Stranger in a Strange Land

During the last weeks of 1998, finance was integral to most of the season’s big news stories. Many pundits joined most Americans in appearing to conclude that, since work was plentiful, paychecks were up, and investments were going gangbusters, President Clinton should be let off the hook this time. In Europe, 11 countries, whose collective histories contained an awful lot of bloody economic competition, were getting ready to give their bankers a common currency, the Euro. Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 averages soared.

As if to match the salience of finance in national and international consciousness, my local world was also preoccupied with money. Our church faced a huge year-end challenge both to balance its operating budget and to garner enough money to finish the construction of a new church building. The challenge would not have been huge if our congregation was made up of NBA players (even locked-out NBAers). But to the schoolteachers, retirees, editors, unemployed, maintenance personnel, and midlevel managers of our congregation, it was daunting.

At the same time that my church family was sweating the results of its weekly collections, I was privileged to take part in a conference on “The Financing of American Evangelicalism.” This venture was funded by the Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis, which over the past decade has enabled many church and religious organizations to study historical patterns and contemporary issues related to fundraising, the use of money, and the moral significance of economic decisions. Wheaton College’s Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals sponsored this particular conference on how American evangelicals have put money to use.

The conference was attended by about 45 participants. Half were historians, while the others came from a variety of venues—economists, sociologists, theologians, lawyers, editors, and financial officers of evangelical institutions. The papers presented and the talk they generated were remarkable in every respect.

Those who are not academics may blink in disbelief at being told that it is very difficult to get different kinds of professors to talk with rather than at or past each other. It is, nonetheless, a sad fact of academic life. However, this meeting witnessed fruitful exchanges among all the participants. To be sure, discussions had their moments. At one point when noneconomists were waxing particularly hot in debate over whether “commercial capitalism” was compatible with genuine Christianity, one of the economists, after struggling for some time to get the floor, ventured to say, “We economists don’t use that word [capitalism] any more.” Much more commonly, the participants found themselves listening carefully and then communicating on the same wavelength.

The economists, for example, asked the right sort of questions to two historians who showed how important money had been in the dynamic early history of Methodism. One explained why wealth functioned as an object of fascinating danger during the dramatic rise of the Wesleyans in the generation after 1780. The other showed how important conflict over financial assets was in the acrimonious strife among Methodists after the North-South schism of 1844 and for many years thereafter. For their part, these same two historians, both British, listened in fascinated amazement at later papers on the complex, but very well developed funding operations of evangelicals after World War II. Nothing in their British church experience had prepared them for the immense scale, the tremendous energy, the sanctified self-sacrifice, and the occasional chicanery of postwar evangelical finance.

In general, the papers generated discussion as interesting for substantive issues as for bridging the chasms between academic disciplines. Everyone marveled to learn that in the decade of the 1850s, receipts of the nation’s churches and Protestant voluntary societies were greater than receipts of the federal government. Michael Hamilton of the University of Notre Dame used the title “More Money, More Ministry,” for an illuminating presentation on the incredible achievements of postwar evangelical fundraising, but also some of the knotty problems created by those achievements. Tom Berg of Cumberland Law School at Samford University presented a meticulous account of the New Era Ponzi scheme that defrauded many evangelical and nonevangelical institutions of millions. John Stackhouse of Regent College asked participants to “Follow the Money” in order to uncover a multitude of biblical, theological, and practical Christian issues—none of them simple, few of them the object of sustained evangelical attention. And at one of the meeting’s wrap-up sessions, Joel Carpenter of Calvin College noted the tensions faced by modern evangelicals who have left sectarian separatism behind but who, after making a certain kind of peace with mammon, still want to save their souls.

I came out of the conference deeply impressed by how central issues of money have been throughout the entire history of evangelical Christianity, and how important it is for believers of all types to work hard at Christian analysis of economic issues internationally, nationally, and locally. And it stimulated my resolution not to take the provision of financial resources for granted.

Which brings me back to our church. Somehow—through grace, gifts of appreciated stock, end-of-year cash-outs, all of the above—we made it.