Why We’re not Afraid to Ask for Money

As pastors attempting to get a new church up and going, one of the primary obstacles we face is raising enough money, so we do things like send out mass emails asking for money (like this one from last week). While we do our best not to be focused on money, many of the practical things we hope (and are expected) to do require money. For example, we cannot hold weekly public services without renting a space—and renting a space requires money. Our basic posture toward this reality is to accept it. If we need money to function, we need money to function. And if functioning is important (and if it’s not, I don’t know why we are doing this!), then raising enough money to function is important. So that’s what we’re doing, despite the fact that asking for money is sometimes scary.

Asking for Money Scares Many of Us

Here are a few reasons I can think that make asking for money scary: 

• I don’t want to be disappointed by other people’s reactions.
• I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable.
• I don’t want to be greedy. (This is a legitimately good reason—pastors who are greedy are not fit to be pastors. This is part of the reason we are not taking salaries this year, to protect us from any charge of doing this for the sake of money.)
• I don’t want to get wrapped up in focusing on the wrong things (instead of, say, people and relationships).
• I don’t want to scare people off who expect the church to be greedy.

So there are lots of reasons not to ask for money, some relatively convincing and some not. As I mentioned above, the primary reason we are still willing to ask for money is the very practical one—we don’t know how to do what we feel like we need to do without it. But there’s one more (slightly more theological) reason I really want us not to be afraid of asking for money:

We are real people in a real world that God loves, and we should not be scared of being a part of it

Many times money feels “unspiritual.” It feels beneath us. It feels dirty. It has all the potential pitfalls mentioned above, so we decide we just need to avoid it. But this isn’t how Jesus acted with the world at all.

Jesus became an actual human. He did actual human things, like wearing clothes, eating food, walking, sleeping, and touching other people. One of the deceptions early Christians had to deal with was the claim that Jesus was not actually physical. There was a philosophical system floating around that insisted on the spiritual world being so pure that it could not possibly come into contact with the physical world—and as such, a perfectly good being like Jesus Christ must have been solely spiritual and not actually physical. Even if He seemed to be physical, this was just a mirage.

This early philosophy may sound a bit wacky and irrelevant, but many of us today have similar dualistic tendencies in thinking about the relationship of “spiritual” things and everyday things. Here are a few common such dualisms I’ve come across:

• Heaven. Many of us are not sure what happens when we die, but we know it involves going to heaven. We neglect that the great Christian hope is physical resurrection and fail to see why it’s such a big deal whether we focus on heaven or resurrection—what’s the difference? (Here are a few of our posts on resurrection: http://redemptionhou.com/blog?tag=Resurrection)
• Work. Many of us feel somewhat guilty for not being pastors. We feel like we have to ignore God for large parts of our day to do the necessary but unspiritual task of work. We neglect that God loves physical creation, that He values excellent work (for example, He plans on having the best cultural goods from various regions present in eternity, as is mentioned in Isaiah 60:7, 9, 13, etc.), that He commands us to work hard like we’re working for Him, and that He is in the process of renewing physical creation, not doing away with it.
• Personal identity. Who is the real you? Is the real you the consciousness that is trapped in a body? Many of us think this way, and we denigrate the fullness of the humanity that God created. He created us as physical beings. We are emotional, spiritual, thinking beings—but we are also physical, and not to be physical is not to be fully human.
• Secular music. Sometimes we, as Christians, feel pressured (whether internally or externally, implicitly or explicitly) to listen to “Christian” music and not “secular” music. This especially seems to be the case for anyone who grew up going to church youth events where such secular music was often screened and banned, if not physically burned and destroyed. The problem with this is that God reveals Himself in all kinds of music. He is visible all around us, even in secular music (oftentimes even more so). When we see love and truth and beauty and grace and justice and redemption—all elements of the grand narrative of history that God uses to tell us about who He is—we are seeing God, whether the music is being played on a Christian station or a pop one.
• Mission. What is the mission of the church? What are we actually supposed to be doing now? Are we supposed to care for physical needs? If so, do we do this before or after caring for spiritual needs? Which is more important? Some churches work entirely to alleviate spiritual needs and completely ignore physical needs. And some churches are the exact opposite. Sometimes this is by accident, but often this comes from deeply rooted theological convictions—which usually reveal an unhealthy dualism that separate God’s concern for spiritual needs from His concern for physical needs. But, of course, God cares for both. Christ died on the cross, got up from the dead, and is returning again to redeem us. And this redemption is both physical and spiritual. It is not one or the other.

God loves the real world, the world we actually live in, including the physical world and the world of human culture and creation

But in contrast to all of these dualisms, God works through everyday things. God is a real God who loves real people. He sent His Son to become a real person in a real culture to heal people in real ways. There is no such divide between physical and spiritual to Him. There is nothing too earthy for Him to work through. He is in the process of redeeming the earth, and He’s performing this redemption through physical means, beginning with His Son who became physical, continuing through the church that continues to live physical lives and bless people in physical ways, and culminating in a glorious physical return of His Son.

Because of all this we are not afraid to ask for money. It is not beneath us to ask. It is not too earthy to ask. In fact, maybe by us asking for money we can even start to show how thoroughly God loves this world He’s created—even the material, physical, earthy, and real parts of it.