My husband has been preaching through 1 Corinthians this year, and
yesterday he arrived at the first half of chapter nine in which the
apostle Paul challenges the Corinthians over their lack of financial
support for him. We deem this lesson crucial to our baby believers as
well; yet we are reticent to preach on the topic unless it comes up
naturally through the course of expositional preaching, as it did
yesterday.
This passage of Scripture is crucial to a baby church
plant because, as I explained to my son last night, "If we want to move
on to plant other churches, we must make sure this church is strong
first and able to stand on its own. And if we want this church to stand
on its own, it must be able to pay its own pastor."
We are reticent to preach on this topic for two major reasons:
- the prosperity gospel and
- the people's poverty
The
prosperity gospel has burned over much of southern Africa. False
pastors, syncretistic churches, and money-making miracle crusades are
everywhere in Africa--copying to the extreme the abuses they see on TBN.
Every one of those pastors preaches weekly about the tithe or makes big
ordeals out of the collection of the offerings and rewards big givers
through promises or status symbols. The church is big business over
here. In fact, so many of the other churches are like that that we and
our church members simply describe them as "money churches." Thus an
obvious, major difference between our church and the prosperity churches
is that we DON'T talk a lot about money.
So we feel we must avoid
those topics so as to not be joined in a group we consider heretical
and detrimental to the Gospel; and when we do address the giving of
church members, we sometimes feel that we have to add a lot of
disclaimers to enumerate the differences between what we're preaching
and what they say.
Poverty is obviously another big problem. How
can they be expected to support their pastors when they have barely enough to live on? Would we want to live on that much?
The
issue of poverty is complicated by the centuries of vast amounts of aid
Africa has received through the years. The Africans get
so MUCH welfare
and yet seem to feel that it's not enough. So it might not occur to
them to live sacrificially and plan a budget in order to pay their
pastor. After all, so many needs are met from outside them. Why would
this need be met from within them?
So one of the questions Seth
asked the church yesterday in his sermon was, "If a church can't support
its pastor, is it sinning?" What do you think? Tough question. The
answer could certainly be
yes; but it could possibly be
no
as well, if the church were too poor to support its pastor yet tried
wholeheartedly to support him more than they supported self-comforts.
There
are so many other questions that can be included in this issue. For
example, should our poor, small church try to support us with whatever
finances they can? At first I said
no, because we are church
planting missionaries, which is not the same thing as a pastor. But my
husband reminded me that the apostle Paul was also a missionary when he
assumed the Corinthians should support him.
Please pray for your
church planting missionaries around the world, because they cannot leave
their churches and begin new works until the churches are selfish,
meaning that they have the "Three Selfs":
- Self-supporting
- Self-governing
- Self-propagating
and
supporting their pastor includes two of those points. We need a change
in their cultures and worldviews to allow for sacrificial giving to
their pastor (and to missions). At times this seems like an impossible
task indeed, but God can do what seems impossible!
