Does 501c3 Status Make Churches Obey Government Over God?

QUESTION: Just wondering if Allen Creek is a 501c3 church w/the IRS. I've been doing interesting research and I am curious your thought on that. Specifically it seems to be that being under contract to the gov/irs means not being obedient to God.

RESPONSE: Thanks for your question.  I've been asked this quite often, from folks concerned that any church that registers with the gov't gives the gov't control over the church's operations and message.

The elders of AC3 have decided that for now, we will continue to be a 501c3 organization because concerns about the gov't’s control are relatively minor, and that those controls which we submit to by coming into such a contract, we agree with in principle.  

So, for example, our status with the gov't disallows the church from officially endorsing any candidate or party for political office.  We actually have no problem with this restriction, since we have no interest in tying the message of Jesus to a political party or candidate.  The Kingdom of God should be ideologically unchained and independent from the Kingdom of the World and nothing ruins that independence faster than the church becoming an implicit promotional wing of a given political party.

We are not however currently required to refrain from speaking out on moral or social issues that relate to public policy or laws or political positions (like abortion for example).  Also, officers of the church can personally endorse parties or platforms as long as they maintain this as their personal position and not the official position of the church.  We rarely get that deep into partisanship at AC3, so these restrictions are not a burden to us.

In the meantime, the contract instills a benefit to donors to our ministry, by allowing them to deduct their donations from taxable income, reducing their tax burden if they choose.  For most donors this benefit is negligible, so the concern that registering engenders greed is overblown.

The reason for this arrangement has deep roots in American history, but mostly is an attempt in the tax code to incentivise charity, which can and does reduce the burden on gov't services.  Also, this status means the church pays no taxes on property which provides another benefit.  So the gov't, realizing that a thriving faith community reduces strains on criminal justice, public services etc., makes giving to established charities tax-deductible and makes the churches exempt from taxation.  The registration with the gov't is required to ensure that qualifying non-profits conduct activities that are truly charitable in nature.  Again, we do not consider this an unreasonable or restrictive burden.

The question may arise, do we see a time when the gov't may impose much greater restrictions on our activities and message through our affiliation with it?  The answer to that is yes.  Gov'ts around the world that ask churches to register with them, do often restrict the freedoms of those churches.  This is true in China and across the Muslim world and to a lesser degree in Europe where churches are sometimes funded by the gov't (Norway).  So it may certainly be the case that in the future, the American gov't may "crack down" by revoking the non-profit status of churches that refuse to promote publicly taught views on gender and sexuality, for example.  To this date, "exemption clauses" make Churches immune to discrimination laws on these particular issues because of our history of religious freedom.  So historic Christian teaching on sexual morality is not yet directed by state morality.

These exemption clauses do not feel stable to me at all.   They are, if one were to be honest, "bigotry clauses".  This is because, in the public view, Christian teaching on sex is not "just another way" in our pluralistic society which we tolerate, but rather is explicitly an immoral way.  Therefore, ask yourself how long any society gives safe haven to groups and views that the majority considers to be offenders of common decency.  Not long.  

So it may be that we can see a future where the gov't provides increasing pressure on churches to conform to public views on controversial issues (this year, the gov't of Canada refused any public funds to hiring organizations - including churches - who did not subscribe to its view on unlimited abortion access).

But our fears about such a day when our 501c3 is used to club us into submission are yet future.  And I lose no sleep over it.  It doesn't concern me because on the day that our teaching of historic Christian doctrine means the removal of non-profit status, that is the day we will gladly surrender the benefits of being a non-profit!  

Our message is the same one Christians have always had:  Jesus is Lord.  If that message means donations to churches no longer have personal/corporate benefits, because the gov't no longer considers Christian charity to be beneficial to society, well, so be it.  We will simply deregister with the gov't.  And if that earns us other penalties, we'll accept those as well.  Compared to the cost our brothers and sisters around the world and through history have paid to say, "Jesus - not Caesar - is Lord," ours would be a mere trifle.

But, I can think of no good reason to not enjoy benefits which enhance our mission until such a time that our freedom to conduct that mission is infringed upon.  And I can report, despite any suspicion that there's a secret, undetectable hand behind the 501c3 status that we should be afraid of, that no sermon, no word of doctrine, no part of our operation as Jesus people has ever been impinged by our gov't.  So far.

We move forward then, innocent as doves, shrewd as snakes.

What are the biggest problems facing American Christians and the Church?

QUESTION: What would you consider to be the biggest issue facing the modern American Christian? And what problems are the biggest the Christian Church faces?

RESPONSE: This is a great set of questions.  I think that the two big issues I see relate to an area of orthopraxis (correct conduct) for believers in America, and an area of orthodoxy (correct belief) for the church overall.

AFFLUENCE

I think the biggest issue with America Christians is our conduct regarding our stuff.  In a word, Affluence.

My parents served for several years volunteering at a Christian training school for foreign nationals in Hawaii (I know, tough assignment!).  They developed many great friendships with people from Asia and Africa.  My parents related to me their surprising reaction to American prosperity and material comfort.  Almost to a person, their reactions were totally devoid of jealousy or cynicism or spiritual angst over God’s unfair distribution of goods.  Instead, to my parents’ shock, their response was almost universally one of pity!

You see, from outside American affluence these foreign Christians were “unplugged from the Matrix” and like those who took the red pill in the Matrix movie, they could see something clearly:  While those in the Matrix lived lives of relative comfort, they were also living a lie, numbed up, oblivious to the real world, and being used to advance a malevolent purpose about which they were clueless.  What a great metaphor for the siren call of stuff!

Jesus’ metaphor is even better.  He said, there would be those who would receive the gospel, like good seed, but that seeds’ productivity would be choked out by weeds. Jesus labeled them worry and “the deceit of riches” (Matt 13:22).  It’s hard to argue that wealth (and relative to the world almost ALL American Christians fit in this category) is seducing us.  The result is millions of Christians numb to what our gospel tells us is the real world:  Our next life which is our real life.  The result is millions oblivious to our mandate from Christ which is not to be rich, but to be “rich toward God”.  (Luke 12:21)

I don’t argue that a Christian can’t be rich AND rich toward God.  But my judgment is that American Christians currently pursue wealth as heartily as the world, without any reflection of how New Testament values ought to inform that pursuit.  If we do reflect at all, it often is to align with some version of the health and wealth Gospel, which turns Christianity into a God-powered program of pain reduction and pleasure expansion.  And you don’t need connection to a charismatic tradition to put a spiritual gloss on love of money either.  It’s just an inherent risk of living in the richest nation on earth.

But I’m afraid this is idolatry, plain and simple (Col 3:5).  And it doesn’t apply to the 1% (alone) but to the rank and file middle class people making up the majority of American Christendom.

How do we tear down this idol?   Well, prescriptions to impose universal vows of poverty aren’t helpful.  Neither is lifelong guilt about something we can’t control, being born in an affluent country.  Three key Christian truths have to be recovered:  

• One, God owns “my” stuff, so I need to manage it his way.  
• Two, the perspective of heaven says all wealth (and all suffering) is temporal and so a Christian doesn’t get obsessed with either.  
• Three, generosity mimics God and no one becomes like Christ without it.

When Christians get this, rather than monochromatic answers, I’ve observed diverse, and inspiring responses:

• In the case of some gifted entrepreneurs, unapologetically making as much as they can, after they set a standard of living, in order to give expanding excess income to the purposes of God in the world.
• Running businesses with Gospel principles which might lessen profits in order to create thriving work cultures that act as missions to employees.
• Willingness to downsize a standard of living, in order to leverage the extra time and money to church and family and the poor. 
• Openness to get out of the rat race partly or totally and be willing to accept callings to ministry where provision is much more a matter of faith.
• Leveraging affluence (money, cars and homes) for Kingdom stuff, such as fostering, adopting, housing unwed mothers, or welcoming immigrants and the homeless. 
• Declaring war on debt.  
• this one should be prescribed! No Christian, living by biblical principles would carry the kind of consumer debt average Americans do ($16,000/household).

Just imagine what the church could do if she repented fully of her enslavement to stuff and the debt that comes with it, and instead lived sacrificially, on purpose, for the Gospel?  That’s the sleeping giant no agent of hell wants disturbed, for, if roused, would surely shake the world.  But hell rests in peace, as long as individual Christians are content taking the blue pill.

PLURALISM

With the Church overall, I think the greatest challenge is from Pluralism and its assault on Christian orthodoxy – specifically the uniqueness of Jesus' message of Grace.

Social pluralism is, of course, a good thing. It says diverse religions should function tolerantly within the same society.  Ideological pluralism however, says that all religious claims are equally true.  Therefore, claims to unique knowledge are considered arrogant and inherently wrong.

This would simply be a problem for how to present an exclusive Christ in an inclusive age, IF the Church weren’t increasingly accepting ideological pluralism as its new creed.  That’s a much bigger problem.

The “Emergent/ Emerging” controversy in the Church today is very much like the "Modernist/Fundamentalist" controversy  of a hundred years ago.  Back then, Mainline denominations tried to accommodate the Faith to Materialism, and it lead to them giving up on core, historical, orthodox Christian assumptions – like creation ex nihilo, the authority of the Bible, the Deity of Jesus, the Atonement etc.  The Fundamentalists responded by delineating and holding fast to the unchanging core essentials of Christian belief.

Today, the Emergent movement, like the Mainliners before them, seeks to accommodate the Faith to postmodernism.  But this is leading it to adopt postmodern ideological pluralism.  Statements of faith in Emergent churches are considered passé, divisive and truth is never spelled with a capital “T”.  Like the Fundamentalists before them, the Emerging churches (totally confusing terms, I know) seek to win Postmoderns to Faith in Christ by rejecting the excesses of modernism, without abandoning, or diminishing the importance of objective Truth and Christian distinctives.

I sympathize with many of the impulses of the Emergent Movement.  They were alienated by the mega-church phenomenon where church relationships were superficial or legalistic.  They reacted against the emphasis on bigness, money, buildings, high-powered worship services and theological bickering.  So they came together around circles of authentic relationships, candles and sofas.  As postmoderns, they gladly reclaimed an emphasis on mystery in Christian thinking and de-emphasized harsh lines of who was “in” and who was “out” of the Christian faith.

And that, IMO, is where they started to go sideways and where the church is at risk.

If this was simply a move toward greater Christian unity, de-emphasizing the secondary doctrinal issues that often arrogantly keep Christians apart, recovering simplicity, I would be a fan.  The Christian faith has lots of room for humility regarding our doctrinal stances, and plenty of areas where we “see in a glass darkly”.  Christians can channel this postmodern urge to rally around what Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.  We can go that far – but only that far.  For Christianity contains, inescapable truth claims that define the Faith.  Without them Christianity is quite literally “worthless” to use Paul’s phrase.

In other words, a full accommodation to the postmodern mind which rejects objective truth, authority, “meta-narratives”, creeds and doctrine, is impossible – not without de-Christianizing Christianity.  And yet, that is exactly what is being tried.  Even in less hip, less trendy, more conservative evangelical traditions, I know of church leaders starting to accept the fundamental tenant of pluralism: that the Christian faith does not offer the world unique access to God through Jesus Christ.

The “only way” of Christ is, admittedly, a divisive idea.  

But can one reasonably believe that Christianity is Christianity without it?  What impelled the first apostles to move across the Mediterranean with the gospel?  Was it an Emergent “doctrine doesn’t really matter” impulse?  No, it was the belief that “there is no other name under heaven, given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).  Consider the role doctrine played in early Christian controversies.  Clearly the apostles had no problem calling some ideas “in” and some “out”, and the assumption that other religions/gods/teachings are false is behind everything you read, from Genesis to Revelation.

Perhaps the Emergent movement will become like the Mainline Denominations which have largely made themselves irrelevant by removing the stakes of involvement.  If you tell people your message is not really needed for salvation and that truth is found everywhere, why go to your church?  Not surprisingly mainline churches have been declining for decades.  It remains to be seen if the Emergent churches will also flag due to their relativizing of truth.  Most still retain the outreach energy of the evangelical traditions from which they sprang.

Also what may energize this movement away from biblical orthodoxy is a growing Alliance between “old mainline” and “new emergent” under the LGBTQ banner.  Again there’s a parallel – when the old mainliners removed the historic gospel, what remained was a social gospel.  Today, Emergents have rallied to the LGBTQ cause of normalizing homosexuality, which is simply another social cause that replaces the primary, spiritual mission of New Testament Christianity.

But that is simply further evidence of the place doctrine, history, the creeds and Scripture holds in the life of these new Christian communities.  This concerns me.  Without a strong commitment to all those things, the Church exchanges its unique Gospel birthright of grace, for a mess of postmodern, moralistic, relativistic  pottage.

How can pastors/ministries justify charging money for messages?

Question:

How do today's pastors justify charging money for their messages? Even Christian counseling radio programs are like infomercials to sell the books they have written. It is so discouraging to see the merchandising of Jesus and even Christian concerts require money to purchase a ticket. If Jesus didn't ever sell anything, how do today's ministries justify doing so? When I have asked these questions, not one of them will respond. I don't understand how pastors can even justify charging for their mp3 downloads, are they in complete denial, or serving the god of money?

Answer:

  Well, let me say first that I share your frustration over the fact that Ministers of the Gospel and certain ministries seem to put the money question out in front of everything else. And it's deeply troubling to me that they then give the impression that they are 'selling their messages'. That impression is a real problem, regardless of the reality behind it, because it means that people like you may be lead to believe that God only wants your pocketbook, or that the message of salvation can be bought.

Now underneath that impression, I think the reality is probably a lot more complicated than you realize. For example, when a radio ministry promos a book, in most cases I know of, they will send that book to you for free if you don't have the money to pay. Most of their listeners can pay and they offer the book for a "suggested donation". This is not to justify the saturation of a program with items to buy, but it should mitigate your feeling that all such ministries wouldn't distribute their message except for a exorbitant profit. The fact is, books cost money and unless a single donor covers the cost for many others, the writers of such books have to charge money to cover those costs through a retail price, or stop printing books. Which is better?

But what about pastors who simply preach the Gospel and then make the audio available online? What about Christian artists who paint inspiring paintings or write inspiring songs? The list of ways that we package our Message is pretty diverse and in each of these it's probably not hard to imagine the substantial costs that are involved in making that message available. The only way for such messages to get out through such diverse media is through money. Even a man standing on the street corner preaching a message requires money, in this sense: he must forgo other work he could be doing with that life energy that's going into preaching, and that life energy represents potential money. If he preaches on the street corner, someone is still PAYING for that to happen. It's himself, or his hearers. It's not free, even it it's offered for free.

So, is it completely unbiblical and un-Christ like to create opportunities for those who receive such messages, the readers, the listeners, the concert goers, the downloaders, and watchers, to be willing and to be expected to pay for what they have received? This might surprise you to learn, but the oft repeated answer from Scripture, from Jesus himself is, no it is NOT unbiblical. Check this out:

1 Cor 9:10-11: Paul says: Did not God speak about this because of us. For sure, this was written for us. The man who gets the fields ready and the man who gathers in the grain should expect some of the grain. We have planted God’s Word among you. Is it too much to expect you to give us what we need to live each day?

Paul felt it was the right for a minister who preaches the gospel that he/she should be able to make a living from gospel recipients. He uses the illustration from the old testament about oxen not being muzzled as they tread grain. When the ox is working, you do not keep him from eating some of the grain that the ox itself is threshing out. Let him eat a portion of what he's creating. The point is, a preacher is producing fruit in lives turned to God. Those lives now turn all their life resources over to the direction of God. Paul says, the preacher/ teacher/ servant should share in part of those resources he is helping to generate.

The call is really to the recipient more than the preacher. Rather than the preacher demanding it, God's Word tells those who are helped by Christian ministers to be generous with them. If the Church operated the way the Bible tells us to, then you would never hear any appeals for money because God's people would just obey the principle of the Bible and generously support those who support them in their faith. You’d hear on the radio about a certain book offered for free, but no Christian would think about getting it unless they sent in the retail price and maybe a little more. (This is a gentle challenge: before you criticize those who charge for messages, ask: Do I spontaneously and generously offer up compensation for messages I benefit from?)

Paul underlined this again in 1 Tim 5:17, 18

Leaders who do their work well should be given twice as much pay, and for sure, those who work hard preaching and teaching. The Holy Writings say, “When a cow is walking on the grain to break it open, do not stop it from eating some” , and “A person who works should be paid.”

And since you mentioned that Jesus never sold anything I should bring up the fact that this principle – that a Christian worker should be paid by those who benefit from their labor – is from Jesus himself. He said in Luke 10:7

Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages.

It's true he didn't tell his followers to write books and sell them. Or to perform songs and charge admission... but the idea that Christian workers should be paid by those who benefit from their labor, is biblical and derived from Christ himself.

Now, a door charge, or a set "fee" turns the issue around so that the Christian leader is demanding the payment, instead of the recipient spontaneously offering the payment. But perhaps in our culture, the fee or the "suggested donation" is often easier and more appreciated.

To illustrate: in my own case, I receive a set salary, which could be termed a "fee" for my gospel labor. However, this way of doing it has this benefit: the minister always gets a set, agreed upon (and in our case a publicly known) amount of compensation. Some Christian ministries run into problems because the giving to those preacher is direct and very generous and very spontaneous. Without a set amount to live on, those preachers often are the ones who become scandal laced headlines as they have no built in governor on their income. It ebbs and flows with the gifts that come directly to them. Without a set 'fee' they take ALL that's given and the generous giving of God’s people corrupts them. This violates another Biblical principle, that a plurality of leaders ought to oversee the churches donations and there should be transparency. (2 Cor 8:20)

As a Christian pastor, I have no problem receiving a salary for my full time Gospel work because of these biblical principles. But when I go to other places beside my home church, I don't expect any payment. But true to this biblical model, in most cases, those people readily offer me some gift for my service rendered.

Christian ministers should be paid, and some might even argue, paid well. It's what they then do with that money that legitimately comes to them, that's the issue. In fact, how they use it SHOULD be a further blessing to the people who support them. I say to my people, “watch how I live, watch how I give, and follow my example of living simply, setting a standard of living and not letting it chase my income, and giving generously to God's Work”. It's a tricky little balance: my salary is public knowledge, but I keep my giving numbers private to honor Matthew 6:3, yet I tell them what I do (I tithe, at times I give above and beyond the tithe) to lead them in giving. Meanwhile, there are people who DO know what I give, and I’d be a fool to preach giving if those people knew I never gave. Also, our church books are open, and all that that builds trust.


If the ministries you mention have open books, (and they should) you can see who is making what and where the money goes. In most cases, I bet, you would be pleased with the distribution of fees, ticket charges, suggested donations, and other income. If they don't have open books, stop giving to them.