Giving to Greatest Effect

The subject of giving to the Lord has come up a few times in the last year from different angles. One idea that I touched on briefly in a previous post is that some Christians believe we ought to do all our giving through the filter of local church leadership, who would distribute funds received as they see fit.

You’d have to know a little bit about my background to understand how foreign such an idea seems to me.

Back to 1950

A downtown church in a major Canadian city commended my father to the Lord’s work long before I was ever the remotest of remote considerations. Dad was single at the time and thought he would probably remain single for life. He’d come to Canada from the UK after WWII with the idea of studying at Bible School and then serving the Lord in some capacity, so he worked to pay his way and studied briefly at a Christian institution in the US until realizing that Bible School could not teach him anything of substance he hadn’t already learned. (That wasn’t arrogance; one of his professors asked him, “Er, what are you doing here?” I guess the English churches were doing a good job of equipping motivated teens and twenty-somethings back in the day.) In Canada, he had already started Bible teaching, evangelizing and doing children’s work, and he simply wanted to get back to it. So he left Bible School before graduating and went back to a combination of regular secular work and doing everything he could for the Lord in his spare time.

At some point in the early 1950s, the leadership of his home church took him aside and asked him if he had any interest in serving the Lord full time. They had been watching him, discussing him and praying for him for a few years, and had agreed together that this young man looked to be cut out for that sort of life and might be of use to the Lord in building up his church. Full time service was not only exactly what Dad wanted, it was all he wanted. Informed of his interest, the church’s elders had a little meeting about it and the congregation shortly did something modeled on Acts 13:1-3: they prayed, laid hands on him and cut him loose to do whatever the Lord might lead him to do. Just like that. No mission board, no specific plan of action, no oversight, no salary, no promise to do anything but support him in prayer.

Quit your secular job. Off you go. Keep in touch. Let us know how it goes. That was about it.

Commendation Back Then

My father thus began a life of financial dependence on the Lord that lasted over sixty years. Nobody ever told him what, where, whom or how to serve. No arrangement ever made was less predictable or less intrinsically secure. His commending church faithfully sent a ridiculously small amount every month relative to his actual living expenses, and he spoke there regularly but far from exclusively. Other local churches in which he preached would send him a few dollars after a Sunday visit or a series of meetings. Individual Christians who had benefited from his teaching and counseling would slip an envelope in his pocket or mail a check to his address, which at that time was a single room in the house of a friendly local Christian family. He lived by faith, never once asked for a penny, and never let anyone know what his financial situation was or whether he was in need. The Lord always provided, sometimes right at the last minute and in the most unpredictable and unexpected ways.

Dad was not the only man doing this sort of thing in the 1950s or afterward. Not by a long shot. Commendation was the informal practice among the non-denominational local churches in which my dad served at the time, whether for local full-time Bible teachers or for mission workers overseas. No mission boards, no salaries, no direct supervision. Just let them go, commend them to the Head of the Church in prayer, and see what the Lord does with them. Fewer churches practice this sort of commendation today. By 1960, very much to his surprise, Dad’s view had changed that full-time service, for him at least, precluded marriage. He met my mother in a little local church hundreds of miles north of home, married her rather abruptly, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Eleven months later, I was born into the home they built together, and several more young and energetic siblings shortly followed. I grew up regularly reminded the Lord would provide, and he always did. We were never wealthy or even well off, but we always had what we needed.

Two Models

That’s the model for full-time Christian service that I learned as a youngster and the model I believe in. I understand it’s not common in churches today, but it’s as ordinary to me as breathing.

With that in mind, let’s come back to this issue of Christians doing all their giving through the local church, effectively through the good intentions and best guesses of the men on whom responsibility has been bestowed. Until recently, I never even gave that possibility a thought. For years, the vast majority of my giving went to individuals and families doing full-time Christian work at home and abroad, as my father had done, with the occasional healthy donation to my local church to cover the estimated costs of maintaining the building based on the number of other believers giving. (Annual reports are good for something, and I wanted to pay my share.) Only recently have I started to meet people who accepted and practiced an exclusively church-based giving model just as unquestioningly as I had absorbed my very different presets.

As an aside, there’s a good reason for such a wide variety of practices in local churches, and that is that the New Testament gives no instruction to local churches about how to fund the work of the Lord. There are plenty of instructions to individuals to be generous and share enthusiastically with others, but few commands about how to do it. What we have are examples and models, not hard rules of procedure. So there is room for some human creativity in there, and that’s what we see as we look around.

The Interesting Part

Interestingly (to me anyway), in addition to the IRL conversations I’ve had about this subject, I came across this article at the GotQuestions website this morning. It’s entitled “Does our tithe all have to go to our church or can part of it go to a Christian ministry?” So somebody else is asking this question at least. What I found most astonishing about the article is that there is not one word about full-time individuals doing the work of the Lord on faith. Not one. There’s much about “Christian causes” and “parachurch ministries” and “Christian organizations”, but not word one about missions, let alone undirected full-time work.

For me, the most fascinating paragraph in the entire piece is this one:

“Sadly, the answer to this question usually breaks down based on who is responding. Churches / pastors will usually teach that the full 10% should go to the church, and any other Christian giving should be above and beyond the 10%. Christian ministries and causes usually teach that the 10% figure for giving can be divided between churches and ministries according to the Lord’s leading.”

Oh yes, they also assume the full-time salaried pastor model.

Institutional Institutions

I find it not the least bit surprising that institutional expressions of Christianity require … institutions, with all the financial baggage that accompany them: secretaries, buildings, advertising budgets, fund-raisers and so on. When you give to such an outfit, rather than going straight to the cause you are interested in supporting, your gift makes all that clutter both possible and inevitable. Naturally, their methods of generating income must all be financed somehow, and in perpetuity. If the money stream dries up, they are done like dinner, and liquidating the “baggage” at a fraction of what it’s worth is no fun for anyone.

Talk to the head of a family living out faith-based service about where your 10% should go (assuming that’s what you give), and I can pretty much guarantee you his opinion will have nothing to do with his personal situation, because for that he depends entirely on the Lord’s goodness. He doesn’t have to encourage, motivate or manipulate anyone into doing anything on his behalf. If the money stream dries up, he takes it as a sign that the Lord is leading him to a different area of service, or maybe to make tents and keep on plugging away. Feeding and clothing three or four growing kids is not cheap, but it’s a trivial cost compared to the overhead of running a giant corporation.

Moreover, if it fails, it fails small. You won’t have an RZIM on your hands.

A Church That Needs ALL Your Money

My desire in giving to the Lord’s work has always been to give to greatest effect. That meant supporting individuals, and I like to know them, choose them and have ongoing personal fellowship with them so I can pray for them adequately informed about their current situation. After all, the responsibility of this stewardship before the Lord is mine.

I think GotQuestions has put its finger on the problems with institutionalism, though the writers are not too explicit about it. Possibly they are unaware they have done it. Both modern churches and parachurch organizations are far too often money pits with mortgages, extensive assumed obligations and numerous regular salaries to pay. They suit comfort-oriented middle-class congregations more than the faithful few committed to being a testimony to Christ. I consider that any local church whose leadership feels entitled to administer all the money their congregants give to the Lord has gotten way too big for its boots. I trust I will never encounter one.

As Peter said to Ananias on his way out, “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?”

To me, that puts the appropriate responsibility in the appropriate hands.