“Our churches can do little to change economic reality on the macro level. Plant closings, unchecked suburban growth, and population booms and busts are not trends that the church in its ordinary operations can affect. Yet at the micro level, at the level of the congregation, we can do much to live in the broader economy constituted by God and not only in the economy as narrowly construed by those who measure employment, prices, and interest rates.
Congregations can be substitutes for the country club, or they can serve as a witness to God’s alternative economy. That is, they can accept and affirm the status quo, or they can place what seems to be given realities in a larger moral framework that calls into question the debilitating assumptions of the status quo. The church’s message to the world is that there is much more to live than meets the eye. God’s alternative economy is, if we will let it be, more real that the closed-universe economy in which we constantly feel ourselves to be trapped.”
James Hudnut-Beumle in Generous Saints: Congregations Rethinking Ethics and Money (Herndon: Alban Institute, 1999) 21-22.
What a line! “Congregations can be substitutes for the country club, or they can serve as a witness to God’s alternative economy.” What message do our churches send to the world? There is more to life than working for money and trying to amass possessions! Congregations must help people realize that life according to the world’s economy is nothing but a dead-end roadway filled with disillusionment.
Life in God’s economy is rooted in the realization that in Him we have everything we need and obedience to God’s Word is the only pathway to individual and community flourishing. We must make this known with the same love that Paul urged Timothy to further it in Ephesus in the first century.
As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the [economy] of God which is by faith. But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 1 Timothy 1:3-5