Modern day Americans live in the most materially rich society the world has ever seen. This material wealth has resulted in a society of great spiritual poverty that is unique among the world’s people. Americans are no more sinful than any other people, but the kind of spiritual sickness we have is unique to us, as it only arises in circumstances of great wealth. Because of the novelty of our situation, there is not necessarily a solid answer to the question of what to do with all the gobs of money that we have.
What, exactly, is the problem?
Succinctly, we have few places to put our money that will do much good. Despite all our potential, we (rightly) feel impotent. While our government has provided all kinds of incentives and tax breaks for benevolent giving, it is not at all clear where money can be donated that will foster a world the glorifies God. I will come back around to explaining this, but I think first it is appropriate to rehearse the Christian position regarding money, and why it is such a problem that benevolent giving is so fraught.
Why not just spend all our money on ourselves and the ones we love?
There is a ton of scripture dealing with money. Jesus himself spoke about it in very stark terms:
“ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
- Matthew 6:19-21, 24
While there is stuff in the Old Testament dealing with monetary faithfulness…
“Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”
- Malachi 3:10
…the New Testament has a lot more to say:
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
- 1 Timothy 6:10
or how about this one?":
“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
- James 5:1-5
If you didn’t already know, money can be a real problem. It, on its own, is not good or bad, but meant to be used as a tool to glorify God. Yet when it is spent instead on oneself, it has become an idol and rightly condemns us to eternal punishment. The burden of the rich (and that is most of us in America, by biblical standards) is to find ways to spend our money in ways that bring glory to God. Glorifying ourselves is the opposite of that. We are not our own: we belong to God. We have been bought at a price. Our lives should reflect that.
A Practical Note
The reality is that spending money on ourselves and our children does not bring lasting joy, either. Deep down, we know that the fleeting material pleasures of leisure and excitement are, well, just that: fleeting. They don’t last for eternity. For so many, life is spent hopping from one fleeting happy feeling to another, but utterly alien to the deep, lasting joy that is only to be found in Christ.
While it is a good thing to make sure one’s family is provided for, it is another thing to bequest large sums of money and wealth to family members. I have seen the presence of chunks of money severely poison families as they jockey for position around an older or sicker loved one with money. I have seen so many people with vast sums of money, who are told by society that they are supremely blessed, but who do not know how to work or create, how to care or invest. I think it a rather cruel thing to consign someone to wealth without the tools to know how to spend that wealth for God’s glory. So, friends, of course help equip your children and family for future flourishing, but don’t just dump a ton of money on them.
The Problems Involved in Giving to the Local Church
I know some folks who have a good deal of money. I would consider them friends. They worked hard earlier in life, made smart financial decisions, and now are in possession of a relative fortune. Yet this has given them much sadness over the years, as they have donated fractions of that fortune only to find it squandered. They gave a small fortune to another church in the small town they lived in, only for that church to become a progressive church that preaches doctrines counter to the Christian scriptures. They then gave funds to a Christian college with a very solid president who was leading the charge against cultural marxism, but then he retired and was replaced with a leader who did not have the same passion. They have supported local nonprofits that work with the local poor and children, but they have often been discouraged at the lack of transformation through accountability that is offered to the families affected. They rightly wonder if their funds are being used, not to help people out of poverty, but to make them more comfortable in the midst of their dysfunction.
These folks give happily to the church, but not nearly as much as they could. Their experience has been that institutions and people are prone to fail to uphold their values, or even work against traditional biblical values. They represent a very large group of people in America who could give a lot more to the church, but who choose not to. I know many more folks like this, who do not currently come anywhere close to approximating a tithe to their church, when they could easily give away 50% of their money and still live quite comfortably.
Many pastors are prone to feel resentful at those who have but who choose not to share. They are right to point out the spiritual danger of hoarding goods at the expense of the poor. And it is true that a great many of the rich do not withhold because of the concerns I have listed here, but because they are selfish, greedy, and evil. This isn’t the case for all the rich, but definitely for some.
The rich are indeed obligated to give to the poor, but the thing is that the church isn’t poor. The church is meant to help the poor, but the church itself cannot be poor, because our heritage is in the Lord. One of many scandals in the modern church is that poor people are now falling away from churches at higher rates than middle- and upper-class people, and churches seem to know less about helping the poor than they ever have before. So many pastors are like dogs chasing cars when it comes to money: even if they were to catch it, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Having money for the sake of it is not the calling of the church.
Another hateful thing churches do with the poor is simply writing a check. As folks enter the doors of a church, speak to the pastor or a member, send an email or make a call, they are giving the church an opportunity to speak to their vulnerability and sin. So often the church instead behaves permissively, subsidizing dysfunctional lives when it should be using what it has (money) to pry open otherwise closed hearts.
Local churches and their pastors so often fail to use funds in ways that transform lives, choosing instead to pursue more materialism and entertainment rather than calling folks to repentance through the authentic Word of God. How many pastors are on television with expensive clothes, living in expensive houses, surrounded by status symbols? How many pastors are caught misspending funds and embezzling money? How many are just blowing the money their little old ladies in the pews worked so hard for on people who take without any intention of transformation? These incidents are real and frequent. Folks are right to question whether or not their money is best spent on the church.
This phenomenon, by the way, is not new. I remember studying the Franciscan Order in the Roman Catholic Church, an organization of monks following the discipline and life of St. Francis of Assisi, a man who gave up all his wealth and lived in poverty all his days for the sake of service to the poor. Yet after a couple decades of great organizational faithfulness and vigor, the Franciscans became opulently rich. They betrayed a heritage of voluntary poverty and gave in to the temptations of mammon. What can be done when even religious organizations dedicated to care of the poor become self serving?
The Problems of Giving to Nonprofits, Colleges, & Government
Lest one become too angry at the church, nonprofits are notoriously guilty of the same sin. Very few exercise the transparency needed to prove effectiveness. Like so many government programs, nonprofits tout the anecdotes of individuals who were blessed by one initiative or another, yet the overall trends of our society are not good. Even huge foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been found to create very little wealth for the poor and instead are used to suit the needs of the rich. It was revealed earlier this year that the millions of dollars given to Ibrahim X. Kendi and other Black Lives Matter activists went into mansions and wealth for the main leaders, while producing nothing of substance. Many wealthy Jewish Americans are upset at the moment to find that all the millions of dollars they have given to their alma maters have resulted in rabidly antisemitic student populations.
Government programs to help the poor are notoriously unhelpful, and have even caused great harm over the years. The modern welfare state has exacerbated factors leading to poverty by incentivizing households not to have men in them. Children need fathers in the household more than they need a middle class income. Many currently have neither the fathers nor the income. They are not socialized well, they do not know how to work hard, they do not know how to build and maintain healthy relationships. Despite all of the trillions of dollars spent on social welfare programs over the years, we are worse off than we were before the creation of the welfare state.
Summing Up
So it is damning to hoard money for oneself, it is harmful to give too much of it to family, government, colleges, and nonprofits use the money for unbiblical social programming, and churches are not immune to the worldly temptations that money presents. What should we do with money? Just burn it up? No.
My Solution
I believe we are at such a dysfunctional place because a while back Western culture swallowed a mostly materialistic understanding of people. Because of Freud, Marx, and other thinkers, we chose to believe that meeting people’s material needs primarily would trickle down into fixing a whole host of other problems, spiritual and otherwise. In nerdy words: We believed in a false anthropology.
The reality of human existence is not primarily material or monetary, but spiritual and relational. Remember that the word RELIGION is built around the root -lig, which, like a LIGament connotes connection. Re-lig-ion denotes a structure that re-connects otherwise alienated and disconnected individuals. In this highly narcissistic and alienated age, the #1 thing our culture needs is true religion, which reconnects us rightly to God and others. What I’m saying is that the primary gift we have to offer is not money or ministries per se, but relationships.
Money can indeed be hugely transformational when it is used to buttress healthy, holy relationships. It does not need to be this empty, ephemeral opiate of the masses. It can be a fertilizer for flourishing people who need to be healed from inborn sin.
Once upon a time, churches did indeed transform the lives of the poor and needy. One of the reasons I am a Methodist is because the original generation of Methodists so effectively engaged the lower-class and working-class folks of Great Britain to radically shift their lives toward God. I believe the church has no option but to do this again.
Yet that requires that we again put the priority on relationships. Not the phony, skin-deep, comfortable relationships that are so common in churches, but deep, authentic, mutually-vulnerable, accountable relationships that our scriptures point us to.
That means churches can no longer be country club settings. I don’t mean to insult country clubs; I just mean to say that the church is not a country club. It isn’t a club at all. It is a spiritual family of people who have had their robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. That means our assemblies need to look a lot less like an evangelistic plea or concerts for consumers and a lot more like people who know and love one another.
Conclusion
I believe that most churches put the cart before the horse. They want the fruits of the Spirit without doing the hard, disciplined work of self-denial and sanctification. They want the young families, the volume, the big budgets, the ease…but they do not want to pursue holiness. Yet Jesus said
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
- Matthew 5:33
Rich folks know that they need to give. As the Lord works upon their hearts, and as pastors do their part to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable, the wealthy will get a sense of the noblesse oblige that the Lord requires. As they are driven to their bibles, and as they listen to good sermons, they will encounter such things as:
“And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.
“But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”
- Luke 6:34-35
To the rich, I have to say: You have to give, even if you don’t believe the receiver is any good. If God gives to a sinner like you, then you must also give to the unworthy. Your job is 1) to find a local church that is interested in being more than a skin-deep social club, and 2) to engage in it and build it up so that it knows what to do with the wealth that you entrust to it. To those to whom much is given, much is expected. You have to be one of these people building relationships, showing the love of Christ, building up small groups, facilitating scripture study, facilitating prayer. One must plug up the holes before a container can hold water. Likewise, you must build up your church, build up believers and leadership that can ably handle the blessings God is moving you to entrust to them. By the time you die and your assets are distributed in the way that you have designated, you will take joy in knowing that your church knows exactly how to honor your legacy (and, more importantly, the will of Christ Jesus) when your trust is enacted.
While this work is being done, it is the job of the church to truly be holy, to actually offer wholeness to the poor, to earnestly practice the love of Christ Jesus in our assemblies, and to exercise church discipline, maintaining the purity of the fellowship that the bible requires. As we do so, it will not be like pulling teeth to get folks to give. We don’t need to do these canned stewardship programs. Rather, folks will remark on the vast difference in culture between the church and the world, and those to whom much has been entrusted will likewise be faithful in returning that trust to the Lord through the church.
So CHURCH: Be the church. The world needs Christ’s church. It doesn’t need another government program, another nonprofit, another college, another sect. It needs true local churches doing the work of God. The rich will take their place and fellow servants, joining joyfully in ministry as the Lord moves them.