Get­ting Peo­ple to Sacrifice.

by Mis­sion­ary David R. Cox

Let us divide this sec­tion in var­i­ous subsections:

(1) Sac­ri­fice of money and prop­erty.
(2) Sac­ri­fice of time and energy.

Sac­ri­fice of Money and Property

Let’s make some state­ments here that maybe some or many peo­ple will need to mull over for a long time before they under­stand them. When we plant a church, the eas­i­est part of it is to put up a build­ing. Any­body can do that. They can rent a store front or audi­to­rium, or buy prop­erty and build a small audi­to­rium. In most people’s think­ing, that is just as far as they go. They think the rest of church plant­ing is sim­ple. It is not.

A church must be planted as an on going endeavor. In other words we need to set up the church from the begin­ning as an autonomous church. We define this as (1) self-governing, (2) self-supporting, and (3) self-propagating. Sim­ply put, a church is not a mature adult until it has achieved these three prin­ci­ples. I have heard of churches planted by the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion in Mex­ico, that had nice build­ings put up (with US money), with good Mex­i­can pas­tors (salaries paid by the con­ven­tion), etc. When the con­ven­tion “turned it over to the nation­als”, the money stopped com­ing from the US, and the good pas­tor went to another church that could pay him good money, and the peo­ple of the church could not main­tain or fix the church, and even­tu­ally it was turned into a cow barn with no ser­vices being held there. The point here is that every church that will con­tinue with­out exter­nal prop­ping up has to have an inter­nal source for these three basics of life.

A church needs absolutely men who will sac­ri­fice of their money and goods and prop­erty to see that the min­istry among them con­tin­ues and grows. This has to be a basic goal of every church plant. With­out it, the church is only a depen­dent child on life sup­port that will wilt and die almost imme­di­ately once that life sup­port is taken away. It is not healthy.

Our goal as church planters here needs to be to instill a vision into our men to sup­port finan­cially the min­istry. The more big money from the US or a denom­i­na­tional board is spent on a small church plant, the less impor­tant the men of that church see their own con­tri­bu­tions to their own min­istry. Because of this, it is bet­ter to go the low road, barely scrap­ing by, but empha­siz­ing the church mem­bers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion as absolutely essen­tial. They must grow a vision for finan­cially fund­ing the work of God among them.

The way to do that is to make the min­istry finan­cially depen­dent on their sac­ri­fices. This is a road filled with dis­ap­points and defeats, restric­tions that keep us from doing so much, and basi­cally is depress­ing to see the incon­sis­tency of God’s peo­ple. But this is the only road open to us. We must fight through these issues with our fam­i­lies and espe­cially with our men so that they pay for what we do.

Sac­ri­fice of Time and Energy

The Bible presents a link between sal­va­tion, lov­ing God, and the expend­ing of our time and energy in God and His work. The trick here is to teach what is nec­es­sary from the Scrip­tures to estab­lish this link in the minds of your mem­bers. The first thing is that we need to be “right” as a church. If we are not really doing the work of the Lord, we are a cult and sim­ply have car­nal or mis­guided objec­tives at heart. The work of the Lord is to see the lost con­verted, dis­ci­pled, liv­ing vic­to­ri­ously, and serv­ing God.

Next we need to link our teach­ing, preach­ing, and urg­ing to serv­ing God.