The heart of the church in America

Dan Edelen has a thought provoking post on church budgets and spending priorities. Here is a snippet from his post Your Church’s Budget–And Why It May Grieve the Lord

As much as we talk about being others-centric in the American Church, our church budgets don’t reflect this. We really are too self-centered. For many churches, the Great Commission is thwarted by building and physical plant maintenance costs. When a church allocates little money for outsiders, it grows into itself and withers.

If you are a church leader, consider a different way of budgeting that better reflects the Kingdom of God. If it means not erecting a $10 million building so you can use those funds to finance the education of single moms in your community instead, then cancel the groundbreaking ceremony. If it means a Sunday School teacher who has been out of work gets to keep his house because you set aside monies for this kind of help, then go for it.

We live in disconcerting times. If we don’t adjust the way the Church spends money, we won’t be the first choice when lost people come looking for answers. The Church will look like any other worldly, tightfisted corporate entity, and no one is running to Megabiz Inc. for salvation.

If Paul was making the budget for your church would it look like your current budget? If he was writing the checks, would the “payable to” line look like the cancelled checks in the church bank account today?

I don’t think any honest assessment of the church can avoid the truth that our fixed maintenance expenses are hampering our ability to care for those in need in the church, much less those outside of it and that we are far more concerned, by and large, with catering to existing Christians than we are in making new disciples. Buildings cost money. Staff costs money. Sunday school materials and other programs cost money. So does clean water and food and shelter for an orphan. So does sending a missionary to a unreached people group. So does helping a family in your church pay their bills when dad loses his job. There isn’t enough money in most churches to pay for all of this and so something has to give. All too often what gives is not what we should be sacrificing.

Jesus said: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:21). Do the spending priorities and budgets of the church in America say that our heart is for the least among us, for our brothers and sisters in need, for the lost person down the road or around the world? Or does it say that we are mostly interested in empire building, in our own comfort, in religion? I don’t think we really want to ask that question because we don’t want to hear the answer.