Looking beyond the church’s finances, there are other issues neglected by the author. While a small congregation of fifty may be limited in what it can do financially, it may be a spiritually alive, thriving, and growing. A church that has three hundred members may be spiritually dead; lacking both the guidance of the Holy Spirit and in spiritual growth. I have seen God take a small congregation that is struggling with its finances but where its membership is sincere in their wish to follow the Lord’s guidance and turn it into a church that begins to develop the resources to support a full-time pastor. I have seen larger congregations suffer many setbacks because instead of depending on the Holy Spirit’s leadership, they began to bow themselves down at the altar of the church’s banking account, more worried about the ledger than the spread of the gospel. Their love of the Lord has grown cold and the leadership becomes dependent upon the giving of a few financially well off families, and with that, sin creeps into the camp as topics that might offend the main tithing families are avoided in the name of “maintaining harmony” within the congregation.
In all fairness, it can happen in any church of any size where the ledger replaces the gospel. In a church that I served as interim pastor, they boasted at a business meeting that they had nearly $70,000 in the checking account and nearly $370,000 in an investment/money market account. That particular business meeting, those in attendance were discussing the need to find a permanent pastor and trying to set what they were considering an appropriate compensation package to offer a potential pastoral candidate. What amazed me was that three men in the congregation insisted that the church not spend their money. These men had become focused on what they saw as being an important issue – the church needed to save money for the future and these men were willing to sacrifice providing for a full-time pastor to accomplish their goal of the church having a million dollars in investments! When I heard these three men, each saying the same thing about the spending of the church’s money, I was surprised and shocked; my thoughts still go to this passage when I think of that meeting: Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine (Matthew 25:24-25).
This is where the heart of the problem lies. As a Christian, when I place my tithes and offerings in the church offering plate, the money is no longer “mine” but is being given to the Lord to support the local ministry. When I served as the pastor of a small rural church in western Kentucky, the money that went into the offering plate did not belong to me, the deacons, or the members of that church, it belonged to the Lord for the purpose of supporting the local ministry. Yes, the local ministry does need money to support itself – it has the obligation to pay its own utilities, insurance on buildings and any vehicles, to maintain the facilities, and to support its pastor. Without going into a lot of scripture, I do believe that any church has the biblical obligation to provide for its pastor to the best of its abilities. Beyond that, the church has an obligation to further the reach of the gospel message. As a Christian and a member of a local congregation, I could not imagine having to explain to the Lord Jesus Christ why the bank ledger was more important than saving souls just as I cannot imagine being the author of any article written to church leaders urging them to shut the doors of a church simply because it had less than some arbitrary number of members chosen by man.
Is it biblical for a church to set aside money for the future? Yes, I believe that it honors God when a church is wise and sets money aside for the future. However, when the focus becomes more on how much can be placed in investments and in bank accounts and not on how many souls can be reached, the church has lost its first love. Can you imagine being a member of a church and standing before the Lord and claiming, “Jesus, we thought it was more important to save for a rainy day than to send support to missionaries in South America…” As I think back to the author’s comments about being a wise steward and how Christians of smaller churches have an obligation to combine and join other churches to truly be wise stewards. To be completely honest, church size has nothing to do with being a good steward; it is about the church doing what God has commanded through utilizing with great efficiency the resources that God has provided to win the lost to Christ and to edify the believers within the local New Testament body we call the “church”.
