Do You Have Issues With Money?

You go to church for many reasons. Some of them are sincere, and others at times may not be so sincere. To worship, to hear an encouraging message, for entertainment, for your kids to learn your values, for friends -- whatever the reason, the bottom line is, it is highly unlikely you dressed yourself and showed up so that you could hear a 30 minute talk about the church's mortgage, interest payments and other debts, and how YOU need to 'pledge' money to pay off a debt YOU weren't involved in creating!

A few years ago, our worship team was asked to lead worship at a local mega church. Their biggest comment to me afterwards was "that pastor came up and talked about the building debt and interest payments for half of the service!" I don't know about you, but that's the part about "Church" that I dislike. In this day and age of people out of work, businesses barely making it and other struggles existing, is it really the time to be squeezing money from people that are simply trying to connect with God at church?

It would be one thing if you were asking me to give to the homeless or help feed the hungry, but you're asking me to pay off the huge and possibly unnecessary loan that someone else took out to have a fancy building, in addition to my own mortgage or rent. Don't get me wrong, I personally have friends who have ministries that are large, beautiful campuses. But what I respect about them is that they don't ask for money to pay off a debt. How do they do it then?

Faith in the Grace of God: Why preach about God providing and then ask me to pledge? Seems ridiculous—just try googling "church fundraising" and you will come up with a ton of companies that do this for a living. Now if your church is part of a building campaign, debt campaign or some other money raising effort, it’s likely they employed one of these guys to advise them in their journey. It’s all pretty much the same...come up with a catchy phrase (Rise and Build, Building for the Future, God's House plan etc..), make a website and lots of postcards for it, divide the amount you need by the amount of people you need to give, and so on lol… where's faith now, preacher man?

Faith went out the window when the responsibility of providing fell on the shoulders of the people in the pews versus God. Now I realize that money doesn't magically appear and that somebody somewhere has to write a check. But is it really faith when you have to manipulate, squeeze, man handle, shake-down and guilt trip people into participating in a gimmick? I don't think so. Let's not make the church complicated. No long talks about money.