This is a guest post by Scott Bessenecker. He is the Associate Director of Mission for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Each year he helps to mobilize thousands of students to domestic and international mission. He is author of various books including his new release Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex
Serving Two Masters
On any given day I think about and talk about money at least half a dozen times. I talk with my colleagues about fund development, I fill out an accounting report, I check to see how much of my travel budget I’ve spent, I begin working out how to pay for a new ministry idea. As a full-time Christian worker, I am steeped in the world of money.
Jesus warns a great deal more about the dangers surrounding money and possessions than he does about the dangers surrounding sexual infidelity. You could say that followers of Jesus are more apt to be led astray by our coins than by our loins. It is as if there is a highly corrosive quality to my regular obsession with getting and spending money, even in ministry What if the sliver of the Christian church I am part of, one that exists on an island of affluence in a sea of poverty, is straining out moral gnats while swallowing camels?
It is time to re-think a ministry paradigm that is built on the foundation of money. Those of us in the west have given finances center stage in our fellowships and organizations, and we are far too often oriented around the financial bottom line. Money has become our deliverer, our hope, our savior, our protector, and our source of life. If we had more money we could do more kingdom things. Save more souls, build more churches, release more missionaries, hire more pastors, and build more churches.
Money has become a panacea for the church, the answer to all ministry problems. Economic growth in our churches and ministries is considered a presumed good. I think it is time to begin questioning the equation More Money = More Kingdom.
When I was in Malawi a few years ago, I was shaken by the serious poverty which was set against the backdrop of a fabulously-funded relief and development industry. Shiny aid agency SUVs and massive glass aid agency buildings lined the dusty streets and stood like paradoxes in the middle of an impoverished, deforested landscape. The only development I saw going on in Malawi was the development of the development industry.
The exaggerated place that money occupies in our hearts and minds shows up in our ministries. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the central place money occupies in our ministries leaks into our souls. Most religious workers I know are not making large sums of money nor do they have ambitions to become rich via ministry. But money-love has many faces. At the core, our fixation with money betrays a soul-crushing lack of trust and handicaps our imagination.
Our Corporate Roots
Most Christian ministries and many large churches are set up like corporations. The connection between the corporation and Protestant mission reaches back hundreds of years to the early commercial trade societies like the British East Indies company, which carried many of the first Protestant missionaries abroad. William Carey looked to the trade society in order to design the missionary society. Find investors, create a board of directors, appoint executives who recruit and hire employees. This is the corporate-capitalist paradigm and it is the chief shape to large ministries and churches. But is this really the best way to run a ministry?
Finances are the center around which this corporate universe orbits. Our ministries are run largely like commercial businesses. Major donors who made their fortunes in the corporate, for-profit world occupy our boards and become chief architects and influencers of our ministries. Those with capital (or access to capital via friendship) can essentially purchase their access into ministry. My godly and qualified friends who grew up in slums of the developing world or the impoverished neighborhoods of the western world have almost no chance of entering ministry or starting kingdom ventures if the money-centered, corporate paradigm is the only way to build the kingdom of God. But how do we shrink the excessive emphasis on money within our churches and organizations?
Dethroning Money as our CEO and Head Pastor
Become a centrifuge, not a magnet: The corporate temptation is to subsume all new ministry ideas into a single monolith. While we think this encourages economies of scale, it actually makes ministries unwieldy and expensive. The Tampa Underground is a great example of allowing house churches to spin off of a core. It is a lighter, inexpensive, reproducible model. Ministers are bi-vocational and ministries grow out of people’s homes. It is a prophetic alternative to the large, centralized, expensive, corporate vision to Christianity. To do this requires greater reliance on volunteers and bi-vocational workers, something should work harder to make room for in our ministries.
Let the financially excluded make financial decisions: When there was a resource distribution problem in Acts 6, the people being excluded were invited to take the lead in making resource decisions. I sometimes wonder if we invited our financially marginalized brothers and sisters into the places where we are making key financial decisions, whether they might order things differently. How salaries and benefits are structured, what we choose to spend money on, and how money is raised may take on new and innovative dimensions.
Redistribute: An extremely privatized vision of money has created a world where 85 individuals hold as much wealth as the bottom 3 billion human beings. I simply don’t think there is any way around redistribution if we want to create an even playing field and release more ministers and ministries. My organization, InterVarsity, redistributes 1% of all funds raised to our non-white colleagues. One ministry I know releases 10% of what workers raise to those in need within their ministry. Whether 1% or 10%, redistribution is an acknowledgement that wealth is concentrated into too few hands. Not everyone has equal access to capital.
What might happen if we ousted the monetary lords from the corporate thrones we’ve constructed in our ministries and churches? My guess is that we would open up creative alternatives, expand ministry to new hard to reach places, and involve a myriad of gifted workers who have been sidelined by the high entrance fees to Christian ministry.
How does this post challenge you about money and ministry? Please share in the comments?
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