"We believe that you cannot have too many churches."

One of the less cogent statements I have heard denominational workers make is this:

"We believe that you cannot have too many churches."

This was the statement of a church planter catalyst, leader or some other iteration of denominational worker whose job it was to assist in planting churches. I do not recall if the individual was a state convention employee or a North American Mission Board employee. He was probably a hybrid of the two.

The context was in planting churches in and around one of the great southern metroplexes, Atlanta, the heart of the Bible Belt, the locale of dozens of megachurches, the place where it seems as if there is a Baptist church on every street corner, at every crossroads, and several in every jerkwater town.

Credit must be given for excessive exuberance in doing his job and an allowance must be made for his understanding that how well he did his job, how well he earned his paycheck, depended on the simple bottom line of how many churches he could say that he had a hand in starting.

The statement is several years old. I presume that the philosophy he espoused is not the current one adhered to by our entities. I hope that is the case.

I chastise myself for allowing such a categorical statement as "...you cannot have too many churches" to go unchallenged. I confess to not thinking every thought that I should think when it should be thought.

The brother could have properly contextualized the statement and made it truthful and valid and thereby establishing himself as the kind of sagacious denominational servant we are blessed to have. To do so would have been simple. He could have added appropriate qualifications so that it was understood that among a population of several million there would always be a need for new churches to reach and serve various ethnic groups and other population segments for which there was no existing congregation well positioned to do so.

I suspect that he had heard one of the denominational superstars make the assertion and merely repeated it.

We can certainly have too many churches and probably do. Autonomy has its downside.

My small town and country community has three Baptist churches within two blocks of each other. Two are SBC, one is independent. Another seven Baptist churches are within three miles. There are in addition several Baptist churches whose makeup is primarily African American, several other mainline denominational churches, several non-denominational churches.

Nonetheless, a new Baptist church plant finds the area fertile and presumes another is needed. Did I mention that the area is not growing and that there are no groups of Syrian, Sudanese, or other refugees are being relocated here which are in need of a church.

I was asked recently why Baptists didn't restrict new churches to certain distances from existing churches. Aha, local church autonomy is the culprit.

To my knowledge, the local association, the Georgia Baptist Convention, and NAMB are not attempting to further saturate the locality with shiny new SBC churches. Good for them. To NAMB's credit they have established parameters, ratios of churches to population, that they use in funding church plants. This is an imperfect but emminently sensible approach.

So, while the young, energetic, goateed Reverend with a vision of having his very own church works his church planting magic and tries to snatch away enough folks from existing churches to have a regular paycheck, we have people groups all over the globe with hundreds of millions of folks who have little or no Gospel witness at all. If successful he will be lionized and emulated.

I wonder how God looks at all this?

Guaranteed to put fear in the pastor's heart

You are stopped by one of your church members in the hallway prior to the worship.

They say to you, "Pastor, I think I am going to Google all your sermons."

Your heart may skip a beat, several beats, while your brain churns in search of a response.

"Why would you do that?" you ask.

"To see if anyone is stealing your sermons, pastor."

Should you make some casual comment at this point that pastors sometimes borrow from each other and that anything of yours that another pastor thinks helpful he is welcome to borrow. You cannot think of anything to say other than that but you do have a lot of thoughts far beyond the old standard that preachers swap stories and outlines.

Deep down, you know that if you have someone doing Google searches for your sermon titles and outlines, or even for some sentences and phrases they are going to find out that you "borrow" heavily from others, sometimes sermon titles, complete sermon outlines, numerous sermon illustrations, and even much of a sermon body.

This could be a problem because you have to admit that you are (a) stealing someone else's material, (b) not giving even a hint of attribution, (c) using entire sermons that others have prepared, and (d) even taking another's illustration and telling it as if it is your own.

You've been warned against this.

Your seminary profs told you that you should read widely but study hard and prepare your own sermons. They explained that it was normal to take a sermon idea, even a title, and do your own prep work. They even understood that outlines in the public domain may be used, just give credit.

You started out in the pastoral ministry fully grasping that as a pastor, your most important work was to proclaim God's Word, that God called you and that He would use you to explain and apply His Word to the lives of those whom you touch.

Whatever happened to that?

You got lazy. You foolishly thought that if you preached like a megapastor you could be a megapastor. You started borrowing, then stealing.

Now you have sermon outlines printed every week in the bulletin. You have many sermons that are fully printed and available on your church website as text, podcasts or both. You have that sinking feeling that if this church member assiduously researches your sermons you will be found out.

You haven't been doing a lot of your own work for years. Most of what you preach you found elsewhere. You have justified this by presuming that folks would understand that there are so many demands on the pastor and that you are only responding to the expectations the congregation has placed on you for visiting, meetings, administration, counseling and other duties. Surely they will understand your using other folks' sermon material to save time.

At the level you are stealing from others, they probably will not understand. You get a paycheck every couple of weeks in part for filling the pulpit. If what comes from your mouth when you preach is not yours, what are you? Sort of an ecclesiastical reporter just reading off "your" notes instead of a teleprompter?

You are in serious trouble if this goes much farther. What if the deacons were presented with the facts here? You really don't want to think about that conversation.

You cannot undo the past but you can clean up your act for the present and future.

Stop with the silly rationalizations and do it.

Just 4% of SBC churches give 50% of all Cooperative Program gifts

SBC Life has some interesting Cooperative Program statistics in the current issue. Under a short piece entitled, "Interesting (and Important) Facts about the CP?" one finds this:

2,025 churches reported giving a combined amount that equals 50 percent of all Cooperative Program gifts given through the state Baptist conventions — more than 240 million dollars ($240,704,503).*Among churches that gave this amount are:

• 89—churches with more than 2,000 in worship attendance

• 56—churches with 1,501 to 2,000 in worship attendance

• 163—churches with 1,001 to 1,500 in worship attendance

• 158—churches with 751 to 1,000 in worship attendance

• 348—churches with 501 to 750 in worship attendance

• 886—churches with 251 to 500 in worship attendance

• 277—churches with 126 to 250 in worship attendance

• 19—churches with 125 or under in worship attendance

• 29—churches did not report their attendance

I doubt you would have guessed that about 2,000 of the SBC's 46,000 churches are responsible for half of all the Cooperative Program giving. 

And if you look at the listing of the sizes of these churches given above, you may be persuaded away from the old saw that all those average and small SBC churches that give high percentages are the backbone of the CP. Their giving is important and commendable but the backbone seems to be the larger, mid-mega, and megachurches if we're talking about the dollars that pay all the SBC bills.

These 2,025 churches gave an average of 8.1% of their undesignated receipts through the Cooperative Program. That percentage is significantly above the average, which hovers between five and six percent.

Want some good news about Cooperative Program giving?

For the first time since fiscal 1999-2000, the percentage forwarded by the churches through the Cooperative Program did not decline.

• In 2011, the average percentage giving from all churches was 5.407 percent.
• In 2012, the average percentage giving from all churches rose slightly to 5.414 percent.

Frank Page should declare an SBC party day over the .007 increase in average percentage. It is a miniscule increase but it is an increase. Perhaps the Cooperative Program has reached its percentage floor.

How the lottery was a boon to Georgia Baptists

Here in Georgia, we are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of our state-sponsored lottery.

I use “we” loosely because your humble hacker and plodder blogger isn’t celebrating, but most everyone else is. My residence was in South Carolina in 1993 but as a native Georgian, I was aware of the lottery proposal and subsequent approval back then and watched from across the Savannah River as the strong opposition of Georgia Baptists was insufficient to kill it. It passed amid all manner of dire predictions by opponents. It has been wildly successful.

I have never purchased a lottery ticket, not a single one, but I have been in line in convenience stores behind literally hundreds who have and do buy them.

Georgia’s lottery was approved by citizens because the proceeds were to go to fund college scholarships for students with over 1.5 million Georgians being helped with their college education through the lottery. Among that figure are my own children. I never paid a single penny in college tuition or fees for my kids. All of it was paid by the HOPE lottery-funded scholarship and other scholarships. [As an aside, I know of exactly one and only one person in these twenty years who eschewed the lottery scholarship and paid tuition out of his own pocket.]

Which gets me to the matter of the lottery being a boon to Georgia Baptists and Georgia Baptist churches.

Although the HOPE scholarship was originally means tested, after the first few years when lottery sales were far beyond expectations and money was abundant, the original family income cap of $66,000 was raised to $100,000 and then eliminated altogether. There is no means test today for the HOPE Scholarship.

With no means test, those affluent families who planned to pay for a college education for their kids suddenly had a sum of money, quite a considerable sum of money, available for other uses. Studies showed an increase in luxury car sales in affluent Georgia counties after HOPE’s income cap was removed. Families took the money planned for college tuition and bought expensive vehicles with it. In Athens, my home and home of the state’s largest university, the University of Georgia, there was an explosion in the building of student-oriented condominiums and conversion of apartments to condos, as parents invested in real estate for their children to live in while in college (and, when the real estate meltdown came in 2008, many of  these lost considerable sums as inflated condo prices crashed and buyers could not be found).

What a great country! The state sponsors a gambling enterprise, something they monopolize by making such criminal for all others, which is funded proportionately greater by poor citizens who spend more of their income on lottery tickets than their wealthier fellow citizens. The more affluent Georgians then take the free tuition and buy new cars and houses with the enormous pool of money set aside for their kid’s education that is now available for discretionary spending.

Some of that pool of money, into the billions of dollars over twenty years, has and will go to Georgia Baptist churches in the form of donations. Astute readers will notice that I offer no concrete proof of  this. It has not been specifically targeted for study but I think it to be a safe conclusion.  

Here’s something I am not reading or hearing these days: any call by Georgia Baptists to do away with the lottery or even to make the adjustments to it to remove or ameliorate it as a state-sponsored wealth transfer program whereby our poorer citizens pay for the college education of our more wealthy citizens.

Happy 20^th birthday, Georgia Lottery. You have ingrained yourself into the fabric of our culture and, since middle class and upper class Georgians are accustomed to the financial benefit, you will live to be 100 and more.

You will not hear Georgia Baptist pastors fighting this segment of the culture wars. We benefit too much from it.

Pastor, put down the multi-level sales scheme and step away from it!

You're a Southern Baptist pastor, that's as high up as you are ever going to get, and you are paid less than the average $60k salary for SBC senior pastors. You look at your future with a clear eye and understand that upward pastoral mobility is limited and substantial salary inreases will probably not be coming. You recognize that the salary difference between a senior SBC pastor with ten years experience and 30+ years is not much, on average.

So, understanding that you need to provide for your own retirement, educate your own kids, and have a house of your own at some point down the road, you start looking around to see if you can supplement your income with something that you can fit in your job responsibilities as a pastor.

Good move, taking personal responsibility for your future.

Eureka! A friend of a friend has a route where it is asserted that you can make a substantial second income, possibly exceeding your income as a pastor.

This involves some sales but the bigger money is made recruiting others into the "business opportunity," "under you," as it is explained, where you get a cut of their sales.

Welcome to multi-level marketing, or worse.

Take my advice, pastor, stay away from this stuff.

You probably will not make much or any money and you will probably get dirty in the process. There are other routes to extra income that are more straightforward and honest and in which you will not get your hands soiled.

I attended an evangelism meeting held at our local associational office some years ago, an event led by a staff member from the state convention. I received a phone call from the staffer inviting me to stay after the meeting for what he called a good business opportunity for pastors to earn extra income. I stayed. The opportunity was a multi-level deal with borderline legality. It was held out that some pastors were making tens of thousands of dollars working this.

This was a shameless scheme to suck pastors into a deal where a few might make some money but where most would lose their few hundred dollars spent to buy in. It angered me that a denominational employee piggybacked this onto a ministry event.

Dangle a few hundred dollar bills in front of a pastor and what do you get? From some, you get an ocean of drool, I'm afraid. We could all use the extra money.

I didn't "buy in" although I did waste quite a bit of time fending off phone calls from my colleagues who had and who wanted me in the deal.

The most recent example I was hit with was one that recruited subscribers to a deregulated utility supply service and, more importantly, involved persuading your friends to be 'dealers' at a price of several hundred dollars. Not many people selling the product. Lots of people putting money in a pool as "dealers," hopeful that enough others could be persuaded to do the same and you'd end up with a tidy sum. Same nonsense. Pyramid scheme with a patina of respectability.

My reflexive response to these things is this: "No. Not just 'no' but 'Gehenna no.' Goodbye."

Somewhat different, and more sinister, are affinity scams like the one that swindled millions from folks in an Atlanta church (this is illegal and I don't need to be told the difference between legal multi-level marketing schemes and Ponzi schemes). The pastor of the church promoted the program in his church and recommended it to his people. Now he and the church are being sued on the basis that the church gave a "tacit endorsement" of the illegal scheme. Hmmm, the stakes are raised if you and your church might get sued over your plan to put money in your pocket.

Forgive me, my scheming ministerial brethren, but don't you feel a little funny selling stuff and promoting these things to your congregation? (I know several pastor's wives who sell make-up, jewelry and the like. I see no issue with these where you make a little money actually selling the product.)

An enterprising pastor can sell books on Amazon or products on Ebay and make some extra money perfectly honorably and legitimately. He can probably do this and it not even be known to his congregation, not that it needs to be kept secret. Just do it from your basement, not the church, and do it in some of the 100 hours a week you aren't working.

Far too much suspicion already falls on those of us who pastor churches and preach the Gospel. Don't add to that with this nonsense.

If you want to be remembered by your congregation for your preaching, your ministry, your selfless service, stay away from this stuff.

But if you want for your former church's members to remember you as, "Oh yeah, Brother Get-Rich-Quick, he was the one who was spending most of his time pushing the latest and greatest moneymaking scheme" then have at it, brethren.  

Why is the Cooperative Program down this year?

Surely there are folks at the Executive Committee who analyze such things.

Baptist Press reports "CP slightly above budgeted goal for year" which is the positive way to spin the figures that show the Cooperative Program to be running about $2.4 million behind the total give for the same period last year. SBC entities budgeted conservatively so the budgets needs have been met with the amount given and are running every so slightly above budget needs, about $153,000. It is good to meet a budget.

The budget year has one more month to go. Maybe there will be some 'catch-up' giving by the state conventions and the CP will be up for the year.

The stock market is up. Unemployment is down. Are church finances less stable than last year? Is there still a heavy pall on future finances for churches that churches are reluctant to increase their CP giving?

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I don't see significant numbers of churches cutting their CP giving over any SBC issues.

Slice the giving any way you wish, the CP is still a huge funding engine and the $188 million budgeted for SBC entities should be achieved. Add to that the majority of CP giving which stays with state conventions and you have close to half a billion dollars in funding.

Jason K. Allen eliminates Calvinists from the SBC

It's so simple. Just refuse to allow the use of the term "Calvinist." Presto! No more Calvinists.

Jason K. Allen is the SBC's youngest seminary president, having been put into the driver's seat of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, our most problem-plagued seminary, less than one year ago. He is doubtless an outstanding individual and has my prayers for success in his task at MBTS.

He has wrote a piece this past Tuesday, "Are you a Calvinist? Rethinking theological labels."

The article is a thoughtful and reflective treatment of the use of theological labels http://sbcplodder.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and specifically of that single most important theological matter in our beloved SBC these days - Calvinism. .

Allen was preaching at a church recently and described a question he was asked:

I have one question for you. Are you a Calvinist?” 

That question is not an uncommon one, but it’s a question that might be more difficult to answer than first thought. To this gentleman, I reflexively replied, “To be honest, sir, I have no idea what you mean by that question.” He smiled and responded, “I have no have idea what I meant by the question either.”

The story illustrates my experience with not a few Calvinists and I suspect it illustrates the experience of many, many a pastor search committee's conversation with a prospective pastor who is Calvinistic. 

The Calvinistic candidate will rather have a shard of glass stuck in his eye than to let the sentence "Yes, I am a Calvinist" pass from his ministerial lips.

Allen suggests three "principles for doctrinal discourse," What is most biblical; what is most forthright, and what is most wise." In discussing the three points he asserts this,

 If someone else has hijacked the term or loaded it with freight you never intended, to embrace it might not only be unwise, but downright foolish. Instead be forthrightly biblical and not foolishly sign on to a label that was divorced from its true meaning long ago.

This is a conclusion almost universally shared by SBC Calvinists. The thinking goes like this: "Calvinism is a snarl word, a term loaded with bad images and experiences in the minds of some laypeople. It is not helpful to me as a pastoral candidate; therefore, I will never, ever allow it to be applied to me and I will talk doctrinal circles around any committee who presses me on it."

I hear Calvinists often say of the label, "I don't use it because it is not particularly helpful," or "I never accept that because it is so broadly used," or similar.

I acknowledge that Allen and my Calvinistic SBC friends do have a problem here. There is some negative cachet to this term that best describes their theological stance. (My graybeard SBC colleagues will recall that SBC moderates tried to eliminate the term "moderates" as applied to them back during the heated days of the Conservative Resurgence. They even had Baptist Press invent some new terms to their liking. It didn't work.) I'm thinking that "Calvinism" is too ingrained to be eliminated now.

Allen concludes with this:

Theological conversation is most always good, but it can be improved when it takes place on higher ground. To conceal one’s theological convictions is at once disingenuous and cowardly, and no self-respecting minister should be either. Rather, let’s be Bereans, studying the Scriptures and articulating our convictions in ways that are most biblical, most forthright, and most wise.

 I don't know a Calvinist who thinks he is disingenuous and cowardly and I appreciate Allen, Tom Ascol and others, including the Calvinist Advisory Committee whose report said,

In order to prevent the rising incidence of theological conflict in the churches, we should expect all candidates for ministry positions in the local church to be fully candid and forthcoming about all matters of faith and doctrine, even as we call upon pulpit and staff search committees to be fully candid and forthcoming about their congregation and its expectations. 

While I don't disagree with Allen on this, I wonder what is the best course for conversations between search committees and prospective ministers if "Calvinism" is off limits?

One solution, a few years old now, was what came to be called a Calvinist smoke out guide.

One might look askance at the title for this but it's tough to argue that a church committee doesn't need some guide for assessing the theological stance of interviewees. Since we have eliminated all Calvinists from the SBC, perhaps LifeWay could publish one. It looks as if there is a market. ;)

Is your church secretary stealing from the church?

Two things are true about that question:

1. She is almost certainly not.
2. For someone who reads this blog, she is.

And here's what is happening in your church, with the Lord's money and you don't know about it:

She handles all the books, pays the bills, writes the checks, gets the bank statements. What is happening is that she is writing checks to a dummy vendor, perhaps with a name that sounds 'right' if someone looked at it, and deposits it in an account that she controls. She then writes checks out of that to herself. Or, she is writing checks to herself or a family member but changing the payee when the check is entered into the accounting software so that when statements are run everything looks normal. And she knows that no one besides herself ever looks at the bank statements. Or, she has a private supply of checks and she tosses out the ones that are legitimately signed by one or two church officials and rewrites her own and forges the signatures.

She can get away with this until some bill goes unpaid or until someone smells something foul and takes minimal initiative to ask questions and look at actual records. 

But you, Spurgeon are too busy with your nose in some dusty commentary to educate yourself on church finances. Besides that, you don't want to soil your dainty hands with tedious administrative duties. 

OK, genius, just wait around until you've had tens of thousands of dollars stolen from the church. You can always be the white knight in offering support and forgiveness to the thief while the church has to figure out a way to get back to solvency. 

If you are going to pastor a church with a budget of $100,000, $200,000 and upward, and you are the only full time staff, and you are the one who sees to it that policies are in place, you better educate yourself.

I have relatives who are CPAs and one was an internal auditor for a Baptist university. While he did not run across anything more than sloppy accounting and money handling practices at that job, he has sufficient experience to have quite a view of honesty in the workplace, including churches and religiously based institutions. 

Here's his rule of thumb for workplace theft:

• 10% of employees will always steal from you.
• 10% of employees will never steal from you.
• 80% of employees will steal if the circumstances are right.

I think he is a bit low. I read where 30% are already stealing from their employer and another 60% would if the situation was right.

"Aha," sayeth my clergy colleagues, "Christians are more honest and those with church jobs are certainly more honest in dealing with the Lord's money."

Uh, no, brethren. You must presume not. If your thinking as a pastor is that you trust the folks who handle the money and write the checks, probably folks for whom you are their shepherd and pastor, that is good. If your practice is that you trust these folks, that is bad and you are as dumb as a stump. 

At some point in a 30 or 40 year pastoral career, you will have folks stealing from the church. Sadly, you probably will not even know it.

There are simple solutions to most of this that doesn't involve outside auditors, CPAs, or finance experts.

• Have a committee look over the bank statements once a year. 
• Divide up responsibilities for collecting, counting, and depositing the money. 
• Don't let one guy count the money and make the deposit.
• Don't let one guy have access to the deposit where he can take out cash and then remake the deposit slip which is not duplicated.
• Pastor, either you or someone or some committee ought to look at every check written occasionally. You can easily generate a report with this. 
• Go to the bank and get a list of accounts linked to the church and see if there are any you are unaware of.
• Physically reconcile the balances on the church financial statements, the one your bookeeper generates with what is actually in the bank.

You will save yourself some grief down the road.

Here is the latest: Woman steals $130,000 from Baptist Association

There's even a CPA who has a blog called Church and School Embezzlement. Read all about it.