Yesterday I wrote about the beautiful church building I discovered in the midst of a slum in Bangalore. The church was doing lots of good in the slum, but I also discovered that many of the poverty stricken people of the slum tithed sacrificially to the church.

I remember wondering if this was what God wanted.

Lavish Buildings in Low Income Areas

In more recent years, I have discovered that having a lavish church building in the midst of poverty is not an isolated incident. It is not uncommon to go into some of the poorest and most destitute communities around the world, where many of the people live in cardboard and tarpaper shacks and have barely enough food to live on, and in the middle of this community, find a large, grandly constructed church building with towering steeples, intricate stained glass, beautiful woodwork, and gorgeous hand-painted murals.

In 2001 I went with a mission’s trip to Kino, Mexico, a poor fishing village on the eastern shore of the Gulf of California. Many of the families of this village live in tarpaper shacks and slept on a dirt floor. Yet right in the middle of town was a large, brick church building, complete with stained glass and steeples. I don’t know the story of how it was built, or where the money come from, or who was hired to construct it, or anything about the building, but I still remember thinking that the people of the community might have been better served if that church building never existed.

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Chapter 12 in my book, Close Your Church for Good, is called “Pass on the Offering Plate.”

In this chapter, we look at some of the issue of tithes and offerings in the church, and whether the practice is truly biblical or not, and what alternative ways there might be for churches to obtain funding for their various ministries.

Please note that due to some of the feedback I receive on these posts, this chapter might be radically revised for the final edition of the book. These changes will only be available in the print or eBook version when it comes out.

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Several years ago, I visited a slum in Bangalore, India. After walking through the slum and trying to serve some of the people that lived there, the team I was with happened upon a beautiful brick church building, complete with steeples and stained glass. I was a little surprised to see such a building in the middle of such poverty, and asked several of the people in the slum about the church.

A Wonderful Church in the Slum

They had only good things to say about the church. It was a good church. The church tried to offer food, clothing, and basic healthcare to the people of the slum. Those who attended the church said that they liked going. The music was beautiful. The pastor was kind. And they said that the church was cool and clean, and attending the church gave them some reprieve from the heat and filth that surrounded them. Some said that the church gave them a glimpse of what heaven must be like. It was a little bit of heaven on earth.

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Is this the same preaching, when Christ says to the rich young man, “Sell all that thou hast, and give it to the poor;” and when the priest says, “Sell all that thou hast and… give it to me”?

— Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christendom

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Ultimately, evangelism is not about looking to heaven and to the afterlife as the cure for all of life’s problems. The central message of evangelism must not be “Get right with God because then eternity will be grand.” While the Gospel contains truth about heaven and eternity, it also focuses on life here on earth.

The Truth of the Gospel

The Gospel contains numerous truths about loving one another, taking care of our neighbor, looking after our family, and serving those in need. If we are ignoring these aspects of the Gospel, we are not living or obeying the entire Gospel, but are instead using the hope of heaven as a way to escape the responsibilities of life on earth.

In his book Naming the Powers, Walter Wink put it this way:

Christian evangelism has all too often been wedded to a politics of the status quo and merely serves to relieve stress by displacing hope to an afterlife and ignoring the causes of oppression.

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