Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: I look at iconic churches in America. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral now is vacant. They couldn't afford to pay—they went bankrupt. They couldn't afford to pay their janitor staff any longer. Beside their own internal problems, like we talked about last week, the congregation simply dwindled. This generation, which made up a good part of the congregation, began diminishing, and so did the money.

I look on other TV ministries with predominantly elderly crowds and they're packed out with beautiful cathedrals and beautiful churches, but listen to me: it's tick, tick, tick. A thousand a day. A thousand a day this day up here that represent 50% of the money coming into churches are going home to be with Jesus, which isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing.

Each ensuing generation in the church is increasingly unreliable, unpredictable, and less generous in their giving. Donations are on course to drop 70% within 25 to 30 years. What's going to happen when 70% of the money stops to the local church in America? Can you just imagine that with me, some of the things that are going to take place?

In 2001, giving went down from an average of 4.27% down from 6.15% a few years earlier. Tithing decreased 62% in 2003, decreased again in 2004, decreased again in 2005, and with the economic meltdown of 2008, it went down another 30%.

The money these churches—I have two words here: send and spend—to other ministries is going to dry up. In other words, we spend locally on certain things. We spend on the pregnancy center, we spend with Family Promise. We spend certain moneys in our church on local outreaches, and we also send certain moneys across the sea to different countries and support IAGM that has 30-plus different mission fields, 20-plus different mission fields there. So we're sending and we're spending money.

Now, what's going to happen if you take 70% of my budget out? Will I be able to send and spend any longer? I won't. And that's just my church. When you put every local church in America and all the different outreaches and community plans that are funded by the local church—think about how many that would be in the United States—and you take 70% of that income off the table, these buildings will be shuttered all over the place.

And when these buildings are shuttered, ministry is shuttered. Ministry doesn't come out from these doors of the building. I'm not complaining about now; I'm worried about later. I'm okay with the direction we're heading now as a local church. I'm thinking about what happens when this generation goes.

What's going to be left for my daughter, who's ten, when dad goes home or dad's no longer here? What's going to happen to this local church? What's going to happen to the 700 local churches in Pinellas County? Are they all going to go? No. There will always be ones left behind. There will be progressive ones, forward-thinking ones. There will be men of Issachar that make sure they survive the next generation. But a lot of them just don't have that foresight or are stuck to their own religious ways. We'll be seeing doors shut. I heard of one this morning, another local assembly shut down.

Full-time ministry, sort of what I do, which I believe is God's model for ministry—I believe I can show you that biblically—it's going to be very rare. People going to seminaries are going to be very rare. Bible colleges and Bible college universities like mine, Luther Rice, very easily could be shutting their doors because why learn a trade or why learn about the Bible if you can't live off it?

I talked to a young pastor this week, younger than me, still very young. I asked him about his source of income. He understood this. He's a man of Issachar. He said, "I understand my church will not be able to potentially support me long-term, so I have created another revenue source for me. I can support myself halfway now from my revenue source and halfway through the church, and then if worst comes to worst, I can make it 100% through my other revenue source so I don't have to be dependent upon the church."

The problem with that is that other revenue source takes a lot of his time that isn't spent in ministry like it could be spent. Christian radio stations, where do you think their funding comes from? TV stations, para-church ministries, Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Press—they run on maybe not a lot of dollars, but some dollars. And if I'm a local church and I can barely keep my doors open, am I going to be sending money out or am I just going to try to keep it right here? Do you see the problem I'm getting at?

I'm not trying to paint something dire, but it's dire. We have time to do something about it now, and we will actually be looking at that for the next two weeks. We're going to talk about what can we do to fix the evangelical disaster that we are facing in our country. First of all, the face of ministry needs to be less dollar-dependent. There are things we can do without spending anything or very little. I think we have to look at those things.

We've seen that even though we, as an evangelical church—if you took all the evangelical churches in this country and put all their moneys together, we'd be in a top 100 world economy—yet we're losing ground in culture. All the money that we have isn't really making any inroads in culture. So we have to find a way that maybe doesn't cost a lot to turn this around.

We want to take this thing right here, this cone. This represents Christian representation. We want to take this cone and we want to straighten that thing out so when I die, it's no longer like this, but it's fat down there. I want a fat cone when I die. I want to look and see that this generation coming behind me has just as many Christians coming up, and we can do it if we become people of Issachar and think ahead of ourselves now. More spending will not fix the problem. Evangelism will fix the problem.

How do we face this problem? I'll let a couple of ideas out and then we don't have a lot more to say. I just want to make you depressed and then I was just going to let you go home after that. First of all, like Joseph. When Joseph knew that seven years of famine was coming, what did he do? He planned for seven years. He knew the famine was coming, so he saved enough grain and enough resources so when the famine came, the nation of Israel could eat—and Egypt, I should say, could eat.

So we need to find a balance here, and this is difficult and this is going to be per church. This sounds funny for us because it's a non-issue for us because our budget isn't there, but there are churches out there that have large budgets and we have to find a balance between spending and saving. My attitude before I saw this was: why do we want to save? I'm not against saving or having some money in a bank and being able to repair the property when you need those repairs, but why does a church need three-quarters of a million dollars or half a million dollars in a bank? I'm not saying they do. As I said, it's a per-church thing.

But on the other side of the coin, if we don't save, when this cone starts disappearing up here, this is going to dry right up. This is what happens and I watched it happen in this church in the last 12 to 24 months. When this beautiful generation is passing away at a thousand a day—and in a couple cases I'm thinking of—people in this generation were writing out faithful weekly or monthly checks to this local assembly. They were faithful. First of the month I'd get a check or every other week, however it would happen.

In some cases, they were people of means. It was an income source the church could depend on; it came in every week. Then they passed away. They went home to be with Jesus, which is good. But all their money stopped. When we lost them, we lost their income source. They took all this revenue that they had, the dollars that they represented, and they passed it down to this generation. But this generation doesn't give. 37% are atheist. It's not on their radar screen.

So this revenue source that was here ended. A thousand a day from this revenue source ends. I don't want you to think, "Oh, Pastor, you see me as a revenue source because I'm a senior citizen?" No, I want to commend you because you've kept it going. You funded it. You've done it. You kept the doors open. Seniors, you've done it. You've dug down deep, you worked through hard times, you gave and lived through the Depression in some cases. You've done it. You are to be commended.

But I'm not done with you yet, and God's not done with you either. He's not done with you until you're dead. And you're breathing, you're here, and you're listening because I think we can turn this around. Again, this is a per-church agenda, but what happens when Pastor Kelley goes home to be with the Lord in 15, 20, or 30 years? What happens to the kids in Pastor Herman's orphanage? We forget them?

Can we create something so that ministry continues even when we're gone? Could the current generations consider paying it forward? Maybe people up in this percentage can say, "Okay, my life savings, my life's worth, is going to come down to this generation." There's nothing wrong with that. That's your family, your kids, your grandkids, whoever. But maybe I want to pay it forward a little bit for the kingdom of God.

I want to help fund the next generation. I want to keep the church moving—and I'm talking the church universal. It might be a para-church ministry. It could be Campus Crusade for Christ. It might not even be a local assembly. But I'm going to pay it forward a little bit. I'm rethinking this with my wife right now. Maybe I want to help fund ministry after I'm gone. When I'm in heaven worshipping around the throne, saying "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty" and bowing at the feet of Jesus, my finances are still paying for things on earth and still helping the church.

I want to share a story. I asked Rose this past week—she used to do the books for many years at Pasadena Baptist. Some of you don't know who Emma and John Peel are, but if you walk right out the door, you'll see a plaque on that classroom building dedicated to those two. It's an interesting story. It wasn't what I thought it was, and I might get some facts wrong, just yell at me later.

They were an elderly couple in Pasadena Baptist Church. By the description I got, they were unassuming. John went home to be with the Lord and then Emma was left without her husband and in poor health. Her health deteriorated. It came to a point where she couldn't really come to church anymore and ladies, some of them sitting here this morning, would go visit Emma and help her go shopping and help her around the house until the Lord finally called her home.

A month or so after she went home to be with the Lord, the church gets a call from Emma's attorney that says she left this box of stuff to the church. In it were some stocks and some bonds and a bunch of things like that. Over the next period of months, I think to the tune of about $300,000 came to Pasadena Baptist Church from Emma and John Peel. They paid it forward.