As Haitians suffer the devastation of an earthquake that his ripped apart the lives of many and left an already poor nation crippled even further, it was with sadness that I read the Sunday Star Times article regarding the empires of three prominent Auckland churches, revealing their financial situations and their growing wealth.

The suffering of the Haitians and the opulent wealth of the three churches examined in that article may seem disconnected and possibly they are. Since the name of Jesus is invoked by those churches, and every other church that pursues great wealth, the horrible nature of that disconnection, where it exists, must be made clear especially since the image of the money grabbing, wealth hoarding church is fast becoming the public’s perception of what it means to be Christian.

It seems to me that for a long time the general populace has subconsciously had a very good understanding of what it should mean to be Christian. Images of people like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr, the late Pope John Paul II and most importantly, Jesus himself, are often invoked when discussing the model Christian.

Images of these people are foremost in our minds when we consider the ideals of Christianity because they uphold values of service, sacrifice, standing up for the voiceless and valuing others as we would wish to be valued. They uphold the ideals of putting ourselves last and putting others first and indeed, this would be consistent with the life of Jesus, the very person those of us who call ourselves “Christian” strive to follow. It’s these ideals that should come to the fore when faced with situations like the Haiti earthquake.

The Bible is replete with challenges to use our lives and all that we have to serve the poor, marginalized and oppressed. It becomes very clear on a careful examination of scripture, that such a pursuit is central to the call God places upon people who identify themselves as his followers, not the increase of our own wealth as Prosperity Doctrine adherents would have us believe via the supposed blessing of God. Church communities building empires and amassing wealth when that wealth is not used to serve the poor flies in the very face of God’s desire for justice and mercy for the poor.

With a little practice it becomes easy for church leaders to justify the building of wealth via church donations and it becomes easy to justify lavish expenses. Such justifications include believing that the leaders work so hard and sacrifice so much that they deserve the congregation giving them lavish gifts and sizeable salaries. There is also the justification of good works – the creation of responsible citizens – such a pursuit, in the minds of some, needs loads of cash, large buildings, expensive musical equipment and many programmes for personal development, programmes that are often only available at a cost.

To add weight to these justifications, the leaders of such churches are likened to Kings or prophets of the Old Testament and they draw on the practices of ancient Israel and equate them to the modern Church, often with little to no real evidenced understanding of the practices they are talking about.

It is not uncommon to hear the Old Testament practice of tithing being put forward as a requirement of a Christian with scriptural passages used to add weight to the message of needing to give abundantly to the church. A classic passage used comes from the words of the prophet Malachi as he conveyed a message from God to the people of ancient Israel:

Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But you say, ‘How are we robbing you?’ In your tithes and offerings! You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me—the whole nation of you! Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing. I will rebuke the locust for you, so that it will not destroy the produce of your soil; and your vine in the field shall not be barren, says the LORD of hosts. Then all nations will count you happy, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts. Malachi 3:8-12 (NRSV)

The implied and sometimes stated message given when this passage is used is that if people do not give to the church, they are effectively robbing God. It is not hard to imagine how a vulnerable believer whose only wish is to faithfully serve God will react to such coercion.

But this is where the challenge for wealthy churches and any church that pursues wealth as one of its central aims begins, with this very passage and others like it.

An examination of biblical tithing (in the Old Testament this was giving ten percent of one’s produce for the year), specifically involved primary produce – agricultural products such as grain, cattle, olive oil and wine. These were the economic back-bone of the culture at the time. If these goods could not be transported to the temple where the tithe was collected, then they could be sold for money. The money would then be taken to the temple and used to purchase produce again. Interestingly, artisans were not required to tithe a tenth of their products and things such as gold and silver are never mentioned. The tithe was never collected as cash, only as food.

The food would then be used for various purposes. One purpose was a big party. The food would be eaten in Jerusalem with great rejoicing, creating an amazing sense of community and festivity. Some of the food would be kept in storehouses and given to the Levites who administered the national religious duties as servants to the high priest and government and who were one of the few people groups that were landless, thus unable to produce their own food. Levites, as recipients of the tithe were neither allowed to own or inherent land inside Israel. Alongside the provision of food for the Levites kept in the storehouses, the storehouses were also where the rest of the food was kept for the poor, the orphans and the widows.

The chief purpose of the tithe was to act as a type of social security for those with no land or family protection so they would be provided with food. Thus in the challenge of the passage of Malachi we see God’s anger burning because the people’s priority around their wealth was to keep it for themselves rather than filling up the storehouses to provide for the needy. In the quoted passage God is promising to bless them when they provide for the poor and those who need assistance.

It is shameful to see how that challenge and promise has been manipulated today to justify pumping large sums of money into church buildings, lavish gifts for church leaders, fleets of modern vehicles, large salaries and countless programmes.

In the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, we see God judging humanity according to how we have treated those who are left naked, hungry, thirsty, imprisoned or in a strange land. His admonition is that how we treat them is how we treat him, yet how many are hoarding wealth and building personal empires?

If the pursuit of churches such as those represented in the Sunday Star Times article is to grow great citizens as stated, is that best achieved by the creation of an empire and encouraging people to fund that empire, or is it done by demonstrating service to the hurting and broken in the world around us, demonstrating and teaching sacrifice and lifting others up while we put ourselves last? How can a Church teach this when it’s biggest priority evidenced in its bank accounts is the growth of wealth – where our treasure is, there our heart is also. This is not to say that wealthy churches cannot and do not have their priorities right, but the trappings of wealth should cause all to regularly stop and examine their priorities and how that wealth is used. None of us are free of this challenge.

If our example is Jesus, the one who emptied himself of all of his glory and was born as a refugee in a dusty town within an occupied territory, entering life in an animal’s stable and placed in a feeding trough, taking the form of a slave, humbling himself and becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Phillipians 2); if this is our example then the challenge is on to make sure, as churches, that our financial priorities reflect his concerns and his concerns are not big buildings, large salaries, flash cars and lavish gifts for those who call themselves his servants.

There is an old maxim in relation to the use of our finances that is fitting here and that should challenge us all both individually and communally – enough is enough.

I want to lay down one simple challenge to all church leaders, even those of us who may be standing in critique of churches that are perceived to be wealthy, thinking  we are free of guilt in this. I work for a Christian development agency where we do our utmost (along with many other agencies) to try and work close to a principle of keeping our administrative expenses to 20-30% of income while 70-80% of our income goes into the field to serve the poor. We do so knowing that people’s donations matter immensely.

I would like to challenge all churches to carefully examine the proportions of their income used to operate buildings, vehicles, salaries and programmes compared to contributions to serving the poor and needy in New Zealand and abroad (whether that be through services you directly offer to those in need or through the use of third party organizations). Does this use of our resources best reflect the one that we claim to follow, Jesus of Nazareth – friend of sinners, father of the fatherless, defender of the widow and orphan, the one who hears the cry of the poor?

The church can reclaim its strong voice advocating for the poor, marginalized and oppressed, but it cannot do so unless we can truly demonstrate that this is where our priority lies rather than in the expansion of our own buildings and business empires.

Let’s take up the challenge of the prophet Micah in Micah 6:8 to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God and let’s do so in every aspect of our lives and communities, including our finances.

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