Should Churches Monitor Members' Giving?
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Mat 6:1 ¶ Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Mat 6:2 Therefore when thou doest [thine] alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
Mat 6:3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
Mat 6:4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee
I take these verses seriously, and I’m not alone. Many well to do members will give cash or cashiers checks and deny themselves a charitable deduction to avoid the possibility of receiving glory of men which includes their pastors. I don’t see scripture making a pastoral exception on keeping it secret. The fact that a pastor knows you are a big giver and approaches you for help, unknowingly is giving you glory. He came to you and not others will tempt feelings of pride by that giver rather than grace. Large givers can wrongfully have subtle influences over a ministry, even with the most spiritual pastors. If it weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be Matt 6:1-4.
I get some insight on fellow members’ livelihoods because I help many of them with their taxes, both the smaller and larger incomes. If you think by looking at their lifestyles you can figure out how much they make, you are naive. We have a member that makes $500K a year, but drives a 15 year old automobile and lives in a $140K house. I know of a member who make $35K a year and drives a late model mercedes and lives in a $200K house. A business owner can have a couple great years financially and then make nothing the next. If you could see his giving for that year, would you assume he is declining spiritually, even though he has the same house, car, etc?
If you are going to assume that members who don’t want their pastors to know how much they give are not giving appropriately, then I will assume that pastors that want to know what their parishioners give are doing so out of a need for control rather than their “spiritual well-being”. For you see, if you are serious about their spiritual condition with regard to stewardship, would you not analyze all their finances? Wouldn’t you also be concerned and want to know the details of how they spend the other 90% and not just the part that benefits the ministry? To feel there is some a gauge to their spirituality by the $$ they give and not know anything else about their finances is ludicrous.
To Jim,
My “Jim’s wrong” statement was about the idea that policies should be made public. I think they already are public by default.
In addition, I think general policies are, generally speaking, bad ideas. They force everyone into a mold that doesn’t matter to most of them and handcuffs leaders when it comes time to lead. Lawyers and managers like policies because they make things easy. Leaders don’t like them because they make it hard to adapt to things. Simply put, most people will never be affected by this “policy” so why make it?
Larry Osborne says this: When making policies, ask How likely is it? and How disastrous will it be if it happens? He builds a grid that perhaps I will create and upload, but essentially it is this:
- Unlikely/no big deal - Ignore it, no policy
- Unlikely/disastrous - Loose policy
- Likely/no big deal - Ignore it, no policy
- Likely/disastrous - Firm policy
Here’s a couple of other things from Osborne on this general topic: When one sailor drowns, have a funeral for a dumb sailor. When three sailors drown, make a new policy.
He also said “If one person calls you a donkey ignore it. It two people call you donkey, look in the mirror. If three people call you a donkey, get saddle.” Not really related, but a bit humorous and helpful.
Policies are what causes first graders to get kicked out of school for having a two inch plastic soldier with a gun in his bookbag. It’s stupid, and it should have never been made. But it was easier to have a blanket policy than to deal with people as people.
To your illustration, yes, I would talk to him and keep him off the deacon board, and explain to him why. If he has some good reason, it would be taken into account. There may be a good reason, such as a medical disaster or something. And if he has a good reason, he probably won’t care if you know, and if you talk to him about it. A few years ago, we had a situation here where a guy told me up front that his giving would be less in the coming year.
To the issue of favoritism that several have raised, first, if a pastor shows favoritism it may be a sign of character issues that disqualifies him anyway. Second, we all show favoritism. It’s not necessarily wrong. I do not treat all opinions the same. There are some that matter more for various reasons.
To Susan,
No, you don’t demand that everyone do it a certain way. Again, firm policies make for good management but bad leadership.
Yes, you can roughly tell what a person makes by how they live, unless they live very frugally and look like they make a lot less than they do. (I know people like this). But generally, people who look like they make a lot of money either do make a lot of money or have bad money management practices. But no one lives like a millionaire on minimum wage, no matter how frugal they are. Asking about gifts and yard sales is misleading and irrelevant. Again, you don’t make a firm policy about this. Use common sense.
Again, my guess is that most people don’t care a lot of about this, and many who do probably do so for all the wrong reasons. I can’t imagine objecting to a pulpit committee who wanted to investigate my finances. You want to know where I spend my money, ask. You want to run a credit check, tell me.
To me this all goes to how seriously we take the qualifications for church office. To determine if someone is qualified, we have to ask questions and check in the areas that would make them disqualified.
You want know if a deacon is “fond of sordid gain” without checking. Or if he manages his household well without checking (and finances are a part of household management). Tough? Sure, but why have qualifications if we get to ignore the ones that are “too personal”?
[Paul J. Scharf]And this is a great example of one kind of person who needs pastoral leadership.[Susan R]BTW, I don’t buy the idea that someone can figure out how much someone makes by looking at their house and neighborhood and cars and where they work. Some people do very well with very little because they are very frugal.
Or, what’s more likely
—that all of his toys are financed and he has no room left for giving, even if he wanted to.
(This describes a large percentage of people.)
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
Someone asked above why money should be the one thing that is outside of accountability (I forget if it was accountability to the local church, the pastor or whom exactly). But this is not the case. There is a great deal of all of church members lives that is not “accountable,” in the sense of “known to the pastor(s)/elders or other church leaders.”
A few examples:
- what members do with all their time.
- How they handle family disagreements.
- What they watch on television.
- What language they use when not at church functions.
The list goes on. There is much that is, thankfully, between people and God. So I guess I’m turning the question around. Why shouldn’t money be a matter that is between the believer and God?
There may be some good answers to that question, but I do think that’s the better question.
To say it another way: not everything that is spiritually significant is supposed to be known to church leaders and considered confrontable by church leaders. So what criteria do we use for deciding what is “accountable” and what is not? Figure that out and then we can run the giving question through the grid.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
A few examples:
- what members do with all their time.
- How they handle family disagreements.
- What they watch on television.
- What language they use when not at church functions.
So you would allow a man to hold church office without knowing much about his personal life? All of these things are connected to the qualifications for church office.
Why shouldn’t money be a matter that is between the believer and God?
Obedience in clear matters is never just between a believer and God. When it comes to church office (the issue I am addressing), it has even greater import.
So what criteria do we use for deciding what is “accountable” and what is not?
The Bible seems really helpful here. When the Bible talks about a man who (among other things) is self-control, not greedy, manages his household well, it is biblical to look into how he handles money to see if he is qualified.
I am not suggesting a deep level audit of a life. Let’s just ask if he is faithful and generous to the work of the church. If he’s not, do you really want him to be a leader over people who are? Can you really hold him up as a model?
Larry, glad you quoted Osborne. He’s a good leader with good insights for the church.
Limitations for knowledge of giving should be applied to leadership. No one should be in a position of organizational direction, staff or non-vocational, who is not committed financially to the work of the church. This doesn’t speak to amount & percentages, but to “shouldering the load of ministry” together.
As to the non-leading flock, it’s like someone mentioned, we don’t spy out what they do with their time, their viewing of media, etc. Those things should be addressed through small groups and general interaction and a process of accountability, but not via policy. It’s a matter of personal growth/maturity and sanctification.
A practical tool we’ve implemented at our church is to break the church into giving units statistically. Then analyze how much giving per unit occurs. We discovered that there were some areas for major improvement in giving. And thus we were able to teach from the pulpit without specific knowledge as to who was giving light, but that it was obvious there was light giving and the body needed to respond as a matter of spiritual growth, not guilt.
For starters, the question was whether or not church leadership should monitor member’s giving, not about the financial habits of the leadership itself.
I agree with the 9Marks blog post that leadership and laity should be encouraging, mentoring, and to some degree accounting one to another in all areas of faith and practice. This would include solid teaching about tithes and offerings, charity and hospitality, thrift and debt, caring for widows, etc…
I also agree that proof of such is a requirement for leadership. However, proof of financial responsibility, tithing, etc… is not a Biblical ‘requirement’ for every Christian as much as it is a goal, a growth in grace. Leadership is to have reached a certain level of spiritual maturity in conduct and discernment in order to be able to exemplify the doctrine they proclaim.
One thing we do not want to encourage is an atmosphere of Big Brother-ism in the church, where members and leadership investigate and spy on each other to try to find out who is or is not doing what. I’ve been to a church like that, and it is a Very Scary Place.
[Susan R]This last paragraph is also what I was mentioning that I would avoid by my very short post above. A monitoring environment is quite different from an environment of accountability, even though the former is often justified by explaining the need for the latter. God would have to do a pretty large work in my heart and convince me that it absolutely was his will to ever have me accept a church where everything is monitored in the name of counseling and accountability. I think it engenders the wrong kind of environment and atmosphere in the church.However, since Larry brought it up, even at our church, we vet deacons for as best we can, all of the categories mentioned in scripture. As far as financial responsibility, we run each name by the financial secretary (the only one who ever sees giving totals) to find out if they are regular givers. No one’s income is checked exactly against what they give, since we don’t have their incomes, but the amount given is checked basically against the median income for the area, taking into account what we know about what the person does for a living, etc. It’s a very general check. I don’t even know the amounts that qualify or disqualify. I have been a deacon, but I have never had access to the financial statements, giving or income, of any member of our church other than myself, and I wouldn’t want that. Obviously, everyone in the church gets the financial statement and see what the pastor(s) are paid, just as they can see every item in the budget, though their giving is also not known.I have served on a pulpit committee as well, and we did run a criminal background check and credit check against those who made it to the “last round” before we presented one to the congregation, but even the credit and criminal checks are only to make sure they haven’t had real problems with money or the law that couldn’t be explained, not to see what their income was or whether they gave in accordance, or anything like that.I’m not sure what the best way to keep accountability in several areas in our lives is, but it’s pretty clear there are areas all of us would draw a line, such as our relationships with our spouses — there are things there that really shouldn’t be discussed by anyone except the couple in front of the Lord. I would say that if the leadership of a church is desiring to know my income and giving, I would expect to see the same from each of them. They should, after all, lead by example.I have gone through a couple years in my life where I gave my entire tithe in cash, which would have been hard to trace exactly. I wanted to see if, for those years, I could budget everything and not use credit or checks, which can go over appropriate amounts very quickly. Of course, since I was at a small church, it would have been pretty obvious that money approximately equal to what was coming in before was being received. I’m pretty sure some might have had my name on it, and some not. However, as one other poster mentioned, I can’t see how anonymous giving would go against what scripture teaches. If alms are given in secret, they can’t be checked by leadership, and that would be that. If they would decide that a person who they couldn’t track shouldn’t be in leadership, then so be it, but they would not be able to determine a person’s spiritual state in regard to money by the lack of records.Like most areas of our lives, I believe discipleship and accountability should be accomplished in smaller groups of believers, who can really establish accountability with one another, not simply a top-down, leadership-keeps-everyone-accountable-while-not-being-held-to-account-by-lowly-members model.For starters, the question was whether or not church leadership should monitor member’s giving, not about the financial habits of the leadership itself.
I agree with the 9Marks blog post that leadership and laity should be encouraging, mentoring, and to some degree accounting one to another in all areas of faith and practice. This would include solid teaching about tithes and offerings, charity and hospitality, thrift and debt, caring for widows, etc…
I also agree that proof of such is a requirement for leadership. However, proof of financial responsibility, tithing, etc… is not a Biblical ‘requirement’ for every Christian as much as it is a goal, a growth in grace. Leadership is to have reached a certain level of spiritual maturity in conduct and discernment in order to be able to exemplify the doctrine they proclaim.
One thing we do not want to encourage is an atmosphere of Big Brother-ism in the church, where members and leadership investigate and spy on each other to try to find out who is or is not doing what. I’ve been to a church like that, and it is a Very Scary Place.
Dave Barnhart
Just to be clear, my comments were always about those nominated for leadership positions.
The failure to discriminate public acts which the church may rightly monitor for membership and private acts in which it provides the context without interference and monitoring (singing hymns-i.e. Brother Bill you are not singing to the Lord enough) is what results in the presumptive but wrong any injurious acts to its members by ecclesiastical government.
The church is the means through which worshipful giving is done (primary) and it is a spiritual response unto the Lord, hence, such boundaries must not be encroached upon by personal monitoring and/or attempts to interfere with such private Priesthood matters through personal interference and directives. The Scriptures provide no precedence for such monitoring.
The church is not to be concerned with who gives what with respect to monitoring and the view it is licensed to approach people on the matter individually with commendation or correction (though records of giving both may and should be kept for other legitimate reasons). It has as its concern the holy and righteous use of the money it receives.
Bill was a rookie teacher in the Christian school. Each week he placed his cash offering in the plate. After a few months, the pastor approached Bill about his giving (was he or wasn’t he and how much?). In a moment of ignorant boldness, Bill asked the pastor how much the pastor gave. Their relationship was somewhat strained after that.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
In addition to the risk of creating a Big Brother atmosphere, I’ve also seen attention to giving completely drain all the joy out of it. Not saying “leave it alone,” but both OT and NT seem emphasize the beauty and joy of willing giving and there’s a risk that going after it in the wrong way will turn it into something more like paying taxes than giving. That would be sad.
Agree w/Larry in principle, though, that selecting leaders is a bit different from monitoring member giving generally and, as a category, it doesn’t make sense (and isn’t biblical) to exclude “finances” from the vetting process. It’s just a question of how deep to drill, so to speak.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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