Can I be a wealthy Salvationist?

11 August 2014

I recently had the great opportunity to read the new book by Major Grant Sandercock-Brown entitled "21 Questions for a 21st Century Army: Being the Salvos Now" 

I was naturally drawn to the 13th chapter.  Grant has written an excellent view on Salvationists and money.  Grant has kindly giving permission for us to publish this chapter but if you would like the whole book, which I would recommend, its published through Vivid Publications and is available from Salvationist Supplies.

A huge thanks to Grant.

13. Can I be a wealthy Salvationist?

The really surprising thing is that this is not so! Many of us are not generous at all. I have been involved in Planned Giving programs in the Army in different ways for more than twenty years. And it is embarrassing how little some Salvationists give. How can this be? And in fact, when it comes to money, why would many Salvationists say to me, ‘it’s none of your business’? We will need to take some time to drill down to really understand what is going on here in terms of western Christians and our desire to accumulate wealth and our aversion to being held to account when we do so.

One of the things that happened in the Reformation was that the Church no longer controlled who was in and out of the Kingdom. Rather, one’s being in or out became a matter of individual response in faith, and therefore a matter of individual conscience. As faith became more and more interiorised with a rise in the notion of the individual, which so dominates Western thinking, faith became more and more a private concern. So now, most of us would say, ‘my faith is between me and God, it’s completely up to me how I respond, the pastor can’t make me do anything’.

The problem is I’m not sure I can trust myself to be the sole arbiter on my faith or any other issue. The difficulty with Shakespeare’s immortal line, “to thine own self be true”, is that the self is often not true, and so is no yardstick at all. In fact, as Greg Ten Elshof points out in his delightful book I Told Me So, “self-deception is a major part of what defeats spiritual formation in Christ”[i]. The traditional Christian view is that the self is damaged in every aspect and the only solution is the healing love of God and a continued obedient faith to God. Traditionally, our inherent bent towards self-deception, self-excusing, and selfishness was held in check by the Christian community. Christians held each other accountable, helping each other to hold their life and actions up to the scrutiny of Word and Spirit. As life in the West got busier, and the notion of individual rights seeped into our core values, these communal practices and corporate disciplines fell by the way side, and the individualisation of faith won. As one of my lecturers once said “we no longer have permission to have an opinion on other people’s souls, let alone say, ‘I can help you’”[ii].

In this long process of cultural shaping the sacred and the secular got separated into two worlds. Somehow, somewhere, we developed a notion of the real world on the outside, and the world of faith on the inside. And it appears that for many of us the two are not particularly connected.

This disconnect between faith and life, between ideal and reality is easily seen. We have Christians, Salvationists, who can lead a life during the week that is at complete odds with the songs they sing. They will sing, “I surrender all” as they put a couple of coins in the offering plate; road rage on the way to worship, berate the corps officer on the way out of the worship service. This is possible because somehow the world of faith and the ‘real world’, of which money is a part, are two separate realities. This disconnect between rhetoric and reality has been an all too common, and embarrassing, failing amongst Christians for many years. The Victorian writer John Ruskin criticised the church of his day saying, “They dine with the rich and preach to the poor. Until they are more willing to dine with the poor and preach to the rich its [the church’s] popular influence will be limited”[iii]. Ditto for you and me.

Sometimes we forget how much the world has changed. For me as an Australian Salvation Army officer, I am among the world’s rich and blessed. But it was not always so. I had two great Aunts who were Army officers. Aunty Annie and Aunty Millie. I’m very proud of them. Not because they were famous or particularly gifted but because they gave their lives to the Army and to the gospel. They spent years in small appointments, through WW1, the depression, and WW2. They gave up many, many things. Their lives were sacrificial, meaningful, and fulfilled. No cars (no licences), no iPhones, no overseas travel, and no conferences (except congress). They gave their lives to God a hundred years ago in a way and in a world that was at some deep level fundamentally different to my experience. Expecting so much less from the Army and so much more from God.

I am not advocating that every Salvationist sell every electronic device and give up their holidays forever. But we must challenge ourselves to live a different way, to live simply and generously, to hold each other accountable, to lift our hearts and our motives and our accumulation of thing up to the scrutiny of Word and Spirit. There is no question that Jesus’ followers are called to live differently from the surrounding culture. The amount of money you earn doesn’t really matter. How you regard the money you earn and what you do with it matters a great deal.

A reminder from Paul

Paul reminds us about the necessity of our giving, albeit in rather paradoxical fashion. “Each of you must give, as you have made up our mind, not under compulsion for God loves a cheerful (glad) giver. 2 Cor. 8:9. Why on earth would he say we must give but not under compulsion?

For Paul, life in Christ was God’s gift through the Jews, and the gentiles giving back to the church in Jerusalem demonstrated that they were now all one family. The literally poor Macedonians had given generously. Paul had assured the Jerusalem church that the Corinthians would do the same, and he was sending a team to get them organised to do so!

This was not just giving because it was useful. For Paul, something deep and profound would happen in this practical and symbolic act as the Jerusalem believers and the Gentile believers each acknowledge that they belong to one another in Christ through giving and generosity. Grace would come alive. For him the thought really did count. And they were of course motivated by love. For while it is possible to give without loving, it is impossible to love without giving!

When we read 2 Corinthians 8 we see that the word grace is all through the passage. Along with related words like free, gift, and thanks. And it seems that there is a circle of grace in giving to the work of God in which we each take our place: God’s grace to us, our grace towards others, their grace to God in thanksgiving. For Paul, there is no question that the one who loves God will join this circle and give, the only question is what shape will that gift take. As believers we are free to determine what shape love takes, but we are not free to not love, not free to not do good works.

And we must give freely. If we put the tiniest string on the gift then it is not truly a gift. If our giving is a means of self-aggrandisement, or control of others we have missed the point. We love because God first loved us, we give because God first gave to us. Therefore, the grace of God must be responded to in freedom and grace. With Paul we say, “Thanks (grace) be to God for his indescribable gift” (2 Cor. 8:15). I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with a deep awareness of God’s indescribable gift to him and a deep love for God, who was not generous, in all sorts of ways, but primarily with their possessions.  

What about those of us who are not generous, giving, and loving? What stops us? Why don’t we respond freely, generously and gladly to God’s grace? What is the barrier (or barriers)? It may be that the barrier is something that we have to give up, not just give away that is the necessary prequel to generosity.

Perhaps we need to let go of our pride and fear. ‘Look how much more than them I have’, we pridefully think, or, ‘I don’t have enough to be secure yet’, we fearfully say. No, we must give up the desire to accumulate and protect, measure our worth against others, our gifts against others. These twin barriers of pride and fear, defiance and insecurity, limit our capacity to be generous. My free response to God’s indescribable gift must be to give gladly, and I must deal with my self to do so.

Remember it is possible to give without loving, but it is impossible to love without giving! When we’re fearless enough to love without strings, to give generously, love is returned, multiplied. Grace grows and flows through our relationships and relationships and character are deepened.  Giving matters. “I don’t have to give my wife a present, she knows I love her”, we might say, but if I love her why wouldn’t I want to give her a present? A gift given freely with no agenda in my giving.

We are in a relationship with the living God, our heavenly Father, so we give to him through giving to others because we love him. We just have to. We must make the fundamental shift from ownership to stewardship. Someone once said, “When we give to God we are just taking our hands off what already belongs to him”. That is, we must rid ourselves, not of riches, but of our reliance on riches.

The benefit of wealth is our great capacity to do good. The danger of wealth is its capacity to corrupt our hearts. I think we can recognise this. Corruption starts small, little spots of rust, small comforting bits of selfishness, “I’ll bet they wish they had one of these”, “I wish I had one of those”. “I must have it, I can’t share it, it’s mine!” No its not! It’s God’s. When we make that shift, taking our hands off what already belongs to God, something begins to change in us.

 If we can live free of pride and fear, free of the desire to accumulate and hoard we are free to live another way. As Paul says “So that [we] may take hold of the life that is truly life” (1 Ti. 6:19). Not to live as an ascetic, not to live as a miser, but to live! Not just give ‘because it will do us (the corps) good’ but give because it will do you good! The discipline of generosity is a means of grace. And like all disciplines it helps us open our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit. Giving works in our hearts. It’s why the saints always talked about surrender, trust and obedience. They know that certain practices allow God to get to work in us, to shape us. And generous giving is one such practice.

Can you be a wealthy Salvationist? Yes. I know some. And God willing, every wealthy Salvationist will do all they can with all they have for the gospel’s sake. And God will work in and through our generosity to shape us and transform the world.