Opinions: Perspectives from readers

Every Sunday at Breakthru Church International, our home congregation here in South Africa, we proclaim the following before giving our offering: “As we give today’s offering, we are believing the Lord for jobs or better jobs, benefits, sales and commissions, settlements, estates and inheritances, interest and income, rebates and returns, checks in the mail, gifts and surprises, finding money, bills paid off, debts demolished, royalties received. It’s offering time. Hallelujah.” …

Every Sunday at Breakthru Church International, our home congregation here in South Africa, we proclaim the following before giving our offering: “As we give today’s offering, we are believing the Lord for jobs or better jobs, benefits, sales and commissions, settlements, estates and inheritances, interest and income, rebates and returns, checks in the mail, gifts and surprises, finding money, bills paid off, debts demolished, royalties received. It’s offering time. Hallelujah.”

I have to admit that when I first encountered this giving declaration in our early days of attending Breakthru, my anti-health-and-wealth gospel radar immediately fired up. I looked around me to see if there were any people I didn’t want to notice me making such a proclamation and mumbled through it, or I didn’t say it at all.

Knee-jerk reactions are unfair, even more so for mission workers working with partners who don’t and shouldn’t have to share all their personal values, theological inclinations and traditions. But I have since decided that my immediate appraisal of this giving declaration was misguided. In fact, God’s agency in helping us prosper in every sense of the word might be part of the gospel after all—and one Westerners need to take a second look at.

One challenge to my anti-prosperity gospel radar came when I learned to differentiate between self-centered and God-centered prosperity. What do we do about the biblical indications that God made the patriarchs prosper materially (Genesis 13:2; 26:12-14; and 30:37-43)? I am still infuriated by a gospel that preaches prosperity devoid of self-sacrifice. But I have come to believe that there may well be a place for a biblical understanding of prosperity that is both God-centered and self-sacrificing.

Our pastors at Breakthru, Nina and Russell Toohey, have given new meaning to financial self-sacrifice. They sold their house a few years back and gave all the proceeds to the church. They have continued to give sacrificially and monthly to Breakthru Community Action, the nonprofit organization we helped establish to become Breakthru’s social ministry arm. During these years they have also been able to buy another house, and someone from the church gave Pastor Nina a car. Both the self-sacrifice and their prosperity fit into their biblical understanding of reaping and sowing and how that relates to God’s favor.

The tithe declaration has challenged me to recognize that I had little belief that God could—or would desire to—shape my economic reality. I too often don’t give the Lord much authority in my daily life over such mundane affairs. Could it be that my response to the tithe declaration says more about my lack of faith than about my South African colleagues’ belief in God’s desire to see them prosper materially? Are there other North American Mennonites like me who have largely reduced Jesus’ promise to give us abundant life to the spiritual sphere? Have we spiritualized salvation too much? For most Africans we have worked with, God is not interested only in saving our souls but also wants us to break out of poverty, succeed in school and help make our crops grow—all so we can provide for our families and for God’s larger family.

This connection between spirituality and economy makes sense in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, considering that traditional worldviews here are holistic, linking the material and the spiritual. But is this a contextualization of the gospel that is appropriate only for this setting?

I now believe this association of spirituality and economy is a more biblical worldview than was my own. Having lived in Africa, I no longer believe that wealth has to be inherently evil or that wealthy people are intrinsically sinful. The concept of shalom leads me to believe that God is interested in making us prosper in all areas of our lives: bodily health, peace, justice, harmonious relationships with God and our neighbor, provision for our families and freedom from want, fear and harm. This does not negate us carrying our cross daily, and it is not a blank check written on some divine bank account. But we need to question our knee-jerk reaction against any reference to prosperity and appreciate that many churches that preach a prosperity-tinged gospel also teach responsible stewardship: budgeting, giving sacrificially to the church, being involved in the community and saving money—concepts few Mennonites could argue with. With these realities in mind, I suggest it is to our own peril that we simply dismiss the prosperity gospel as non-Christian. Perhaps we will not start reciting the tithe declaration anytime soon in our churches, but maybe we should consider whether we have cut God off from a part of our life over which he wants to be Lord.

Phil Lindell Detweiler is a Mennonite Mission Network worker living in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.