(Image courtesy Wikimedia, public domain.)
Anywhere you go--on any street, highway, and back road--you'll see church buildings. Sometimes several on one block. In an earlier three-part blog post on tithing, I discovered that as little as 0-8% of the money we give to our local houses of worship actually goes to help the "orphans and widows in their distress" (James 1:27), despite that the New Testament does not teach that Christians need to tithe--rather, they are primarily supposed to use their wealth to help the widow, orphan, and foreigner. Instead, though, we've consumed our own resources, spending them on church buildings, clergy salaries, and programming that mostly serves us.
So, now, as I drive past all these churches, I can't help but wonder how much we've spent on ourselves and, if we were to spend that amount on the needy people of the world, would it make a difference?
According to The Borgen Project, it would cost us $175 Billion per year for 20 years to end global poverty. Get that? GLOBAL poverty, not just poverty in the US or Canada.
According to the article, 14 Church Statistics You Need To Know for 2020, by Reach Right, despite reduced church attendance, "Donations to churches and other types of religious organizations rose by 3.3% in 2019 to $131.5 billion. This number is in the United States only.
So, Americans are giving $131.5 Billion and the worldwide financial need is a mere $43.5 Billion more. What does that tell us? That if ALL believers worldwide stopped paying for church buildings and clergy salaries, we could end poverty... for EVERYONE.
Granted, this is a rather simplistic perspective. Since poverty is a multifaceted problem, which includes a variety of cultural and social phenomena, it's a bit naive to assume just throwing money at the problem would solve it. True enough. However, if Christians:
... no longer just slapped a check in the plate
... stopped passing God's command to help the poor onto others
... set aside our religiosity (that is so often used to disguise our sin)
... learned to personally reach out to real people in the midst of their pain and suffering
... learned to trust the Holy Spirit to use us to meet the needs of others
... and used our resources--not just our money, but also our compassion, time, skills, wisdom, and grace--to show this severely hurting world God's love and mercy, we wouldn't just have the power to end poverty. We could end human trafficking, pornography, abortion, jail overpopulation--and a host of other terrible things.
But would we?
Or are we too dedicated to doing things the way we always have? Is it too easy to simply show up at a nice building, listen to a religious performance, shake hands with a few respectable people, place our 10% in the plate, and go home feeling like we've done our Christian duty?
