Discipling Spiritual Leaders
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the March 15, 2014
Sabbath School Lesson
“Now it was the practice of the
priests that, whenever any of the people offered a sacrifice, the priest’s
servant would come with a three-pronged fork in his hand while the meat was
being boiled and would plunge the fork into the pan or kettle or caldron or
pot. Whatever the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is
how they treated all the Israelites who came to Shiloh. But even before the fat
was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the person who was
sacrificing, ‘Give the priest some meat to roast; he won’t accept boiled meat
from you, but only raw.’ If the person said to him, ‘Let the fat be burned
first, and then take whatever you want,’ the servant would answer, ‘No, hand it
over now; if you don’t, I’ll take it by force.’” 1 Samuel 2:13-16, NIV
Many years
ago, I worked for a major national insurance company as their registered agent.
I sold insurance and also was licensed to sell equities. I assisted individuals
with several aspects of their financial and estate planning based on excellent
training received from the insurer in these areas. During the years that I was employed
there, I discovered that in order to be successful, an agent must be willing to
convince people to buy products that they did not want and perhaps did not even
need. We had very detailed computer projections that we would trot out to show
that they did indeed need what we were selling to avoid the possibility of a
very dire future. This was very similar to an evangelist working an audience. Initially,
I bought into these projections, but as I learned more and more about true
financial planning principles, it became more and more difficult to rationalize
this company’s business model, and we parted company.
One of the
fundamental principles that I learned about financial planning is if the
financial planner stands to make money from your choices whether you win or
lose, they may not have your best interests in mind. Some may see the soundness
of this when it comes to their finances. However, is it possible to be sensible
like this when it comes to our retirement planning and then lose this sense of
rationality when we transfer over to the spiritual domain? In short do we ask
who stands to gain from what we are being told?
The
Christian church has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 1st
Century, C.E. Back then, wealth and property were held in common[i]
and no one gained a material advantage by convincing others to follow Jesus.
This resulted in an inclusive faith with the interplay of many different
perspectives that allowed for a flexible theology to take the message of the
Gospel to much of the Mediterranean world and beyond. Perhaps this egalitarian
attitude allowed the leaders in Jerusalem to feel so accommodating toward the
non-Jewish Christian converts when Paul met with them over the issue of
circumcision.[ii]
Eventually,
things changed. Perhaps they changed when Paul instructed the church to take a
harder line toward the needy.[iii]
The Book of Acts, which scholars believe was written in the 7th
decade, CE,[iv]
purports that the church of the 4th decade was egalitarian
financially. Paul’s guidance to the Thessalonians is dated to the mid-6th
decade.[v]
If this is indeed a harder line, then it occurred rather early, perhaps within
twenty years of Christ’s ascension. However, since it is bracketed apparently
by earlier practice that is different and is described by someone writing a
decade after Paul’s statement may indicate that Paul’s statement is applicable
to a specific context and not seen as the general policy of the first century
church.
While the
idea of some profiting from the Gospel was apparently not practiced early on,
the fact that Paul mentioned it to the Corinthian church gives support to the
idea that it was at least under discussion.[vi]
Why would it even need discussion? Aren’t Paul’s words on the matter adequate
to establish the practice of some being paid to work full time for the Lord? Perhaps
at issue then as now is the purpose of the church. Should the church exist
primarily to provide resources to support a clerical caste? Or should its
resources go primarily for evangelism and benevolence?
A study done
in the Episcopalian Church and presented in an article in the “Daily
Episcopalian,” illustrates the burden this creates for congregations.[vii]
The article’s author, George Clifford, states that the total compensation
package for even one full time cleric can run well over seventy thousand
dollars. This would mean that for a small congregation of thirty members, each
member would have to contribute an average of over $2,300 per year or almost
$200 per month simply to break even notwithstanding the expenses of operating
the physical plant. Perhaps this reality is what caused Paul to prefer a “tent-maker”
ministry where he supported himself from secular employment rather than drain
the finances of the church for his own needs.
When we
consider the thousands of clerics paid by the various denominations, perhaps
this goes a long way toward explaining the dismal evangelism returns for
Christianity in the Western and Orthodox worlds where this practice of paying
clergy is most prevalent. In North America, accretion rates are typically below
three percent. In fact, the fastest growing church, the Seventh-day Adventist
denomination grew in the United States at the rate of only 2.5 percent as
reported by USA Today in 2011.[viii]
In the official report of the denomination on their denominational news site in
2013, they did not even publish the figures for the United States so perhaps
they were even worse.[ix]
When we
consider all the pressure this must place on the clergy to urge the local
church to support the burden of their own salaries, perhaps we can see the
potential for clergy to engage in perpetual fund raising at the expense of
gospel outreach. One aspect of this fund-raising is seen in encouraging “obedience”
to tithing and stewardship regulations. This can cause moral distortions in
church practice. For instance, if tithing is a key requirement for church lay
office, the faithful tithe payer with borderline morality, may be more likely
to hold office than a non-tithe paying member with stellar morality. Perhaps it
is possible to see how this might end up with the wolf minding the sheep pen.
The pressure
of providing for a clerical salary may also result in the pastor, bishop, administrator,
etc. taking poor counsel from those he or she shouldn’t have listened to simply
out of fear of offending a hefty contributor to the church coffers. We might
ask if it is proper that money be able to buy the cleric’s ear in this manner.
Perhaps
worse, what happens if someone is pastoring a relatively poor congregation?
Suppose the congregants are mostly elderly pensioners or disabled individuals
struggling to manage to pay for medicines and basic household expenses each
month. We know that Jesus would never drive such persons away, yet because such
a church would have a hard time meeting the obligations to maintain a clerical
presence, the pastor might feel the pressure to push the members to contribute
all they can to offset that expense, even if another church may be subsidizing
the effort.
Is it
possible that all of this financial pressure in any way is contributing to
membership attrition? Has it turned our Christian clergy into the equivalent of
the financial planner that makes money from the product he sells? Can an agent
with such an agenda be trusted to be impartial when it comes to issues of
obedience and faith? Or does this set the stage for a clergy that sells out to
the highest bidder and whatever their agenda might be?
Some have
said that to be a successful church pastor, elder, or administrator, one must excel
at the practice of politics in order to navigate the minefield of competing
agendas. Yet, isn’t the rule of money exactly what we see in the secular political
arena?
Historically
the church has been fraught with an insatiable appetite for gold. Whether we
consider Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople,
the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe, or the costly international administrative
offices and mega churches of the various denominations today, it is rivers and
oceans of gold that have built the infrastructure and continue to sustain it,
both then and now. Sadly the implied belief in all of this is that should the
gilded rivers cease flowing, God’s work will stop. Perhaps, instead, it will
finally be set free, and the church of Acts will be reborn.
