THE WINTER OF 1979 took a chunk out of my soul. My wife, two sons, and I were living in the Chicago suburb of Evanston where I was attempting to pioneer a church from scratch. On New Years Eve several feet of snow fell; for a day or two the streets were impassable. We lived in an apartment with no garage and parked our ’73 Plymouth Fury on the street. The snowplows finally came through, but they piled a high ridge of snow against the cars parked along the curb. I had to shovel for two hours to get my car out.
But that was only the beginning. When I returned from my errand to the grocery store, someone else had pulled into the spot I had cleared and I had to shovel to get my car into another unplowed space. For three months, almost every time I came or went in my car, I had to shovel more snow. The already limited street parking became even more scarce, and I would often have to park several blocks from our apartment.
And the snow kept falling. It came in wave upon wave, interspersed with subzero blasts of arctic air. It seemed winter would never end. Of course through all this I was trying to pioneer a church by canvassing door to door. For two months I could do precious little of that, and my church-planting effort ended in futility. I have never forgotten how bad weather can complicate what you are trying to do.
Money pressures can be like that. For much of my twenty-two years in ministry my financial situation has resembled a Chicago winter. Usually I try to ignore the weather, but even then it influences my mood and my activities. As much as I have tried to ignore money, it influences everything: when I have enough, my life feels like a crisp autumn day filled with sunshine; when I don’t, it is like a cold front hammering down from Canada’s Hudson Bay.
For most of these twenty-two years my personal finances have been difficult, sometimes desperately so. In my first year as a pastor in Chicago, my income was around $14,000. Over the next eight years the church gradually increased my salary. When I left it was somewhere around $25,000. Throughout this time my wife did not work outside our home.
Our possessions reflected our situation. In Chicago we drove a rusty 1974 Chevy Malibu. The rubber door seals had become corroded, and when it rained, several inches of water collected in the floor well of the rear seats. I stuffed newspapers through the trunk into the rusted-out tire wells to keep water and debris out.
We lived in a second-floor, two-bedroom apartment, and when the wind blew from the south, the astringent fumes from a factory were almost unbearable. The building’s old windows rattled in the winter breeze and the drafts were terrible. I became proficient at catching mice (peanut butter is better bait than cheese), adding “trapper” to the many pastoral hats I wore. I felt locked in by our penury. We never had any savings, and it was all we could do to keep up with quarterly tax payments.
When we moved to Arlington Heights, I received roughly the same salary, but we lived in an area with a higher cost of living. On one occasion after our church’s annual business meeting, in which annual expenses are reported—including my salary—a church member said to me, “I didn’t know it was possible to live in this area on less than $30,000. How do you do it?”
Not very well. Nothing has made ministry harder for me than financial pressure. Nothing gives me a greater feeling of “I can’t go on.” I recall a few times of such despair and desperation that—despite my love for pastoral ministry—I was willing to do any kind of work just to pay my bills and be out from under the pressure. I even fleetingly thought about buying a lottery ticket.
I see now that my financial woes have not solely been the result of a slim salary. I see rather that my financial winters have been my responsibility, a confluence of two streams: my personal weaknesses and my personal convictions.
Anti-control freak
We have done a few things right with our money: we have been good givers and we have largely avoided debt.
I learned both virtues in my home church. My pastor gave unselfishly and he taught us to do the same. But the church also constructed a new building that soared over budget, and for the next decade and more the resulting debt was a galactic black hole that consumed time, attention, energy, pastors, money—seemingly everything. That experience has defined my attitude toward debt. Even in the case of serious needs, my family and I have generally gone without rather than charge it—and that has been our financial salvation.
My weakness, however, is a failure to budget. Several times I have worked up a budget plan, but it has always broken down at the point of recording expenditures. So for twenty-two years we have followed the cash-flow method of budgeting: buy only what we need, and when the cash stops flowing, we stop buying.
That method has one huge drawback. It fails to prepare you for large expenditures, emergency or non-emergency. Consequently we have had scarce wardrobes, no savings, no home of our own, a thirteen-year-old car, and a host of ancient appliances. (I have repaired our portable dishwasher so often—bought a year after our marriage—that it looks like it tumbled down a mountainside.) Emergencies have been just that.
For the longest time I rationalized that we didn’t budget because we had no discretionary funds. Every penny we spent was for real needs, not wants. But even though our income has slowly increased over the years, we have yet to successfully develop a budget.
I think the true culprit is the fact that I don’t like to organize and control things—or people. Administration keeps me from what I love. I am an idea person, a word person, a thinker more than a doer. I constantly analyze, question, read, explain, and try to understand. I love to organize ideas, but not money or files. Furthermore, I love to seek the Lord’s face in the spiritual disciplines of Bible reading and prayer. I have to consciously limit myself or that is all I would do. Gradually I have learned to administrate and organize out of necessity and a desire to be a faithful steward, but these duties I keep to the bare minimum.
Two myths
In junior high I walked a half mile to school. During winter that took a toll on my hands. They would become severely chapped until they cracked and bled. My mother pleaded with me to use lotion, but despite my pain I largely ignored her admonition. After all, in a few months spring would come and my hands would get better.
For about the first five years of my ministry, I had a similarly childlike approach to my personal finances. I simply ignored the pain and bleeding as much as possible, keeping my eyes on my work. Two myths encouraged me to do this:
1. We cannot live on what we make. This was perhaps the most destructive myth because it caused me to give up hope of gradually working toward financial strength through sound principles. Instead, I put all my hope in God to miraculously turn our circumstances around. Of course he can do that, but normally he has another agenda: to mold us through the struggle to learn self-control, wisdom, and planning skills.
The truth is, I can live within my means whatever my income level. Many “needs” are determined by the standards I set and the choices I make. From cars to food, I often assume I must have a certain level of quality or comfort that has little to do with my true needs. I sometimes wonder what Elijah or Paul or Christian workers in places like China would think of my “lean” living. The realization that I can live within my means if I work hard at it gives me hope and strength.
2. Ministers are underpaid. This myth depends on my measuring stick. I can use a human standard and say pastors should earn what teachers or CEOs or the general middle-class public make, but where do I find that in Scripture? Furthermore, recent research shows the trend is toward better pay for pastors. The myth that all pastors are underpaid only made me feel sorry for myself and be occasionally resentful toward church people, perhaps even toward the Lord. Instead of working hard to live decently on what we had, perhaps I wanted to suffer in order to spite those who paid our salary. Martyrdom can be great revenge.
Unlike the season that ravaged my hands, our finances faced a long-term winter, and ignoring them only made things worse. I finally decided that while personal financial management took me away from things I considered more spiritual, God must have wanted me to spend some time at it. Despite our faithful tithing, he did not unleash a flood of money to wash away our problems the easy way. We have had to learn how to manage things. God does provide in extraordinary ways at times, but usually he wants to work through our wisdom and hard work.
That lesson was reinforced by what I saw in Genesis 39 about Joseph, whom God singularly blessed. Joseph was a crack manager. As Jesus taught, he who is faithful with a few things will be given charge over more.
We need to major in our strengths. If we put too much time into our weaknesses, so the logic goes, we will dissipate our strengths. I have taken consolation from this concept, but I have also used it to rationalize a lack of growth and make it easy to bail out on a difficult task. If you stretch a large sail to the wind but the hull has a gaping hole in it, the boat will sink. In other words, if I lack those around me to whom I can delegate what I do not excel in, I must maintain a minimum of competence in those areas in order to make the most of my strengths.
How I handle my money becomes a spiritual issue. Money management can lead to spiritual growth. God wants me involved.
Guided by convictions
Mixed with this muddy stream of my weaknesses, several key convictions have guided my financial habits. Some I held simplistically; I have had to nuance them because they helped me rationalize my weaknesses. Others were sound, but I did not anticipate their real-world repercussions.
My wife should not work outside the home. My wife and I had four boys over the course of thirteen years. We decided together that she should stay home while they were young and not work outside the home. At first, our conviction was based on Scripture, then it simply became our preference. In an economy geared toward two-income families, our choice obviously allotted us smaller margins to work with.
I would love to be able to say that God rewards families in which the mother stays home—that they will do as well as if she worked outside the home—but that has not been our experience. When our youngest son went to school a few years ago, Nancy started working part-time, and it has helped us significantly. Certainly our boys are better off for our decision that Nancy stay home with them, and I am glad we did it that way. What I should have realized at the time, however, is the message of Scripture that tells us convictions often entail sacrifice.
Money should never determine location of ministry. I want to follow God’s call no matter the size of the church or the salary. Ministry should not be a climb up the career and paycheck ladder. That attitude, however, may have kept me from making my true needs known to the church leaders who decided my compensation. Over the years I have learned what I hope is a healthy mixture of faith and realism. I need to be willing to step out in faith, but I also need to communicate what I require to support my family and then prayerfully leave the final decision with the Lord and the decision makers.
Before coming to my current position, for example, I felt strongly that God was directing me to this church, but I was determined to tell the leaders what I needed to adequately support my family. The amount sounded exorbitant, but I felt it was the right thing to do. As it turned out, my salary request exceeded what they had planned to pay by about 50 percent, but they accepted my request without dissent. If I had asked for less, that is what I would have gotten, and would be living with the repercussions.
If I seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness, I will not have to concern myself with money. That, of course, is not exactly what Jesus said. He never suggests that I am to be a passive recipient of God’s provision. Rather, the weight of Scripture is that God normally uses me in the process, and that means I will have to give money some serious thought.
Occasionally such thought involved decisions that felt self-serving to me. After a poor offering at our first church in Chicago, for example, I sometimes had to decide between the church paying my salary or the utilities. I had heard other pastors say that under such circumstances the church bills should be paid first. But after trying that I decided it did the church no good to force my family and me to sooner or later find another church because we could not afford to stay. The church had a responsibility to pay its worker his due. So I took out my salary, and the church utilities always found a way of getting paid. If I always made myself the fall guy for church problems, I stood in the way of God’s promise.
Money is hazardous material. More often than not the New Testament warns of the spiritual dangers of mammon. For that reason, outside of paying my current bills, I have never had a desire to pile up money.
Still, deep in the catacombs of my heart, I think some other motivation may be at work. I have never owned a home and currently rent a three-bedroom duplex, though we could have purchased it if we had wanted to. The truth is, I feel more spiritual when I am relatively poor, and that may be a sign of some sort of distortion in my spirituality. Am I trying to impress God or earn his favor by doing without?
In ministry I must be willing to suffer for Christ. I have, and I have not always liked it. In general, though, I have withstood hardship and felt honored to do without for Christ’s sake. That blinded me, however, to what hardship did to my family. I thought they should be just as happy to endure hardship as I was. But we were in a place that I chose to be. The person who makes such a choice has a much easier time of it than those who follow along.
I learned this the hard way. On one occasion, my teenage son and I had a heated argument—unusual for us—and he said to me, “What kind of a man are you? You can’t even provide for your family!”
That got my attention. Although the rest of the world judges a man by how much money he makes, in my naïveté it had never occurred to me that someone in my own family might judge me by that standard.
Actually money was not the real problem, for leanness does not in itself cause resentment. But I didn’t take the time to do enough of the fun family things that were within our means. I was focused on the church, loved to work, and was content. Having fun was not one of my higher priorities. In addition, I may have been guilty of poor mouthing—too often saying no to something the kids wanted, stating the reason to be a lack of funds.
Courage for the promised land
I have made many mistakes for which I will have to deal with the consequences for some time to come. Yet despite all this God has shown his grace. He has used finances like a spiritual ballast in my life—stabilizing me by forcing me to deal with distortions in my thinking. God has met our needs without fail and blessed us with excellent health. In our financially vulnerable scale, he has protected us from the large financial crises that would have created a hole from which we could not climb out. My oldest sons, now in college, are extremely hardworking and self-reliant. Through our times of need I have learned to pray more effectively, I’ve gained faith from seeing God provide, and I have empathy for others in need.
Finally, my wife and I are actually working toward getting on a budget. We have started by recording expenditures for six “critical control zones,” such as groceries, on accounting paper taped right into the checkbook. When we get the recording habit down, we plan to set monthly amounts for each category of spending and then stay within the limits.
One “north star” by which I have navigated throughout has been the experience of Abraham and Isaac. Genesis 12 says God appeared to Abraham, commanded him to move to the land of Canaan, and gave him extravagant promises. Abraham obeyed, enduring the hardship of moving hundreds of miles away, and when he came to the place he was specifically told to go—the land of promise—he found something unexpected: famine.
That was hard not only on Abraham but on the hundreds who lived with him. Imagine hearing the cries of the children in his camp for food and water. Imagine facing the questions and doubts of Sarah, Lot, and the others in his company. The famine was so severe Abraham felt he must move south to Egypt to survive.
Isaac, too, experienced famine in the Promised Land, according to Genesis 26. Like his father, Isaac considered moving to Egypt, but God appeared to him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you.” In faith and obedience, Isaac stayed put. Eventually God blessed him for it, giving him a hundredfold harvest from the seed he planted.
I have received that as a promise and a paradigm for my life. For a time, the “promised land” can be a hostile place. But sooner or later, if I persevere—faithfully doing my part and accepting my financial responsibilities—God will fulfill his purposes for me and bring about a great harvest of the sort he desires.
The place to which God calls me is not easy to possess, especially in the initial stages. It takes time (hundreds of years for Abraham and his descendants). It takes courage and faith (too often I have wanted a situation that requires no faith at all). It takes a willingness to endure famine and live in tents like a nomad. But I believe the glory that will eventually be revealed in this life and immeasurably more in the age to come will make this hardship seem trifling by comparison. The promised land may not always be the easiest place to be, but it is my spiritual home.
Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson
