Jump directly to the Content

How Should We Then Spend?

Transparency is the key to financial wisdom for leaders.

As Ur's readers weighed in on Steven Furtick's controversial mansion, it was clear that opinions on pastoral compensation vary widely. Your comments ranged from blistering critiques of ministerial excess, to defense of the pastor's right to spend his money any way that he #*$@&! chooses. Here's Bob Hyatt's balanced take on the bigger issues at stake.

-Paul

Another week, another mega-pastor breaks the internet. This time it's the $1.6 million mansion of North Carolina pastor Steven Furtick (7.5 bathrooms???). Add to that the revelation that Pastor Furtick's salary is set not by his own church and its elder board, but by a coterie of other celebrity pastors. In any such "scandal" you have the detractors, the defenders and caught in the middle, the Church as a whole.

We've long struggled with the question of wealth; in particular, how should money be handled by ministers of the Gospel? The problem is that we want to maintain that wealth can be, though is not necessarily, a blessing from ...

March
Support Our Work

Subscribe to CT for less than $4.25/month

Homepage Subscription Panel

Read These Next

From the Magazine
Should the Bible Sound Like the Language in the Streets?
Should the Bible Sound Like the Language in the Streets?
Controversy over Bibles in Jamaica, the Philippines, and Germany reveal the divide between the sacred and the relatable.
Editor's Pick
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
Understanding God and our world needs more than bare reason and experience.
close