money and theology...

As I said in a post way back in April, I fear that many of our congregations are black holes for resources. So often we burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars with mediocre results. We talk about the contributions of our members as offerings to God for His work to be done. Often, they end up just paying the bills so we can have church. You may think “What is so wrong with that? We need church and there is a lot of good done there.” While I wouldn’t necessarily choose to argue against that point, although I would be tempted to especially if it were said like that, what I would do is point out how low we have set our sights.

While mega churches may not be “mediocre” in their products and they may do things on a large scale with big budgets, highly produced services and a decent amount of grandeur, I am still left wondering if the amount of resources (cash and man hours) they burn through are yielding the highest level of return or really the desired return at all. As I have said before, I am not looking for hype and really fewer and fewer people are, but they are not looking for “typical” church either. So many non-mega churches are hype free, but they are also void of any aliveness. As my theology has shifted over time, it has caused me to question so much of what we do as congregations. Hence the title of the blog which hopefully is dripping with enough sarcasm it cannot be misinterpreted and all of my posts which have been dealing with this central theme of question and change.

I have shared this quote from Brian McLaren before, but haven’t found a better one so here it goes again. “Many of you will remember the two lists I talked about on the tour - the list of intramural religious debates in the Christian subculture hanging on one wall, and the list of global crises hanging on the other. A year after the EMC tour, it's clearer to me than ever that many if not most Christians in the US remain focused on the "religious arguments" list.” What if we weren’t? What if we could really move past our endless debates about some point that some theologian has written hundreds of pages on that ends up leaving us uninspired and overwhelmed by the complexity brought to what should be much more simple. Maybe Jesus chose fisherman instead of the top students of the day because he knew what the “greatest” minds would do to this deep way of living that he came to demonstrate.

On the most simplistic level our congregations are just groups of people who follow the way of Jesus pooling our resources together to accomplish a set of goals. So, the question to small, medium or mega churches and members is what if the finances that we are pooling together are being inefficiently used and what if they are being inefficiently used on goals that actually miss the mark? What if McLaren is right? We keep hashing up our “intramural religious debates” all the while we are burning a host of resources that could actually solve some much bigger needs and problems.

What could 200 people with roughly a couple hundred thousand dollars a year really do? Well that depends on their theology. We know what our current paradigm can produce. Some have managed this better than others. As I have said in a previous post, personally I have detangled from so much of the way we “do church” and the theology behind it. With that said, it leaves me and so many people like me (which believe me is an ever growing crowd) at the brink of possibility. Not that we are about to discover it all and get it all right, but that there really is a next chapter, not a final chapter, ready to be written. So we find ourselves ready to move from just fellowship to community, from just worship service to inspiring and engaging gatherings (minus the hype), from just Bible class to spiritual formation, from just service projects to finding actual solutions that change the world around us, from just getting people “saved” to more holistic healing, redeeming and reconciliation. With these shifts in theology and the abandonment of our current paradigm I wonder what 200 people with two hundred thousands dollars could do. If we weren’t looking to just start another church, hire another minister or build another building, what we would we actually do with our money and time? If we weren’t looking to just be another organization yet we would still have the need to be organized what would it look like? What would we do if we weren’t bound by a heritage or a denomination and we were free to discover a more organic way of Jesus as opposed to the more church sub-culture driven one we find ourselves being worn out by?

But, there is a problem facing existing churches and even church plants. In our current church paradigm which I call the “American Business Model” paradigm, theology and finance can go hand in hand. When one is talking about a particular congregation shifting theologically, finances have to be considered. If you anger a decent portion of your members by purposing certain theological shifts, your finances can change drastically. As much as we don’t want money and theology to partner up, in our current paradigm, there is no way around it. I don’t criticize congregations for taking this into account when making decisions, because it is a reality, yet I do criticize them for not finding a way around it or allowing this fact to hold them back. Yet so many congregations find themselves in grid lock because those with the money won’t let the theology shift. Maybe that should tell us something (or even smack us in the face) about the way things are set up. Maybe money has had way too much of a voice in our paradigm and instead of being a commodity that we use to do good, it has become a leader that calls way too many shots.