Healing and Offerings

One area that has brought a lot of reproach to healing ministry is the handling of offerings.  So some thoughts are in order.

In particular, some American preachers have gotten a bad name by insisting on top-tier accommodations when visiting other countries.  Perhaps their American friends have no issue with this, but it’s another matter when you hear what the people in the country being visited have to say.  While the alternative may reduce your comfort level, staying in more modest accommodations or with the people can get you a lot more acceptance with them.  They won’t that think you come off as being “too good” for them.  It also avoids criticism of where offering money is going.  Please understand that I don’t think preachers should have to stay in the sleaziest hotel in town, either.  We just have to be careful about the impression we leave.  As in Paul’s case, there is a time to be “all things to all men” and live like the locals in order to reach the locals.

I’ve slept under mosquito nets in a place with no running water or working toilets.  I’ve been in a room so small that the bed took up the ENTIRE room and there wasn’t even enough space to walk around the bed.  That made dealing with my luggage very interesting.  I’ve had plenty of food I wouldn’t care to eat again, too.  (“Just don’t ask” was a good policy in a place where I knew that monkey brains were considered a delicacy, along with chocolate-covered ants.)  I slept many nights in a roach-infested room.  I’ve slept in a room with the host family’s kids.  I could go on, but seeing the miracles that happened made it worth every last inconvenience.  The people were very accepting because I didn’t come across as “too good” for them.  I wasn’t getting the worst place in town to sleep, either, just accommodations that were typical for the area.  The only time I’ve actually refused the offered accommodation is when it turned out that it would be just myself and a woman in an apartment, and in that case, I literally slept on the floor somewhere else for a week to avoid reproach.  I think those of us from more prosperous countries fail to realize the negative impression we make if we inquire where the nearest luxury hotel is.  A fancy hotel would be far more convenient, but it is possible to live without room service, a pool and a gym.

If people want to honor you by putting you up somewhere nice, by all means enjoy the place.  But if you are running a crusade and you are responsible for the budget, you want to be careful.

I went one place where the people were soured on preachers from my country because the preacher who was there before me insisted on staying at the swankiest hotel in the country in a penthouse suite.  The second-to-last night of the crusade, he took AN HOUR AND A HALF in the service to raise money for his huge budget.  Suffice it to say that it didn’t go over well with the locals.

I’ve been to too many meetings where the budget was exorbitant.  By the way, burying church needs in the special meeting budget isn’t fair or even honest.  High budgets make regular people wonder what’s wrong with the people who put on the meetings.  So don’t follow the bad example of the church that needed a new piece of audio/visual equipment, so they put that in the crusade “budget.”

I know this will come across as near heresy to some people, but we’ve put on MANY meetings where we didn’t take any offerings at all.  I was happy because we didn’t have to interrupt the flow of the Holy Spirit to pass offering containers and then have to mess with the proper handling of money.  Who would ever put on a healing meeting under such circumstances?  Well, Jesus, for one!  He had partners behind the scenes who helped him, and my no-offering meetings have also been supported behind the scenes.

I also urge you that if you’re going to do mailings, at least spare us all the silly-sounding marketing gimmicks.  There’s a whole “science” behind what color envelopes get the highest response, what wording on the outside gets the most money, what time of the week or month is the best time for people to get your letter, what wording will impel people to give the most, and so on.  I don’t care to get involved in all that, and I’ll certainly never stoop to sending out ghost-written appeal letters as some have done.  Sending exactly the same “urgent” appeal with the same picture and only trivial word changes for a few years doesn’t help either.  I stopped giving to a ministry that was doing a lot of good because they did that, and in so doing, they lost all credibility with me.  I had a collection for a while of their identical “urgent” appeal letters sent over a period of several years with the same picture of the same woman with an identical caption.  I’ll admit that I used the complimentary personalized address stickers, though the extra expense of providing those was not what I wanted to support when I sent checks to that ministry.

You can also spare people the computer-generated suggested giving amounts that are designed to automatically increase little by little compared to previous gifts.

I’ve stopped supporting a total of three ministries (at this writing) that were doing a lot of good just because their appeal letters were so phony and gimmicky.  You can lose good supporters if you use worldly techniques to raise money.

Churches should never take up an offering “for Brother So-and-So” if Brother So-and-So doesn’t actually get the whole offering, or even the majority of it.  How can the Holy Spirit trust a church to house a move of God when underhanded shenanigans go on behind the scenes?

It grieves the Holy Spirit when churches get chintzy with their guest ministers.  I lived for years in a place where love offerings were often more “love” than “offerings” and some churches literally didn’t give their guests enough money to drive to the next church, let alone do things like eat and pay their cell phone bills.  When traveling ministries start avoiding places like that, the people should not blame big, bad principalities in the heavenlies for keeping good ministry gifts away!  People sometimes misuse the verse “freely you have received, freely give” to justify the idea that the visiting minister got his gifting for free, so he should minister for free.  That is contrary to Scripture, which says that the workman is worthy of his hire (Luke 10:7) and that we should not muzzle the ox as it treads out the grain (1 Corinthians 9:9, 1 Timothy 5:18) and that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:14).

I have noticed what when churches are generous with their guests, the power of God moves better.  We have been very generous with outside speakers and we had some wonderful moves of God when people with giftings that differed from ours came in and blessed the people.

I never see Jesus in Scripture doing “change” offerings (“throw in your change!”) or “calculator” offerings (“If ten businessmen would give 10 denarii each and fifty of you would give 2 denarii each and a hundred of you would give 1 denarius each, we can could meet this budget tonight!”) – or ANY kind of offerings whatsoever.  He was as un-gimmicky as it gets.

And He wasn’t the only one who operated like that, because in 3 John, John talks favorably about people who “took nothing from the Gentiles” (3 John 7).  In other words, they didn’t receive offerings from the people to whom they ministered either.

Whatever you do, don’t use the anointing to raise money by taking an offering right after a big miracle, figuring that at that moment people will in the mood to give a large offering.  That’s been done, but God won’t honor that, and you’ll only hurt yourself in the long run by being money-minded.

NEVER link giving to miracles.  Jesus bought everyone’s miracles already.  It is a shady, unbiblical practice to insinuate that an offering “seed” to your particular ministry will result in a healing miracle.

Also, no one in Scripture “guaranteed” a certain multiplication factor if people gave in a specific offering, so anyone who does this is operating outside of the Bible’s teaching and practice.

Don’t promise that people’s debts will be supernaturally wiped clean if people give to your ministry tonight -- I’ve seen that gimmick in person, too, and I don’t know ANY case where ANYONE’s debt disappeared after that great-sounding appeal.

People will just resent you if you pull the “gotcha offering” I witnessed at a big campmeeting.  The preacher said something like this: “How many of you are NOT going to give in this offering?  Raise your hand!  (Pause.)  Okay, you know what God thinks of liars.  If you didn’t raise your hand, you’ve committed yourself to giving in this offering!”

Ditto for the “guilt offering” that goes like this: “We’ll see who really loves Jesus by seeing who gives in this offering.  This is your chance to prove whether or not you are kingdom-minded!”  (Implication: Fork it over or it proves you don’t love Jesus!)

Then there’s the hostage offering: “We’re not going to move on with this service until the budget is met.”

When you try to “psych” people out of their money, it only proves that you really don’t trust God as your provider – you trust your own cleverness.

If people think you’re in it for the money, you’ll lose their respect and it will be harder for them to receive from you.  And you shouldn’t be in it for the money, anyway.  There are far more lucrative professions that involve far less personal inconvenience if your goal is just to make a lot of money.