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Missionary discouragement isn’t something that only takes place “over there.” It happens right here at home. “I just learned that one of our main churches is going to greatly reduce its financial support of our mission work,” said a cross-cultural worker a few weeks ago. This particular church had fallen short in their building fund campaign and was cutting back on support to overseas ministries to make up the difference. The discouragement in this brother’s heart was obvious.

That night I couldn’t sleep. Our conversation had ignited a fuse of cheerless memories: recollections of other missionaries with the same sad story; of a homeless man dejectedly telling me about a small church that had refused him assistance because they “needed the money to paint their sanctuary”; and, of a time while receiving a tour of a new building where I was to speak, the church member giving me the tour said wryly, “this is our pastor’s monument to himself.” I fell asleep that evening wondering, “have we, the American church, lost our way?” and “are we terrible stewards of God’s blessings?”

Statistics indicate that we have and we are. Of the 6.6 billion people on the planet, 4.5 billion do not claim to be followers of Jesus. More than one fourth of the world—1.8 billion of those non-believers—have no choice in the matter because they have never even heard of Jesus. Yet, in response to this need, about 97 percent of all of the money placed in the offering plate is spent on ourselves, the one-twentieth of the world’s population that lives in North America. And while 3 percent does go to foreign missions, American churches spend an average of 22 percent of their funds on the maintenance or expansion of their buildings. Poor stewardship, fomented by a dependence on buildings, has resulted in our current addiction to edifices that began seeping into the DNA of our ecclesiastical ancestry about 1700 years ago.

Archeologists are unlikely to discover any ruins of church buildings from the first three centuries after Jesus, because Christianity was a house-church movement. Only after Constantine legalized Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire did church buildings come into existence. The legacy took root. A couple of hundred years after Constantine, as he dedicated the elaborate edifice in present day Istanbul known as the Hagia Sophia, the Emperor Justinian is reported to have said, “Solomon, I have surpassed you.” Now it is our tradition that Christian ministry be centered in a church building. Or, as Matt Hedrick has said, “Today, we don’t go out into the world to sprinkle the salt of the Gospel. Instead, we place a salt block in the sanctuary and invite people to come in and take a lick.”

In his book The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch laments our acceptance of this approach to ministry. “A genuine missional impulse is a sending rather than an attractional one. The New Testament pattern of mission is centrifugal, rather than centripetal.” I doubt that we will quickly wean ourselves away from our inherited dependence of building-based ministry. But there are glimmers of hope that ministry to “the least and the lost” will not be forgotten in the shadows of our tall steeples. For example, many churches have discovered faith-promise giving, which separates pledges to missions—based on trusting God for the supply—from competing with the church’s operating budget.

Another approach is for a church that is raising funds for a new building to give a tithe or more of the funds to missions. Rev. Steve Wood and Dr. Richard Hunter, both pastors in the North Georgia Annual Conference, have each done so in more than one church. Wood comments, “In both cases it has really raised the level of expectation and commitment for global missions. We also saw an exponential increase in the number of people who took their first global mission trip.” Hunter confirms this positive impact on congregations he has served, adding that because the congregation is obtaining a new building, these designated mission funds are used to fund new mission initiatives in addition to the ones that the church already supports. By design, this causes the local church’s mission involvement to increase when they add a new building.

Other approaches emphasize a different type of behavioral change. Hirsch speaks of “Third Place Communities,” a movement in which “our first place is the home, our second place is work/school, and our third place is where we spend our time when we have time off,” (not a church building.) “Anywhere people gather for social reasons could be a good place for missional engagement. Third places are pubs, cafes, hobby clubs, sports centers, etc.” He cited one church that actually sold their buildings to invest in a local shopping mall and become a presence there.

I recently spoke to one of two members at a new United Methodist church (which currently owns no real estate) who have intentionally taken jobs at a well-known coffee bar for the purpose of being witnesses for Jesus in a public place.

Maybe we are beginning to sober up from our addiction to buildings.

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The Great Commission Lost in the shadow of a steeple By Frank Decker

The Great Commission
Lost in the shadow of a steeple
By Frank Decker