To: The Members of the Budget Committee of New Life Church
From: C. Jack Miller
Date: December 4, 1978
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Thank you in the name of Christ for your willingness to serve on the budget committee. It is my prayer that God will make your work a blessing to yourselves and to the congregation in a very special way. To further that hope, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts. I hope some of them may prove to be of value to you.
First, I would like the budget committee to help the officers of the [New Life Church] to carry forward the work of educating the congregation and ourselves as Christ’s under-shepherds in the grace of giving in an orderly manner. It seems to me that one of the weaknesses in our giving has been a failure to emphasize giving as an act of total devotion to the Lord in worship. The offering time traditionally in our worship services has been one of the most casual and unfocused parts of our time together. It has been more a matter of “taking up the collection” than a casting into the temple treasury a gift of whole-hearted devotion to Jesus (Luke 21:1-4). Tithing ought not to be a matter of handing over the taxes or even forwarding the noblest Christian ministry but first of all a deed of praise under the inspiration of the Spirit’s rich fellowship. Personally I want to catch the excitement of bringing my gift to Jesus without any thought of anyone else as recipient. I want to be Christ-oriented in my giving before I am cause-oriented even when, that cause is most urgent.
What I want, then, is to come to the Y [he YMCA where New Life met at the time] and rejoice in Jesus in the whole worship and delight myself in giving to Him personally when the offering is taken. Whether I have a dime or a thousand dollars the heart of my giving is the liberty of love to Him. Of course, such liberty will lead to an increase in amount of my giving. As with the widow, consecration always lends to giving in freedom and generosity.
I also am eager for our children to enter into this spiritual ministry of giving when we meet for worship. Somehow we need to interpret the offering to them and lead them to give to the glory of Christ. I think this is very important.
So I guess I’m encouraging you folks to give leadership in educating all of us in seeing giving as first of all a ministry of praise. It was this that I find so inspiring in Bill Pringle. When he gives, you can see that he is doing it out of simple and pure devotion to Jesus Christ.
But such giving requires a basis in faith. You simply cannot come and pour all the anointing on Jesus’ head if you think that the poor of the world will starve because of your “waste” in worship (Mark 14:5). What is needed is a faith-partnership with God in your finances. At the heart of this fellowship is the recognition that His very nature is that of abundant provider for those in fellowship (literally “in Partnership”) with Him. If He is the Senior and Sovereign Partner who owns and supplies all my property, then I can give confidently in worship. Furthermore, I have a right to ask Him to increase my income and bless my frugality so that I may have more to give to Him and His kingdom work. It is out of this partnership with Him that I understand that the weight of world hunger is on His shoulders and that He is wiling to increase my resources so that I may give generously to the support of the poor and the teaching ministry of the church. Our people need this faith-freedom in giving, so that they are not oppressed by the size of the church general budget or the ache of world hunger and lose their joy.
This faith basis for giving is not everything. We also need to learn that God expects a certain order in giving. I believe that the new converts in our midst in particular need guidance here. It is also possible that we older Christians need to struggle more with our priorities along the lines indicated in Haggai 1. How do we keep in partnership with God so that we avoid the easy route of materialistic consumerism (Haggai 1:9: “You ‘busy yourselves each with his own house.”)? To keep priorities right, we need to struggle ourselves and teach one another to struggle not to live for self. In a word, we need to lovingly instruct ourselves to think through what proportion of our Income is being given to God first. For example, Is each brother giving at least a tithe?
At the same time, there is great danger that tithing become legalistic and we forget that each man is to give out of his awareness of how God has prospered him. Early in the history of our church, a young woman came to the officers with a problem along these lines. Her job really did not make it possible for her to give a full tenth. But she said she was going to do it anyway. In response the church then made a monthly contribution to her rent. You may smile at the way we moved money around from one pocket to another. But we all experienced a blessing. We were happy.
How we can bring such “education” to one another is no small task, but I for one appreciate any creative help you can give us. But I also have some specific suggestions on the handling of the budget. First, I think it is important for us to have a clearer picture of the real budget. My hope is that we can include all the major items of our giving on the official budget in some form so that we may have an understanding of the full wonder of what God is doing in and through us. For instance, my understanding is that the official budget includes $2000 per year for the Viss’s but in reality we give $6000 more through the Fund for Uganda, My thought is that we would do well to include in some way the $6000 in our official budget.
My purpose in this is twofold: 1) to give us a better idea of the total giving of our congregation, and 2) to give us some opportunity to examine “volunteer” items which come into our real budget without any opportunity for input from the elders, deacons, or the congregation as a whole.
For instance, I talked with one young man recently who was interested in material support for an overseas missionary ministry from New Life. I am personally convinced that God is calling him to this service. Yet it seemed to me a problem if giving to his ministry became another major part of our “unofficial” budget. It might well be God’s will for the church to undertake a major part of his support. But at the very least the elders and the budget committee ought to give some kind of approval to this action. As well, it is my view that there are often creative alternative methods of financing missionary and diaconal ministry undertakings. In this case, it has been suggested that the high expenses involved in part of his training be paid for by his working for a time and saving money. I also suggested that there is no better training for a budding evangelist than to stay around one church long enough for the brothers to get to know him and deal with the weaknesses which afflict us all. I also pointed out that holding a job for a couple of years with a single employer gives us further opportunity to be socialized and humanized so that we don’t end up as men who talk the gospel but don’t walk it. To top it off, I also recommended that a nearby church which is friendly to us and the cause of missions be approached for prayer and support.
It is somewhat along these lines that I have approached the ministry to Ireland. I have discouraged solicitation for funds from among the members of the congregation. Some exceptions may be warranted, but as a rule we wanted people to provide their support by work or by support from friends outside New Life Church. My understanding is that considerable support came from outside the church this past year. Our hope is that this outside support will be expanded. This is part of the PEF ministry worked out through our elders in cooperation with Ben Wilkinson. They have promised to promote this ministry more widely in the churches. We also expect that there will be more participants going from other churches in the future and comparatively fewer from New Life. My hope is that this [Sonship Leadership Training] is such an excellent training format for the whole Christian life as well as for evangelism that we could have something like a “mobile church” operating here during the summer in Philadelphia. The idea would be that people would give up their vacation time or take time off from work in order to devote themselves to ministry.
My final thought has to do with paying out of the funds which come in. My recommendation is that we pay local expenses last and pay out the other items first. Would this mean that we local pastors and others here might not get paid sometimes? Perhaps there would be pressure here on all of us. On the one hand, it might make us somewhat more cautious about putting new items on the budget; and on the other, it might drive us to pray more for our needs to be met. But this would be all to the good. I am supremely confident that our Heavenly Father would not let us down.