Quit Praying that Prayer because it Ain’t Gonna Happen

by Steve Lyzenga

Early one brisk morning in 2004, during my daily walk and talk with Father, I was petitioning Him on an issue near and dear to my heart.  Would He please ask His Church, and even implore them if need be, to cough up more $ to fund missions — more precisely, to fund ministries and missionaries on the front lines of trying to finish the Great Commission (GC).  After all, my eschatology says that GC completion – “making disciples of all nations” and being His witnesses “to the ends of the earth” – is a prerequisite for King Jesus to return and take us home… and what faithful disciple doesn’t want that to happen sooner than later!

“Please Father” I pleaded for the 2156^th day in a row, “Please ask, implore, and even force Your Church (stopping short of socialism of course) to cough up more money to fund frontline missions.”

Although my prayer was the same as it ever was, the answer this particular morning wasn’t, and it took me by surprise…

“Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen.”

“Huh.”

He repeated, “Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen.”

My physical ears, full of early bird conversational chirping, did not hear the audible voice of God.  But sure enough, the ears of my heart were ringing with that oft familiar inner voice.

With a bit of trepidation I replied, “Excuse me, Father, but this prayer has been my heart’s most passionate petition for many years, so what do you mean ‘Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen?’”

“I mean what I mean.”

And that’s where He left it.  No “burning bush” follow-on conversation, no explanation, no nothing.  In fact, it would be a couple years before I would gain an understanding of “Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen.” In the meantime, I obeyed and “quit praying that prayer.”

At the time, I was a megachurch member and heavily involved in the missions department, traveling the world on a regular basis.  Announced weekly from the pulpit, to the cheers from the pews, our tithe to the GC was swelling to almost $500,000 annualized.  Missions’ life was good in the big church, a big budget supporting a big amount of missionaries and a big number of short-term mission trips.

Nonetheless, in the midst of the good life, I couldn’t shake an inner-nag that began mulling over the other 90%.  The “nag” said this, “If we are giving 10% to the GC – reduced from 12.5% that year due to a $15 million building project – where was the other 90% going to?  In hindsight, maybe I should have been content with the 10% ($500,000), but that other 90% ($4,500,000) really began to bug me.  After all, how much $ does it take to run a church?!

Unfortunately for me, I was also trained a missiologist (or so my diploma said).  Of course, this simply meant that I had more missions’ statistics stuck in my cranium than anyone ever cared to know (especially my wife and Senior Pastor).  For instance, on the subject of the other 90%, did you realize:

• 85-90% of all church activity and funds are directed toward the internal operations of the congregation, such as staff salaries, building payments, utility and operating expenses.
• In the last decade, the churches in the U.S. spent $500 billion on domestic expenses – with no growth to show for it.
• A survey of 34 denominations showed that the average amount of total denominational budgets going to overseas missions was only 2%.
• Christians spent more on the annual audits of their churches and agencies, $810 million, than on all their missionaries in the non-Christian world.
• Annual Church embezzlement by top custodians surpassed $16 billion per year or $5.5 million per day, which exceeded the entire cost of all foreign missions worldwide.
• A mere $54 million, or 0.02%, of all giving to the world’s churches goes into the work of reaching the truly unreached (people with no access to the Gospel), who are also often among the world’s poorest of the poor.

How’s that for some shocking church statistics!  And trust me, there are a lot more numbers like these to build a strong case against the Church’s GC gross imbalance. (Actually, you don’t have to trust me because you can look up all the statistic citations in my dissertation, as well as get a much bigger dose of them here: http://www.box.net/shared/l4nj0uzokl).  Suffice to say, the GC’s gross imbalance had me reeling to the point of needing to know why.  Why would the Church, primarily the Western Church, spend a majority of its income on itself while only spending a mere 0.02% on reaching the 1.9 billion unreached peoples… those who Paul had in mind when he said, “It is my ambition to preach Christ where He is not known.”

In my journey of discovery, it occurred to me that if a church operates as a business, it will have the all the associated overhead expenses of a business including buildings, bills, budgets, and big salaries.  Having jumped from professional ministry into the marketplace, I was familiar with business overhead and the realization that it can easily consume 80-90% of a monthly budget.  I realized that even with the best intentions and purest of GC motives, a church that operates as a business will have limited resources, money and manpower, to apply to it.

No wonder Father told me “Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen.” As long as His Church operates as a business, it will rarely be able to give more than 10%-20% of its income toward finishing the GC.  This simple financial understanding and the consequential ramifications, as depicted by the above stats, is a chief reason I took a long pause in my ekklesia journey to consider a new pathway.  I encapsulated my journey of decision with this phrase, “Did Jesus come to earth to be the CEO of a business or to be the Head of a Body?”  In other words, did He teach His disciples how to manage a non-profit 501C3 business or ‘servant lead’ a for-prophet Body?

Needless to say, in addition to the biblical and historical reasons, I soon jumped on the “church as a Body” bandwagon, believing that this approach to ekklesia would have a much lower overhead than a “church as a business” approach.  After all, how much $ does it take to meet in a home and be “devoted to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer?”

In 2009, I decided to test the “church as a business” overhead expense theory.  Essentially, I wanted to know this: does a New Testament model of church, as taught by Jesus and practiced by the 12 apostles and Paul, manifest in a lower overhead cost than today’s modern institutional/traditional/legacy church, and if so, how much lower?

To find the answer, I surveyed simple/house church folks (you can see the results of the 26 question survey by clicking here ).

As a sample, the following question shows a very compelling result toward a much lower overhead cost for simple/house churches:

Question: My simple/house church spends the following percentage of its total annual proceeds on internal administration costs [overhead]:

The answer shows that almost 60% of simple/house churches spend < 1% of their total annual proceeds on internal administration costs [overhead].  This result, as well as all the other confirming survey results, causes one to ponder: can you imagine how many Kingdom resources would be freed up by turning the “church as a business” with their 90% overhead upside down, allowing the “church as aBody” to give this 90% directly toward finishing the GC!

Of the billions and billions of dollars that pass through Western Church offering plates, this equates to a whole lot of resources that could send a whole lot of laborers into the ripe harvest fields of the earth.

My personal conclusion, “Yes Lord, I will ‘Quit praying that prayer because it ain’t gonna happen’” and start praying that more and more churches operating as a Body instead of a business will apply their freed-up resources toward bringing closure to the Great Commission.

What is your conclusion?

To see the full results of my 26 question survey, including simple church demographics, please click on this link:  http://www.box.net/shared/n8bj4glmdl

To see the full context of the survey as told in my doctoral dissertation, please click on this link:  http://www.box.net/shared/l4nj0uzokl