What Does Wealth Have To Do With The Christian Faith?

Some churches have a theology of prosperity, in which the depth of one's belief is connected to the shower of material blessing that will be received.  There is Biblical precedence to this sort of behavior.

Throughout the Old Testament, God was always in a battle for the hearts and minds of God's people.  After the Exodus, God granted them the Promised Land where they would find their rest.  It always worked for a little while.  There was always a problem.

The problem (for the people) was how God did things.  This all-powerful being dealt with all-fallible human beings.  The focal point was the Ark, the footstool of God, located first in the tabernacle and then in the Temple in Jerusalem.  There was a center of worship.  God's problem was that the local religious practices were more...well...'practical'.  There was Baal, there was Ashteroth, there were rituals for the harvest, rituals for prosperity, rituals for the activities of daily living.  A lot of them involved sex.

Doing things the local way gave the people two distinct (and apparent) bonuses.  The first was 'hands-on', so hands-on it was carnal.  There were ways to get things done to beat the odds.  It was not simply a matter of planting the seeds, the local deities provided for an extra 'oomph' that was both religious and recreational.  The second was that it allowed the people to feel like they had a hand in their own future.  Their work would push the deity to get them what they wanted.

The trouble was that THE God, our God, did not operate this way.  In fact, our God is a jealous God, one who is all-providing.  So, needless to say, things did not go so well a lot of the time.

Fast forward to our time and place, and we have our same God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.  AND we have the gift of Jesus, God's only begotten Son, who brings forgiveness as a free gift to the whole world.  AND we have the universal offering of the Holy Spirit, God at work within us.  But...and there is always a but...

But we live in a world where the promise of wealth arises as our solution to everything.  We can invest for it, we can gamble for it, we can shop for it, we can prepare to retire early with it, it will make us happy (if you believe the commercials).  $350 million jackpot in the lottery, why not?  "Give your dreams a chance."  Heck, "anything can happen in Jersey".  This is the American dream, is it not?  People came here, and come here to build a better life.

It carries the same appeal as the Baals and the Ashteroth!  This work is hands-on, we can do it.  And it feels good.  Have you heard of "retail therapy"?  Building wealth is something I can build.  My hand is in it.  A theology of Prosperity is appealing because this returns me to the old ways.  I can push God to help build my wealth, if I am but faithful enough.  And it surely helps that God is an American, after all...

But this is NOT the way God operates.  God's wealth is invested in us as love, not dollars.  Money cannot buy happiness, it can only buy.  There is nothing more to it than that.  Physical wealth is provided to us by the grace of God for something other than its own pursuit.  It is provided to us so that we, all of us, the collective human experiment created by God, can invest in love.

During the Cold War, a Canadian Prime Minister dared to say that if both sides, back then the US and USSR, took the money they spent for ONE DAY of military purchases, they could feed the world.  That is the purpose of money.  He was ignored of course.

A wise man once said, "You can't have everything, you have no place to put it."  Jesus spoke of the rich man who tore down his barns to make bigger ones for all his stuff, only to lose it all when his life was demanded of him.  Wealth is not the answer.  In Christ, there is more, so much more.
   
     

The Renewal, the Need of the Mainline

Our fearless leader led the Presbytery of Elizabeth through a book study about not leading a dying church.  Cheryl Galan, our Transitional Leader, gave us that book.  And although I am not what one might call a faithful Presbytery-Meeting attender, that book gave me pause.  It started a train of thought.

We have been limping along for far too long.  I am in Perth Amboy since 2001, I was there for the Christmas after the attack that redefined who we are.  I have done too many pledge campaigns, wandered through too many 'vision quests', looking for the magic bullet that would change the church.

Let me say it out loud.  Right now, my church is fading into oblivion.  My Presbytery is fading into oblivion.  MY DENOMINATION is fading into oblivion.  If it were dying, we could bury it with honors, but it is fading to nothing.

For a couple of years, I thought the church growth movement was the answer.  Entrepreneurial in spirit, it had practical measures of growth, money in the plate and backsides in the pews.  By their measures, our PCUSA is the ideal reverse of all they measure.

So what else is out there?  There are two areas of thought in American Christendom that, quite frankly, scare me.  The first is prosperity theology, what I understand to be preachers daring to share from the pulpit that the more we believe, the more wealth God will shower on us in this life.  The second is the fear-threat response to evangelism.  I have read the gospels, I am just about through the book of Acts, nowhere can I find a place where Peter or Paul or the others told listeners that they best accept Jesus as Lord and Savior or they were bound for the barbecues of hell.  But I hear that a lot in American evangelism.

Wealth is the new idolatry.  More and more is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer, and what happens to the rest?

Love and justice and generosity, all the fruits of the Spirit, where have they gone?

The Christian faith, how often has it been co-opted into the politics of the nation?  What answer is there to how it has been changed from its origins?

What else can we point to?  How else had the voice of Jesus been twisted, suppressed, and recast into things that are not even recognizable?

The vision is not the small, not the community changing, but nothing less than changing the face of the church for the coming age.