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| Smile, Gordon, God loves you too... |
One of the most pleasurable aspects of my role is when I
visit churches that contribute to the Baptist Home Mission Fund, to thank them
for supporting churches like mine through their giving.
Without the financial support of our big Baptist family,
Church from Scratch would not have been able to afford its current budget. We celebrated our 11th birthday as
a church this weekend and the fact that we have grown and developed as we have owes
much to our annual Home Mission grant.
I would also want to acknowledge that we receive a double
grant – one of very few churches to do so – for which I am deeply grateful.
These annual grants are made towards up to 50% of the costs
of a minister’s basic stipend. However, they do not contribute to:
- housing costs (pioneering churches are unlikely to have manses)
- employer’s National Insurance
- employer’s pension contributions (the Baptist Union strongly encourages its ministers to belong to the Baptist Ministers’ Pension scheme or to make alternative arrangements)
- the costs of ministry (e.g. travel: my church ‘parish’ covers an area of around 48 square miles)
The amount of our grant for 2014 has just been announced. It is reducing to 40% of the basic
stipend. In real terms this amounts to just
24% of the full ministry costs to be carried by the church.
The taper (a reduction year on year) is presumably intended
to encourage churches to grow and to take greater responsibility for their own
financial needs, so that the HMF can be redeployed to assist other, perhaps
new, churches.
I suspect, however, that the underlying assumption is that
churches like this one should bring in enough higher earners to balance the
bias we have towards sharing the gospel with people on lower-incomes or who
live on benefits.
So I face a personal dilemma (I speak for myself only, not for
CFS on this topic).
Should we focus on building relationships with accountants,
architects, GPs, lawyers and stockbrokers – all of whom God loves and all of whom
are welcome here – at the cost of time spent with people who have fewer opportunities
and choices?
And if we abandon them to search for richer members, who will
take up our work?
Or do we continue to reach out to those who will never be
able to give enough money from their hand-to-mouth incomes to make this church
financially self-supporting?
And has anyone really thought through the Gospel implications of
this policy?
[Note: as well as the comments below, there is quite a debate on the issues raised here on my Facebook page here. Scroll down to the item headed "New Baptist strategy for evangelism"]
[Note: as well as the comments below, there is quite a debate on the issues raised here on my Facebook page here. Scroll down to the item headed "New Baptist strategy for evangelism"]
Thanks for this Ivan... I was having the same conversation with a friend on a housing estate in Birmingham whose support is being reduced year on year... most people around him are unemployed.
ReplyDeleteIndeed Chris, in one sense we should be outraged at the idea of Baptist ministers' stipends being protected while we work among people who may not have seen wages, in some cases, for generations. There are also employed people in the church I serve, working in formerly 'safe' professions like teaching, whose jobs are under real threat. And where people remain in employment, they work much longer hours. In that sense, being forced to confront being bi-vocational (again, in my case) may mean that we can once more look our congregations in the eye. For me the big issue is that I am not sure that the standard HMF approach has worked through what 'success' looks like outside of middle-class areas.
ReplyDeleteMy dream would be a church where the leaders model ways of chasing after God for his money making strategies. I don't mean chasing after donors or government funding but developing the kind of witty inventions that bring money into the Kingdom. Following God's instructions on how to make products and develop services that can be exchanged for money. Think of the early church there were dealers in purple, tent makers, fishermen, even Jesus was a building contractor. The church would have discipleship programs that restored people from broken down demoralised people with a slave mentality into people who are able to stand up and help themselves because they know they are sons of God and have the mind of Christ (aka the best building contractor ever known). I have thought of setting up an online club to bring together people with a like mind. Radical maybe, long term probably, but worth thinking about. I got as far as buying a domain name ChristianOnlineBusinessClub.co.uk but then my unhealed nature kicked in and rather than launching it I drew back. You see I know the road because I am on it myself.
ReplyDeleteI was minister of a poor city church for 18 years. We saw quite a few people come to Christ and a good number baptised, but it was also a mobile population and people often moved on. We never had any high earners and never had enough income to pay a full stipend (and housing and pension and building costs) even with HM support. I was employed by the church full-time with a HM grant for five of those years - watching the funds diminish.But I worked part-time for a training agency for two years, then for eleven years I was fully bivocational. By these means the church had an accredited minister.
ReplyDeleteSmall churches can offer amazing ministry to their communities and need to be supported, but I still think that the honourable role of bivocational ministry is the way to do this.