CREEDE HINSHAW: The trappings of wealth and power within the church

Money often has played an outsized role in the life of the church. Ananias and Sapphira, (Acts 5) having made ostentatious gifts while embellishing their generosity, were stricken dead on the church doorsteps, presumably prompting future donors to be more careful about aggrandizement.

Every church, relatively speaking, has a few sizable donors. In some churches, those persons are known and identified while in other congregations there are strong hints or impressions about who those people are.

Mega-donors can remain anonymous and humble, quietly giving their gifts to God and recognizing the poorest widow in the church might be the largest giver in the church in terms of heart. Ideally, the giving of money to God through the church involves the right hand being clueless about what the left hand is doing. When gifts are tendered this way the Body of Christ flourishes.

However, money always talks. A big giver might expect to have more influence in the church or to hold sway over the pastor or church officials. Either subtly or overtly, the big giver very well may expect the pastor and/or the congregation to decide issues based on what will please the donor.

Recently, I have heard about some big givers using their power of the purse to influence a major church decision. The threat, stated or strongly implied is, “If you don’t do this our way, we will leave the church, taking our checkbook with us.” Few pastors or congregations want to drive away the person whose gifts balance the budget.

In my first church, as a student pastor, the reputed biggest giver let it be known (indirectly but effectively) that if I didn’t change a certain course of action, he and his wife would leave the church. They never said those words; they were cleverer than that. But they dropped hints and everybody understood. I didn’t buckle and they didn’t leave, but it doesn’t always work out like that. Money talks.

The late prominent Baptist pastor Bill Self, preaching to an auditorium full of pastors, identified the crux of the issue. He observed the time would come when every pastor would be confronted with a no-win dilemma: A child would be dying in ICU and the parents pleading for the pastor to make a visit while the church’s biggest giver, a person fickle and powerful, demanded the pastor meet with him at the same time to discuss irrelevancies. Self concluded, “Pastors know where they should go, but they also know where they must go.” Money talks.

What is a pastor and a congregation to do? Can donors — large or small — be better taught to give humbly, without strings attached? The deaths of Ananias and Sapphira probably set the early church back, resourcewise, but in the long run the church was better off not to have been dominated by wealth and power. There are far worse things than church poverty; integrity and faithfulness to the gospel is eternal.