An Unfunded Mandate

President George W. Bush had a program called “No Child Left

Behind.” It was a good idea. But the critics all agreed that it was an

unfunded mandate. Most agree with the idea: Let’s set national standards so

that America’s children can compete in this globalized economy. Problem

was that there was no money behind the mandate.

Church Growth is the Unfunded Mandate

Evangelism has been the watchword of Black Adventists for as long

as we have been organized. For three decades we have had the largest

annual gathering of Adventists at Oakwood in the annual evangelism council

that was founded by the late great evangelist E.E. Cleveland. We still talk

about the primacy of evangelism. Yet our churches are not growing by

leaps and bounds.

Some blame the pastors believing that if we just ran more meetings

like W.W., E.E., and C.D. things would be different. Some pastors blame

the members suggesting that people just aren’t committed like they used to

be.

A Systems Problem

I believe that systems produce what they are designed to produce.

All across Black Seventh-day Adventism, with rare exception, we are

experiencing a decline in evangelistic success. Our churches are not

growing in any significant way. I do not believe it is because all of our

members are now shiftless and lazy. Nor do I believe it’s because today’s

Adventist preacher no longer wants to reach the unchurched. I believe that

we have a systems problem. We talk about church growth, but there’s no

money behind the mandate.

Staff to Organize Volunteers

A few years ago I sought to engage a conference administrator in a

meaningful dialogue about one of the things that I believe is a core problem

for the church with societal changes. I maintained then (and still believe

now) that we need staff to organize volunteers.

Times have radically changed since our work was organized. There

are not as many one-income families as there were in the Heyday of the

12- and 8-week evangelistic tent meeting. In most cases two folk have to go

to work now. People no longer work where they live, often driving 30

minutes to an hour to and from work. (Second generation Adventists got

nice jobs and left the neighborhoods where their home churches are to

move out to the suburbs.) When many of our members finally return home

from work, they are tired and have less energy to turn around and come to
the church for a meeting or to volunteer. Hence, we only see many

members during the church’s weekly worship service.

Proposal One: A Formula

In order to have staff to organize volunteers, we need to place more

employees in local churches. I believe there are at least two ways to do

this. I proposed that the conference (administration, pastors and

constituents) come to agreement on a formula that would allow a church

to add staff based on some combination of tithe and membership increase.

Understanding that the strong must help the weak, I suggested that the

starting point be the cost of the employee/worker/minister plus an amount

that the conference could then set aside to help smaller churches who have

growth potential but lack the financial strength to hire the needed staff.

I argued that this would create an incentive both for the pastor and

the congregation. They would know that when they hit certain benchmarks,

they would be eligible to apply for another staff person. That’s what I

proposed. I would not be writing this note if what I proposed was received

with gladness. My proposal was neither accepted nor adopted.

Friends, we have a systems problem! There is a cap on our growth

because we lack staff at the place where real growth occurs. I am convinced

that people are willing to engage in meaningful ministry, but the work for
the volunteer has to be organized in a way that they can come in, engage in

a relatively short amount of time in an activity that is not too complex and

feel good about it. In most cases, the work of planning and organizing

should be done by a paid staff person.

Times Have Changed: Let’s Move with the Cheese

I believe feelings of guilt and frustration come when we ask

volunteers to do the complex work that a paid staff person should do and

(though well meaning) they can’t get it done because of all the real other

responsibilities they have. I am speaking of responsibilities of work and

family compounded by driving distance from the church and increasingly

bad traffic. All of this works against the volunteer’s active and consistent

participation in church life in a way that it didn’t when Mom stayed home

and live around the corner from the church. We’re blaming the pastors and

the people when the real problem is with the system itself. We have

misidentified our problem. The problem is not primarily with the pastor or

the people; it’s with the system.

A system is designed to get the results its getting. So if one wants

different results, he should change his system. Albert Einstein said, “Insanity

is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”  
 Let’s be real: a pastor is only one person. That means that he or she

is limited in what he or she can do in a workweek. It is unreasonable to

expect a pastor of 750 members to perform at the same level of

effectiveness as a pastor who serves 75 members between two churches.

There are only so many sheep that a shepherd can handle without some

hired hands.

Staff ‘Em or Shut ‘Em Down

It is my honest contention that we should either staff large churches

or sell church buildings that seat over 300 people and adopt a philosophy

that we only believe in small to midsized congregations. One only needs

look at the “flagship churches” in the Black Adventist work from major city

to major city and it will be evident that we have a systems problem. These

churches are not full! (You must concede that it is a systems problem. The

problem is in the Midwest, the southwest, the Northeast, the MidAtlantic,

the South, etc. The only way you can believe anything different is if you are

one who thinks that are no good preachers left in the work! All the

preachers in these major pulpits can’t be unsanctified wolves!)

We’re going to have to make a decision! Either we staff these large

churches so they can grow or we get rid of them and just found a bunch of
small churches that one pastor can handle. (I do NOT espouse the second

option!) Our churches plateau because we understaff them.

There seems to be an unwritten rule or value that a church can have

no more than two or three paid staff persons. One pastor’s church was

growing rapidly. Its membership increased and tithe doubled. The

conference agreed to support this church adding an additional staff person.

The result was that the congregation continued to increase in both tithe

and membership. The senior pastor then asked for another staff person.

Surprisingly, administration balked at the pastor’s second request. (I guess

administration thought he was getting greedy despite the fact that the

church was now sending $1 million in tithe up to the conference instead of

the $500,000.) Administration felt that the pastor had already gotten a staff

person and that they shouldn’t ask for another.

That falls into the category of insane thinking. Alas! That’s our

system. So what happens to a church that has the potential to grow? Its

growth is unnecessarily stunted and stymied because of the low value our

system places on the local church. (It should also be noted in contrast that

conference often add staff at that level of the church and have the

autonomy to create positions as it feels it has need. The conference adds

staff at the conference level without consulting local churches. This is ironic
because every dollar they utilize to employ staff at that level is produced in

the local church.)

Some Qualifications, Caveats

Let me also disabuse anyone from thinking that I believe that adding

staff is some kind of a silver bullet. There ought to be a rationale for adding

staff. Bill Hybels argues rather persuasively in his book Axiom that the right

kind of staff one adds is as important as adding staff. Hybels is transparent

as he recounts that he once added too much administrative staff at a point

when he should have been adding ministers to children and youth.

Several things ought to be considered when adding staff. With the

migration patterns of the African-American, I believe that the Black

Adventist work ought to focus the majority of its efforts on the cities

where the majority of African-Americans reside. If we are to reach the

more than 37 million African-Americans, we should go where they are. (At

the writing of this note not one SDA church in Philadelphia, the sixth

largest city in the nation and a city that is roughly 40% African-American,

has more than one conference employee per church. If our stated mission

is to reach the African-American, we should be investing our resources

(human and financial) in cities where large numbers of African-Americans

reside.
 I also believe that we should think intentionally and carefully about

what kinds of pastors we place at these churches. She or he should be one

that has a passion and vision for reaching the African-American.

Since I had that conversation years ago with the conference

administrator, my position has slightly evolved. I have now come to believe

that we should not wait until a church can completely pay the salary of the

needed staff person. Waiting shows both a lack of vision and, possibly, a

lack of faith. While I do believe that the pastor and church ought to be

striving to increase their tithe, I also believe that conferences should invest

where they see real potential. So, if a church increases its tithe by $50,000

and has unchurched people coming to its services, but the pastor lacks the

staff to move them through the process from interested observer to

committed believer, the conference should give the staff so that those

people can be brought across the line and discipled. (The money’s going to

come back to the conference anyway in a life-long tither!)

That’s one possible approach.

Proposal Two: Total Revenue Sharing

Another simpler approach is for the conference to simply take half of

every tithe dollar instead of all of every tithe dollar. I believe that at least

50% of every tithe dollar ought to remain in the local church for salaries.
Those who would be paid out of the tithe dollar would be ministers such as

executive pastors, youth pastors, assistant pastors for discipleship, Bible

workers, ministers of music, administrative assistants, and custodians.

If we would reach the African-American, we cannot ignore the

worship style as outlined by W.E.B. Dubois in his groundbreaking treatise

The Souls of Black Folk. He said that Black worship is characterized by “the

music, the preaching, and the frenzy” or what I have dubbed “the music, the

message and the unmistakeable move of the Holy Ghost.” Years ago,

Evangelist Randolph P. Stafford said that the African-American is looking for

a certain sound when he comes to church.

As a denomination that focuses a lot on worship as found in

Revelation 14, I believe that the music in our worship services should be

second to none. It should be excellent. It should be thematic, that is to say,

its message should be consistent with the preached word. Again, this takes

time. Therefore, I believe that large churches in major cities should have

full-time ministers of music paid from the tithe that review the theology of

the music as well as train and coordinate those who sing in the choirs and

on the praise teams of our churches. You gotta fund that! A church should

not have to pay its staff out of its offerings. One cannot read the Old
Testament upon which the concept of tithing is based and suggest that

Asaph and others who served in the Temple were not paid out of the tithe.

I realize that tradition is a powerful thing. Martin Luther faced that

when he nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg. Tradition is a

powerful thing! Tradition can cause good people to ignore the clear

teachings of the Scriptures so they can remain comfortable doing things the

way they’ve always been done. Tradition is powerful! But as a denomination

that prides itself on being biblical, we really ought to revisit our modern-day

application of tithe use in our structure. And I believe that Black Adventist

leaders ought to lead the way in streamlining the top-heavy structure and

return the tithe back to the local church for the mission of disseminating

the everlasting gospel.

It is emphatically clear from my reading that tithe was used primarily

to pay the priests and Levites. That’s where our discussion should begin.

What does the Bible teach? We ought not start with where we are, which

is not resulting in large numbers of conversions. When we start with where

we are we find ourselves trying to preserve an ineffective system. The Bible

teaches that tithe should be used primarily to pay those who are

professional ministers.
 If we are honest, (I’m looking for some Nathanael’s – some honest

folk who will receive the truth when confronted by it, i.e. John 1:47-49) we

have a multilayered structure that is consuming the tithe with all of our

overhead. We need to again talk about tithe’s purpose and try to get as

close as we can to how God intended it to be used.

The church only grows at the local level. The unchurched come to

faith and are baptized into local churches. They are led into a deeper

relationship with Christ in local churches. Our members are married in

local churches. They are buried by pastors and their families are ministered

to in local churches. The work of the church happens in local churches.

Therefore, the lionshare of our resources as conferences ought to be

directed back toward the local church.

We should take a page out of many of the nation’s non-profits and

aim at no more than 15% of the tithe being used for administrative

overhead. The rest should be directed back to the churches for the

purpose of sharing the everlasting gospel and hastening the return of our

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Acts of the Apostles, page 9 has the following quote: “The Church is

God’s appointed agency for the salvation of men. It was organized for

service, and its mission is to carry the gospel to the world.” It was not
organized for organization’s sake. Let’s get more resources onto the

battlefield (the local church) where the war is truly fought and won. Let’s

fund our God given mandate!