In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul devotes two chapters to discussing the collection and administration of a financial gift being collected for the poor Christians in the city of Jerusalem by a group of churches in Asia Minor and Macedonia (modern day Turkey and Greece). He writes to the church that they should not view their financial gift as a type of bail-out of the Jerusalem church, but instead as the fair and generous provision of wealth amongst family members.
2 Corinthians 8:13 For this is not for the ease of others and for your affliction, but by way of equality– 14 at this present time your abundance being a supply for their need, so that their abundance also may become a supply for your need, that there may be equality; 15 as it is written, “HE WHO gathered MUCH DID NOT HAVE TOO MUCH, AND HE WHO gathered LITTLE HAD NO LACK.”
In the same way that a family functions in meeting the physical needs of its members—our churches are to relate to each other as a big family household. Paul quotes on verse from the Old Testament book of Exodus (chapter 16), where the nation of Israel, at what was perhaps its most needy state ever, was starving. They had no food, and many, many people to feed. God promised to send them “bread from heaven,” which they later called “manna.” For six days of the week they would go out from their tents and gather up this white, flakey-type substance off of the ground, and prepare it for their families. Exodus 16:18 tells the reader that once the manna had been gathered (about a bushel for each person) it was found that both families with few members and families with many members were all equally satisfied. The former did not have too much, and the latter did not come up short of food. The manna was shared, naturally, within the family. It appears that one person would go out to gather this “bread from heaven”, bring it home, and it would be prepared for the entire family.
I have always viewed Paul’s meaning in quoting this verse to be that churches with more resources and wealth should contribute to poorer churches out of their abundance, and then when those poorer churches had more wealth they in turn would contribute to the needs of the (formerly) rich churches, who now had become impoverished. (Kind of a divine insurance plan for churches: “You’re in good hands with Jesus…”) I had heard of the concept described as the natural flow of the tide—bringing a high water level to one place while another place far away experiences the levels of a lower tide. When things were flush for one church, it would share with the poorer church, and when/if things got tight, that poorer church would kick in to meet the needs of its former benefactor. But I was missing the point that I believe Paul was making, and missing the significance of his referring to the Exodus manna distribution as a pattern for church giving today…
Paul’s point is that we churches today wherever we are in the world—are a family. We’re not to view ourselves as a collection of families who are called to share our “manna” with those “families” across the world—those churches who are in poor, impoverished countries. The picture is not of one church sending funds to another, usually across the world and far away from the giving church, in the same way the Smith family might send a casserole across the street to the Lee family when they’d come upon troubling times. No, we are to share our resources with our brothers and sister churches in the same manner as a Mom or Dad passing the mashed potatoes (still have the manna picture in my head!) across the table to a member of the family. The needy churches we share with are not to be seen as separate affiliates (this is the crime of denominationalism, I guess…), but as beloved members of our family. And no person would ever tolerate living in a house with a family member who is starving because either they aren’t being given any food by their own family, or perhaps aren’t being called to the table for the meal!
I’ve noticed that we American Christians are very motivated when it comes to sending our dollars across the globe in what we call “foreign missions,” and we are also (especially at present) very hot on the idea of local service projects and ministries. Yet I note a horrible failure on the part of our churches to share wealth with the churches of their poorer brothers and sisters in our faith who worship in the same city as our own, if not the same neighborhood—and sometimes the same building of which we rent space to them. Is this the way family members treat one another?
I know of a church of over 150 refugees in Portland that is struggling to simply find a place to meet, and has had to cut ministries simply because they can’t afford to pay the bus-fare to get their members to wherever they might be meeting. Their pastor and his wife are more than sold-out to the church God has called them to—they are sacrificing their lives for it, daily. I fear for how long they can last, how long before they collapse, financially and physically. All this is happening within four miles of two major, mission-minded seminaries who are training students to travel abroad (even to the country my refugee friends fled from), and scores of neighborhood churches that sit dark and empty most nights—a growing church of 150, few of whom have jobs or cars, and all of whom are living on public assistance. It would seem that the best way for churches to receive material assistance from American churches is for them to avoid coming to America!
My church isn’t rich by any means, but we’re starting to ask the questions about our responsibility to see our sister churches as family, and not distant cousins or (worse yet), a “refugee community.” We give a bit, we share in ministries—but we have a long way to go. But the first step for us was a change of thinking. It’s not a matter of how we view the challenge of foreign missions—it’s all about how we treat the members of our family, the church of Jesus Christ.
