How should Christians give to the church?

Question 11093

Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of us have sat under at least one sermon that felt like a sales pitch. So let me say at the outset that I am not after your wallet. I am after something the New Testament cares about a great deal more, which is what your money reveals about your heart.

The question of Christian giving is not answered by a percentage printed on a card. It is answered by understanding who owns what, what the local church actually needs, and what God has done for us in Jesus. Get those three things straight and the practical arithmetic tends to sort itself out.

Christian giving begins with ownership

Before we talk about how much, we have to talk about whose. Psalm 24:1 says that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. That single line dismantles the whole framework most of us carry around, in which the money is mine and God receives a slice of it if I am feeling generous. The biblical picture is the reverse. Everything is his, I am a steward, and what I hand over on a Sunday is not a donation from my resources but an acknowledgement of his.

That shift changes the emotional temperature completely. A steward is not being robbed when the owner asks for an account, and Christian giving is simply that account being rendered gladly. Once you accept that the wages in your bank were provided by God, the question stops being how little can I get away with and becomes how much of this can I put to work for him. I have watched that realisation land on people, and it does not produce guilt. It produces relief.

This is why I resist reducing Christian giving to a line in a household budget. The money is a symptom. Jesus said that where your treasure is, your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). He did not say your heart drags your treasure along behind it. He said the treasure leads and the heart follows, which is a rather uncomfortable piece of spiritual physics.

Was the tithe meant for us?

Many believers assume that ten per cent is the Christian standard, and it is worth asking where that assumption comes from. The tithe was written into the law of Moses as part of Israel’s national and religious economy, supporting the Levites who had no land inheritance and funding the festivals and the care of the poor. It was not one tithe but several, and the real annual figure was closer to twenty-three per cent than ten. It was, in effect, taxation for a theocratic nation.

The church is not that nation. Israel and the church are distinct in God’s programme, and the Mosaic economy was not transferred wholesale to congregations in Corinth and Philippi. You will search the letters of Paul in vain for an instruction to tithe. What you find instead is something both freer and more searching, which I explore further in my answer to should Christians tithe.

None of that makes ten per cent a bad starting point. It is a useful benchmark, and for many people it is a sensible discipline that stops good intentions evaporating. My concern is the person who writes the cheque and considers the matter closed, as though the remaining ninety per cent were none of God’s business. That is not Christian giving. That is a subscription.

What the New Testament actually asks

Paul gives us the clearest practical guidance in 1 Corinthians 16:2, where he tells the Corinthians that on the first day of every week each of them is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper. Four things stand out. Christian giving is regular, it is personal, it is planned in advance, and it is proportionate to income. That is a remarkably practical instruction for people who tend to give whatever is left over, which is usually nothing.

Then in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 Paul lifts the whole subject onto a different plane. He praises the Macedonian churches, who gave beyond their means out of severe poverty, and he grounds the appeal in the generosity of Jesus, who though he was rich became poor so that we might become rich. The motive for Christian giving is never obligation. The motive is imitation.

The famous line arrives in 2 Corinthians 9:7: each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. The word behind cheerful is hilaros, from which we get hilarious. God is not looking for grim compliance. He is looking for people who find the whole business rather delightful.

Give to your own local church first

I am often asked whether it matters where the money goes, and I think it does. The New Testament pattern is that believers support the congregation to which they belong and the workers who serve them. Paul tells the Galatians that the one who is taught the word must share all good things with the one who teaches, and he tells Timothy that the labourer deserves his wages. The building you sit in, the heating you take for granted, and the pastor who visits you when you are ill are all funded by somebody.

Beyond the local church there is mission, there is the relief of poverty, and there is the care of believers in genuine need. The collection Paul organised across several churches was for famine-stricken saints in Jerusalem, which tells you that Christian giving was never meant to stop at the church door. But it did start there, and I would gently suggest it should still start there for us.

What about the parachurch appeals, the online ministries, the disaster funds? Support them gladly if you can. Just be honest with yourself about whether the emotional appeal of a distant cause is quietly displacing the unglamorous congregation that actually knows your name and would sit with you in a hospital corridor.

When you have very little to give

Some of you are reading this with a knot in your stomach because the money is simply not there. Please hear me. Jesus watched a widow drop two small copper coins into the treasury and said she had put in more than all the wealthy donors combined. He measures the gift against what remains, not against the total. If your two coins are all you have, they are magnificent in his sight.

Nor is money the only currency of Christian giving. Time, skill, hospitality and prayer are all real contributions to the life of a congregation, and some of the most generous people I have known gave almost nothing financially because they had almost nothing. Debt, unemployment and illness are not spiritual failures, and no pastor worth the name will make you feel that they are. On the promises so often misapplied here, see my answer to does God want us to be wealthy.

The heart behind Christian giving

Here is the thing about Christian giving that no percentage can capture. God does not need your money. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills and he was managing the universe long before your standing order existed. What he wants is you, and generosity is one of the few reliable tests of whether he has you.

Malachi 3:10 is often quoted at congregations as a promise of financial return, and I would handle it with care. It was spoken to a nation under a covenant with material blessings attached, and it is not a guaranteed investment scheme for believers today. That said, I have never met a generous Christian who regretted it, and I have met a good many anxious ones who discovered that loosening their grip on money loosened money’s grip on them.

So decide in your heart, as Paul says. Choose a proportion, set it up so it leaves before you notice it, review it when your circumstances change, and let it be an act of worship rather than a bill. Christian giving done in that spirit is not a drain on your life. It is one of the clearest evidences that grace has got hold of you.

So, now what?

Do something concrete about your Christian giving this week rather than filing this away as an interesting idea. Look honestly at what you currently give and what you actually earn, and ask whether the figure reflects a steward or a subscriber. If you have never set a proportion, set one now, even a modest one, and make it regular and planned rather than dependent on how you feel when the offering is taken.

And if the whole subject makes you defensive, that is worth praying about too. I have found that the areas where I least want to be examined are usually the areas where God most wants to work. What would it look like for your money to stop being the last part of your life that Jesus is allowed to touch?

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7, ESV)