‘All donors have agendas’
“All donors have agendas,” writes Patrick Brennan. And so they do. No one gives money without seeking some return, some benefit, some recompense. It may come in the form of mere satisfaction at helping another, with no strings attached. Or the donor may seek influence, power, manipulation. And who hasn’t bought something just to get rid of the seller, the return being the restoration of peace?
Beyond the small amounts and the small returns, donors usually seek to further their own vision of how the world should work. And how the recipient ought to work. This principle is true of churches as well.
Some churches have the Lord’s agenda of teaching the gospel of truth to the lost. But sometimes that agenda is soft, subject to budgets, elder or preacher projects, or majority wishes. Even then, mission funds can serve to assuage guilty consciences or be a badge of a successful church worn on the front page of the weekly bulletin.
Then again, more and more churches with businessmen for elders are looking for more bang for the buck, more baptisms per dollar. You dunk the natives, and they’ll plunk down the bills. Not a few mercenaries play that game with the calculating churches.
Some missionaries, in a rush to the field and in a crunch for funds, accept support from progressive churches, thinking that their money won’t talk or make demands. But if anyone has an agenda, it is progressives.
Some years back, one missionary wife confessed that she and her husband were concerned that their new sponsoring church was more liberal in some areas than they were. She didn’t know how they were going to deal with that.
They dealt with it by allowing liberal doctrine to influence them, so that today their congregation is the most liberal in the country and pushing progressive ideas among the churches. How liberal? Recently, people were dancing in the aisles during the Lord’s supper.
All donors have agendas. So they contribute to support-seekers, drop others along the way, until their funds find the field and the personnel that matches their vision.
The challenge in all this is for churches and missionaries who have Jesus as Lord of the mission to find each other.
For the greatest Donor of all has his agenda, too: the salvation of the world and eternal life for all, through the proclamation of the gospel of God.
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- Why the church stops growing (randalmatheny.com)
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Mike Riley 6:40 pm on March 6, 2012 Permalink |
Randal, I really appreciate your article about “Why the church stops growing.” I agree 100% about not investing in church buildings as well as training future preachers “in-house” instead of sending them to preaching schools. Churches of Christ used to do that many eons ago, but I guess progress got in the way! (:
J. Randal Matheny 3:36 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
Thanks, Mike. Progress sometimes has a funny face, doesn’t it?
Joe Palmer 9:45 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
While I don’t disagree. I find it funny that you not only a progressive church having an agenda. Conservative ones do too, and perhaps not all their beliefs are right either. One of the things ministers have to deal with is the marriage of the minister/missionary and the congregation. Being a minister is not like going to look for a job at a factory or a bank. You have to consider does this leadership reflect my beliefs? Will they allow me to teach what I believe. Recently I went into an elders meeting and declared I was going to preach on a particular subject. I was prepared to resign if they told me no. Fortunately for me they accepted me teaching on the subject despite the fact that we all didn’t agree on it.
J. Randal Matheny 9:48 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
Joe, how did you miss my point? The whole article states that all donors have agendas, whether they be right or wrong.
Joe Palmer 10:21 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
I didn’t miss your point. I just took special note of this sentence. “Some missionaries, in a rush to the field and in a crunch for funds, accept support from progressive churches, thinking that their money won’t talk or make demands. But if anyone has an agenda, it is progressives.”
You singled out progressives as more so than conservatives to have agendas. Labels are always tricky. I am progressive in some areas and conservative in others. If you are to the left of me I am conservative and to the right I am a progressive. My church was recently questioned by a potential member because a more conservative congregation had made him afraid of us. We allegedly had 30 year old elders. The reality is that church chooses not to have a kitchen or eat in the building so we are progressives to them. Some of my members aren’t comfortable with another church who uses members who are miked to help improve the singing. They are to some progressives.
I don’t think I missed your point, and I do agree with it. I just think your example displayed some of the ways that you think. Not that it is wrong. We all have to be aware of our own bias. I have mine too.
I was thinking this morning of writing an article, “Should we Change Beliefs?” Perhaps you will let me share it on here. It is really a discussion of if and when we should change beliefs and the reality that all of us have beliefs that need changed even if we don’t recognize them, because none of us can possibly be 100% right.
J. Randal Matheny 10:29 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
The paragraphs above the one the sentence you mentioned refer to all churches. Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but progressives in the sense it’s being used today refer to those who basically discard doctrine of any kind. And they are agressively spreading their own doctrine of non-doctrines among us. They’ve called themselves change agents for years. So I don’t accept that I have an unhealthy bias for pointing them out specifically.
If you write your article, send it to me, and we’ll look at it. Obviously, we don’t agree to publish material unseen.
Eugene Adkins 9:25 pm on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
Hello Joe,
This is a little of topic from the original post so I was going to send you a private email but I could not find one attached to your avatar so I decided to ask you a couple questions in this forum; that is, if you would not mind answering them.
One – When you said, “Some of my members aren’t comfortable with another church who uses members who are miked to help improve the singing” what exactly do you mean when you say “improve” the singing?
I ask this sincerely because I have heard of other things being done/introduced into worship services on the basis of it “improving” the worship before, so I was wondering how exactly does this “improve” one’s worship, or are you looking at the “miked up singers” solely as a “singing improvement” as you originally stated?
Two – Who is this “improvement” meant to benefit?
Thanks for your time if you chose to reply.
Joe Palmer 11:30 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
I am not aware of people labeling themselves as change agents. I am aware of people labeling others as change agent and I agree that some are. Perhaps I am uninformed in that I didn’t know we had such a precise definition of progressives. I hear people use it to describe anyone more liberal than they are.
J. Randal Matheny 11:32 am on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
Progressives is a self-applied label of those who want to change radically what is taught in the church. Yup.