I don’t go looking for the statistics I’m about to tell you, they
just seem to cross my path. In the last week and a half I’ve heard of
the following church organization expenditures.
One church in our small city of 37,000 people is going to spend
$426,000.00
on repairing their steeple. Another church group has decided to spend
$10,000.00 on electric drums and about $50,000.00 on a new sound system.
This same group just bought some more land to extend and pave their
parking lot – thousands of dollars there. They’ve also decided to
build an addition to their building in order to reduce their two Sunday
meetings back to one. Then yet another church organization is going to
spend $50,000.00 on a new heating and cooling system. And now I’ve just
noticed the church down the street redoing their roof in a major way –
lots more money spent there.
The worst thing I’ve heard of late is that one church in another city
spent thousands of dollars on a huge neon sign, even though their building was
located well into the country. It seems they had money they weren’t sure
what to do with, so they came up with this idea.
I’m just wondering. This is a lot of money to spend on building
improvements. The problem is that I know there are poor people in these
congregations that live from week to week. I can’t help but think of the
cost to run our churches these days. It seems to me that things are really
getting out of hand. All the money we spend to maintain our buildings and
organizational structure could be better spent. Are we
being good stewards of our money? Are we being good stewards of our Lord's
money?