The Cost of Doing Ministry

My good friend and pastor of Northeast Houston Baptist Church, Nathan Lino wrote a sizzling blog post recently. The entire post is about the possibility of the Obama administration reducing and possibly removing any tax benefit for charitable giving to churches. This would lead to churches having to budget to pay taxes. Pastor Nathan thinks this will be a good thing for many reasons. I encourage you to read the entire post here. The date was March 13th. (nathanlino.blogspot.com)
In his blog there is one paragraph that scorches the way many churches are driven by programs and money. Buckle up, here it is.

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The immediate secondary benefit would be churches that are much less program driven. By earmarking up to 35% of their budget for taxes, churches simply would not be able to afford so many bells and whistles--which is exactly the kind of purging many of our churches need. Our churches would become more streamlined and simplified. Listen, the cost of doing evangelism is VERY cheap--the price of tracts (about $.15 each) and evangelism training materials and a church doesn't even really need those tools. Pastors and church leaders are the ones who have made evangelism so expensive--it isn't cheap shipping snow to Texas, getting ex-marines to repel from worship center ceilings and getting the local zoo to chain a lion and lamb to opposite ends of one's stage in order to gather a crowd for weekly, large group Gospel presentations. The true reason evangelism has become so expensive is because pastors and leaders don't trust their people to share their faith and/or don't want to take the slower, but healthier route of personal evangelism. So, instead of an evangelism strategy that calls for the lay people to share their faith in their lost community "as they go", churches instead spend humongous money on bells and whistles to try and draw the lost to group settings where a "life coach" shares the Gospel with them. The natural result of the "every service an evangelism rally" approach is there is little to no time for teaching doctrine and so the number of people that "prayed the prayer" grows, but not in faith and knowledge, and we attempt to keep them from figuring out they are starving for bible teaching by keeping them in a trance-like state with the next rollout of sensationalism. And that's just evangelism--did I mention bible teaching costs $0 after one has purchased a bible to preach out of? The skits, videos and stage sets are exciting and titillating, but a financial crunch would reveal them to be merely more unnecessary "stuff". And prayer? $0. Pastor, here's a healthy exercise to do with your staff next time budgeting rolls around, ask them to roll out a strategy for their ministry that would cost $0. Do they require money to do ministry? A church simply doesn't need that much money to run. But, I digress.
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Wow! Let me add something else. I can see someone reading this and thinking, “I guess I don’t need to give as much to the church, do I?” Yes and no. In scripture motivation and the attitude of the heart are paramount. We are not instructed to give so the church can “ship snow to Texas” to do an evangelistic event. We are to give as an act of worship to the Lord. We are to give out of an obedient cheerful heart. We are to give because God has given so much to us.

There is a cost to doing ministry; it’s just not always financial.

P.S.
By the way you can listen to Pastor Nathan Lino online. You ought to check him out because he is an anointed preacher.
www.nehbc.com