big drain on the mission of the church.

How so? Well, we somehow found a way to separate the lowly from the priestly class, a sort of sequel to the Old Testament’s temple system, the very system Christ fulfilled and therefore put to rest.

That separation gave us a full-time clergy and the “well, someone else is doing the ministry for me, so I’ll concentrate on everything that isn’t ministry” laity, an artificial distinction that pretty much denies the idea of the priesthood of all believers. As George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, some are “more equal than others.”

In many ways, this has been a train wreck for pastors because no one treats them like a fellow brother in Christ. They are not one of us, so to speak, a view that facilitates all manner of craziness (cults of personality, depression, marital infidelity, and so on) that derails churches left and right.

Still, the greater hurt comes when those who aren’t “professionals” decide to lay down and do next to nothing to advance the cause of Christ. Sadly, under the bifurcated system of ministry we have today, that’s all too often the outcome.

Which is why I believe that pastors need to have a job outside the church. Even if it’s only a small part-time job, the pastor needs that dose of reality, that connection to the life his flock leads. Talk to some pastors and it’s all too clear they have no idea what goes on in the cubicles today. (I know. I read books by pastor/teachers talking about the modern work world and they just have no idea.) That works against them in many ways. I remember a pastor who preached that it didn’t matter what you looked like or how old you were, yet at the same time there were people in his congregation who were getting Botox injections so they wouldn’t be the old-looking one in the office and therefore subject to the first pink slip when the next round of downsizings came.

But more than that disconnection with the world of their congregations, having pastors work in the “real” work world affords churches the chance to have more than one pastor. A church could hire two pastors for the cost of one if both worked outside the church a few days a week. For a lot of churches who can afford only one pastor, having two bivocational pastors for the price of one full-timer would open up many more options and better broaden the giftings of the leadership in that church.

I also think that having bivocational pastors forces the people in the seats to step up. And that’s always a good thing. No one should be irreplaceable, even a pastor, and the more the congregation takes over the roles it should be handling apart from the lone office of the pastor, the better for their church.

Like I said, that won’t curry me any favor with the pastors who read this blog, but that’s my stance and I’m sticking with it.

I’m also going to quote this:

And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
—Matthew 17:4

Our tendency in the Church is to want to pitch that tent. This is why we have so many church buildings. In 2007 dollars, the price tag would have been $55 million...That tendency is also why the Lord Himself oversaw the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. He wanted the Church to get out there. To move. To not be tied to one place, to a building that can so easily become like cement shoes.

When it comes to church finances, for many churches, that church building has become the impediment that keeps them from running. Its very convenience slows them down, keeps the people thinking small, keeps them stuck in one place, imprisoned by a multi-million dollar mortgage.

But the temple? Well, you are the temple and so am I. Wherever we are is where the Church is. The Light moves where we move.

Track revivals around the world. Those revivals last until someone decides to pitch a tent, until the building committee comes together. Then it quietly peters out. That’s why revival burns bright in Chinese house churches and not so much here. It’s why God is using the poorest of the poor in today’s world to be the best evangelists of the message of Christ. They don’t even have the money for the tent so many others want to pitch. Somehow, making do with what they have is good enough for them. Because they’ve got another paradigm, a heavenly one.

I can’t help but think that our churches can be better by making do with less. By not being tied to the earth by wealth any more than a lone individual should be. Yet you look at so many church building projects and they seem a lot like this:

And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
—Luke 12:16-21

I look at that passage and it’s all too easy to see a church enamored of numbers talking about even bigger numbers and a place to store them all. Tearing down the old church building to build an even bigger one, and in the process losing sight of what really matters to God.

As Americans, I think it’s knit into our DNA to have a building. The American Dream’s foundation is built on home ownership, and I suspect that ideal translates into our compulsion to erect a church building. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, a church abhors being plain. Funny how expensive it is to rig up a church building for maximum entertainment and comfort value nowadays.

Between paying staff and paying for a building (and its upkeep and utilities—ask to look at the electrical and heating bills sometime), a big chunk of cash goes away from fulfilling the overall mission of the Church, especially as it pertains to the world outside the walls of that very building.

I think a church that ran without a full-time pastorate and a semi-utilized building would find itself less burdened by titles and mortgages and more burdened by the lost. It would be a church that cornered on a dime rather than running up on the sidewalk like a semi.

It’s a hard sell, though.

I keep hoping some day that we get a flat-tax or value-added tax in this country, but then you’ve got an entire industry of tax-prep and legal people screaming bloody murder that their livelihood—based as it is on the arcane, cryptic mess our tax code is—will up and go poof. I’m sorry, but it needs to up and go.

And so it is with the way we do church, especially when it comes to spending too much of our money on things that may not be advancing the Kingdom. Too many people are deeply invested in the crusty institutions our churches have become. They’ll find a way to hang on kicking and screaming, resisting what may be better for us in the long run, so that they can maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately, the status quo ain’t doin’ all that well for us anymore.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium

Banking on God: Church Finances, Part 1

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We work, we give. But what happens to that money once it leaves our wallets and hits the red velvet bullseye of the collection plate?

[poll=13]

Well, this poll does a good job showing that most of us know where the money goes. Good for those churches who are clear about their finances. I know mine goes into excruciating detail.

For those few who aren’t getting the whole story, what’s your take on the situation? Why do some churches hide their finances, even when there’s nothing illicit going on? As for those who said that not all line items got equal attention, what expenditures do you believe the church isn’t telling you about?

[poll=14]

As befits an active and informed readership, most of you knew what was up with your church’s finances. That’s a good thing. I wish every Christian in this country knew what was up with church expenditures.

[poll=15]

In keeping with the state of the stats so far, few had anything bad to say about how their church spent money. Anyone care to share their displeasure and what can be done to resolve it?

[poll=16]

If poll respondents are any indication, one church out of three has a negative cash flow. I would love to know (and should have asked) which of the negative responders belonged to a church with less than 200 members and which might actually belong to a megachurch. We assume that megachurches are rolling in dough, but that’s less true, I think, than some would imagine.

For the people who responded that their churches were highly prosperous, what do you believe made them so? And on the opposite end, to those who said their churches were running in the red, what made them that way?

[poll=17]

A quarter of you said that money interfered with your church’s mission. In what ways? Not having enough money can put a negative spin on even the best of intentions and lead to a sense of doom within a congregation. Too much money turns a church into Laodiceans.
[poll=18]

While it’s nice to see that two-thirds of you feel confident enough to inform your church should you encounter financial hardship, the third who could not…well, you have my condolences. I would hope that we all could. While some of that reluctance may be our own pride, I know that for some of you, the gossip would start flying about you the second you opened your mouth. And that’s a shame. Fear in a church can be a real poison, especially when lack of trust undergirds it.

[poll=19]

This surprised me most of all. I’m glad to see that such an astounding number of people could go to their churches and request financial help and get it without strings attached. That’s very heartening.

David Fitch wrote in The Great Giveaway that this is one area that most churches do poorly. From the answers here, a large majority of people go to very generous churches. So perhaps Fitch is wrong.

What say you all?

[poll=20]

This must be one of those “only in other people’s churches” questions because I can tell you dozens of gruesome stories about how badly some folks who needed financial help got pummeled by their churches. Each of those stories just breaks my heart.

But evidently, that’s not you folks. That’s good to hear.

So where are all these churches that mistreat their people in this regard? Perhaps it’s a different kind of Christian who gets the cold shoulder, not the kind who visits blogs like this one and answers poll questions about giving. I don’t know. Like I said, I know plenty of examples, some too close for comfort.

I’ll turn this around and ask you all if the runaway majority answer on this question surprised you.

[poll=21]

[poll=22]

The results on this poll surprised me, too, since I know few churches who have benevolence funds set aside for members. Non-members, outsiders, and folks from the community, yes, but sometimes the flock gets neglected when it comes to the largess.

[poll=23]

Given the previous two poll answers, who then is handing out the money in these churches that give it away? Is it simply individuals acting apart from the church, or is it the pastor on his own?

For those who answered that their church has a benevolence fund, if there’s no group overseeing that money, who is doling it out?

[poll=24]

[poll=25]

I find these last two polls fascinating because they seem to show that people aren’t so interested in spending money on the administration of their church as they are the mission. The decaying remains of HeritageUSAYet how do you have the mission without paying for the administration?

It’s a poser, as the Brits say.

We all want to give to charities that have low overhead, but I’ve got to believe that churches are not such ministries. I’ve seen enough balance books over the years to know that the actual running of the church as business entity saps more funds than most of us realize. I know that my own church has been attempting to pay off its mortgage by adding a premium payment. We also got several thousand dollars upgrade of our sound system.

It’s a tough, tough call, isn’t it, knowing what finances advance the Kingdom and what ones may not? At least not on the surface…

Next post, I’ll give my own take on church expenditures and offer a few ideas for better addressing the mission while spending less on those things that burn in the end.

Stay tuned.

(And if you have a few minutes to pray for my family, I’d appreciate it. Sickness, bad news, and “What next?” have been the orders of the week. Thanks!)

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Banking On God: Series Compendium

Banking on God: The Tithe, Part 2

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See Acts 4:34-35Today’s post is a tough word that may anger a few people. Asking people to give is always a tricky proposition. In the Church, it’s an even more sensitive issue because we have tied giving with our spirituality. Plenty of churches still exist where one’s piety is measured by how readily one ponies up the moolah.

And that brings us to the tithe.

My belief on giving money within the church is what I call “The Quick, Dead Priest” model. And nope, you won’t be hearing anyone else labeling what follows by that name. I believe, though, that this model best represents the true New Testament model of giving.

The first truth: Christians have been crucified with Christ and are now dead to the world.

The Bible is full of legal truths, the kind lawyers love. And one universal legal truth is that a dead man can’t own anything. Whatever once belonged to the deceased must be passed on to heirs. You can’t take it with you. End of story.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
—Colossians 3:3

As Christians, we have been united to Christ in His death. The stamp of the death certificate on your life and mine is the cross. Being in Christ means being in no one or no thing else. You, therefore, are not your own. You have been bought with the price of Christ’s death.

Outcome? You own nothing, not even yourself.

Therefore, all this talk of “what is mine” is just that, talk. Christians have no legal precedent to claim they own anything. God may indeed bless you with property and possession, but under the legal system of the Kingdom of God, you are merely stewarding what belongs to someone else. And that someone is God.

The second truth: The death and resurrection of Jesus permanently ended the temple system instituted in the Old Covenant.

This understanding is critical. We no longer perform sacrifices because Christ, the perfect sacrifice, died, satisfying the demand of blood as a covering for sin. Because Christ satisfied all conditions of the Law in Himself, if we are in Him, then we no longer must strive to fulfill the Law. (Don’t believe me? Sit down and read the entire book of Galatians in one sitting. Then read it again for good measure! Follow that up with the entirety of Hebrews.)

One of the hallmarks of the old temple system was the Aaronic priesthood. The giving of tithes in the Old Testament went to support the work of the Aaronic priesthood. The temple economy, based on the tithe of one-tenth, existed to keep the temple system running, to care for the priests (who were allowed no other forms of income under the Law), and to ensure the purity of the people before God through the sacrifices.

But Christ eliminated the old temple system. The sacrifices are gone. The flawed Aaronic priesthood and all that pertained to it, including the mandatory one-tenth tithe used to support it, was put aside, surpassed by the perfect priesthood of Christ. To prove the case even more thoroughly, the Sovereign God oversaw the destruction of the temple itself in 70 AD.

The old has passed away. The new has come.

Under that new priesthood of Christ, you and I are the priests. For all you Protestants out there, the Reformation was built, in part, on the idea of the priesthood of all believers:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
—1 Peter 2:9

But our priesthood is radically different. It’s a priesthood of equals. It’s a priesthood of community. It’s a priesthood that has God living inside each priest, not in a temple built by human hands. And that truth radically transforms how we must view giving.

The third truth: Each priest in the Kingdom of God in Christ is quickened by the Holy Spirit and that quickening informs giving.

The priests of the Old Covenant did not have the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, hence the need for a man-made temple. The priests of the New Covenant, however, do have God living inside them. We see how that plays out immediately after Pentecost:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
—Acts 2:44-45

That concept is expanded two chapters later:

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common…. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
—Acts 4:32, 34-35

Upon being filled with the promised Holy Spirit, the first thing the new priests of Christ did was to ensure that no one among them lacked for anything. They sold houses, properties, whatever, to ensure that the new priests were provided for. The difference in this priesthood, though, was that everyone was a priest, so all were entitled to the largess of the community, not just a certain tribe or class. All. And the payment? Everything, to the point that no one claimed personal entitlement.

Another truth emerges. The new priesthood did not build on the ashes of the old. It was and is a new thing that God has done. It relies not on Law, but on the indwelling Holy Spirit.

God created a new economy and with that economy comes a radically transformed idea of giving:

The one-tenth tithe has been abolished. Totally. It does not persist in any way in the new Kingdom economy.

As the Bible says:

In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
—Hebrews 8:13

The new standard of giving has replaced the old. The old was for men and women who did not have God dwelling inside them. The old was for men and women who had not been crucified with Christ and therefore dead to the world. The new asks everything of us. It asks for our houses, our possessions, our jobs,our kids, our spouses…even our very lives. It’s all on the table and can be used for the purposes of the Lord any way He chooses, even if that means that we must be martyred so as to accomplish His goals for the Kingdom.

How will you know how much to bring and whether His call on you is to simply give $20 or go so far as to sacrifice your life?

The Bible tells us:

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth….”
—John 16:13a

And

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
—Romans 8:14

The mark of our acceptance into the new economy of God, into His new Kingdom, is that we are led by the Spirit of God. The truth revealed by the Spirit will show us exactly what we should be doing with the money He’s given us to steward.

So how is it that far too many of us cling to patterns of given obsoleted by God’s new economy? Why do so many continue to endorse a ten percent tithe?

Because it’s easy.

It’s easy because it requires so little of us.

It’s easy because it asks nothing of going before God to inquire of Him by the Spirit to know what we should be giving in any and all situations

It’s easy because it doesn’t require us to live by “Give us this day our daily bread.”

It’s easy because it doesn’t ask us to give until it hurts, to take up our cross daily and follow Christ.

And that’s the problem in a nutshell. The old economy asked very little. The new economy in which dead men and women made alive in Christ are priests in a new Kingdom…that economy looks messy, fuzzy, and difficult compared with the old economy. However, the new is one thing the old is not: perfect.

If we want to see the Church be what She is intended to be by Her Bridegroom, then we MUST start living under the new economy of His Kingdom. Not the old economy, but the new.

Now if only more of our churches in America understood this.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium