c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) American Protestant churches are always asking for money. That much hasn’t changed in the past 200 years. But how they ask and how they spend have evolved so dramatically as to reshape understandings of what it means for the church and its supporters to be faithful.

That story of Protestant churches’ intimate and often uncomfortable relationship with money is the subject of a new book James Hudnut-Beumler, dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School. “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism” comes out in March from the University of North Carolina Press.

In the book, Hudnut-Beumler explains how fundraising rhetoric from the pulpit changed over time to reflect the intense anxiety of preachers whose salaries depended on successful appeals. Preachers’ wives figure in the tale, too, as workers who often needed to supplement the family income.

Hudnut-Beumler tracks the rise (and in some cases, the fall) of institutional churches, where expansive missions once required vast facilities and multiple staff, but decades later found themselves overcommitted. Readers follow the trajectory from 1800 to the present day.

Q: What drew you to this topic?

A: When I was working at the Lilly Endowment in the early 1990s, religious leaders came to us asking for money. They were arguing that times were worse than they’d ever been, and organized Protestantism and its churches were threatened by low salaries and poor giving. As an historian, it piqued my interest. I wanted to say: well, is it different? And in what ways is it different from what it had been in the past?

Q: Is it true churches are in greater financial straits today than ever before?

A: It’s true, and it’s not true. It’s true in the sense that many churches are smaller in membership size than they were 25 years ago. One hundred fewer members are supporting a small congregation in typical American denominations than was true a generation ago. On the other hand, more than half of American Christians attend a congregation that is large in size _ over 750 members. And those congregations are doing quite well.

As Americans, we’re all on average, in real terms, wealthier than we were 100 years ago. That explains how many congregations in urban and rural areas continue to keep their doors open when 100 years ago they might have closed.

Q: How has the understanding of “church” and “discipleship” evolved because of financial or fundraising pressures?

A: The church in the United States has needed to raise enough for its operations and cast that in a moral light _ you’re giving to God, and we the church are giving to those less fortunate and to extend the word of God in mission and in service. Discipleship and money go hand-in-hand in the American situation.

Q: Were you at all disillusioned when you dug into the dollars behind the ministries?

A: I was most disillusioned, I must say, when I read all the self-serving sermons that clergy have used to try to talk people out of their money. There have been two centuries of bad preaching with only a few glimmers of hope, when it comes to the preached record.

What I discern out of all of that bad preaching is an anxiety that “maybe the people won’t love Jesus, the Gospel or this ministry as much as I do as a member of the clergy.”

Clergy should lay out how much they love it, respect it and think it deserves support _ not tie it up in some magic formula of a prosperity Gospel or compulsory tithing or even proportionate and progressive giving. Get people to give because they love what they can do through giving.

Q: As a Christian, do you think financial pressures ultimately make churches more or less faithful to the Gospel?

A: Wow. I think, as a Christian, financial pressures are a challenge that can drive us either to become more or less faithful. Less faithful if we become absorbed in what we don’t have, and more faithful if we become aware that we have choices to do different things with what we have.

Q: What should supporters of churches learn from reading this history?

A: I hope my book will allow people involved in religion _ and those outside it _ to take a look at institutions they’ve taken for granted, and practices they’ve taken for granted, and say: “How can we do this differently, more effectively and more faithfully, given our past and some of the mistakes we don’t want to repeat?”

KRE/LF END MacDONALD

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