Never mind the poor - it's rich people we need in this church!

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 11^th 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"]