What Is Preached Now

Words to Know

Altar call — the invitation to come forward at the end of a service.

Seed faith — the teaching that a financial gift produces a financial return.

Prosperity gospel — the teaching that faith, and giving, produce health and wealth in this life.

Form 990 — the yearly financial report most American charities must file with the tax authorities, which anyone may read. Churches are not required to file one.

I want to do this fairly, so let us start with what is good.

In a great many churches, real things happen. Somebody’s rent gets paid. Somebody gets driven to chemotherapy. A widow has company on Thursdays. A man newly out of prison gets a job through somebody’s brother-in-law. Casseroles arrive at the right house at the right hour without anyone organizing it.

That is my movement. It never stopped. It is happening this week in your town, in a building with a bad carpet.

Keep that. Nothing in this lesson touches that.

Now, look at the sermon.

Think back over the last two years of sermons you have heard. How many were about your personal victory, your breakthrough, your season, your blessing? How many were about money owed by poor people to rich people, or the men waiting for work in the parking lot, or a prisoner?

I ask because of what filled my own teaching.

Of the roughly forty stories I told that your gospels kept, at least a dozen turn on money, debt, wages, land or inheritance. Then there are the sayings, which are worse: sell what you own, you cannot serve God and money, lend and expect nothing back. ¹

Then count the number of times I tell anybody how to get more money. That takes no time at all.

Go deeperThe dozen money stories and the sayings, with references

Here are the dozen, so you can read them with a pen.

A man with a full barn who dies that night (Luke 12:16–21). A rich man and a beggar at his gate (Luke 16:19–31). A manager who cooks the books and cuts everybody’s debt (Luke 16:1–9). A servant forgiven an impossible debt who then jails a man over a small one (Matthew 18:23–35). Day laborers hired by the hour and all paid the same (Matthew 20:1–16). Money handed to servants to trade with (Matthew 25:14–30; Luke 19:11–27). Two debtors, one owing ten times the other (Luke 7:41–43). Tenant farmers who refuse the owner his share (Mark 12:1–12). A banquet the respectable men are too busy to attend (Luke 14:15–24). A son who takes his inheritance early and spends it (Luke 15:11–32). A buried treasure and a pearl that somebody sells everything to buy (Matthew 13:44–46). A woman who turns the house over for one lost coin (Luke 15:8–10).

Then the sayings, which are not stories, and are worse.

Sell what you own and give it away (Luke 12:33). You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24). Do not store up treasure (Matthew 6:19–21). Lend and expect nothing back (Luke 6:34–35). Invite people who cannot repay you (Luke 14:12–14). Blessed are you poor, and four lines later, woe to you who are rich (Luke 6:20, 6:24). Forgive us our debts (Matthew 6:12). It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:25). And a widow putting two small coins in the treasury, which I said was more than all the large gifts (Mark 12:41–44).

That is the count. Do it again yourself and correct me where I am wrong.

The first thing I ever read out loud in public, when I stood up in my hometown synagogue and picked the passage myself, was about good news for the poor, release for prisoners, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor — which, in the law I was raised on, meant debts cancelled and land given back (Luke 4:18–19).

That was my opening statement. I chose it.

Here are three things in the modern service. Each one has a history.

The sinner’s prayer.

There is no such formula anywhere in the New Testament. Nobody in your Bible is ever led in it. ²

It grew out of revival preaching in the 1800s, and then it was printed, which is what fixed the words. Bill Bright’s booklet The Four Spiritual Laws, from Campus Crusade for Christ, the Steps to Peace with God card handed out at Billy Graham’s crusades, and Jack Chick’s cartoon tracts from the 1960s onwards all end with a prayer for the reader to say. ³

Go deeperThe three tracts that fixed the words

Three items did most of that, and you have probably held all three.

The Four Spiritual Laws was a small booklet from Campus Crusade for Christ, which Bill Bright founded in 1951. It sets out four points and ends with a prayer for the reader to say, with the suggestion that saying it settles the matter. It has been printed in enormous numbers and translated into scores of languages.

Billy Graham's crusades handed out a version of their own, titled Steps to Peace with God, that closed the same way.

Jack Chick's cartoon tracts, printed by the hundreds of millions from the 1960s onwards, put the prayer in a box at the end.

A booklet is not a commandment. But a booklet with a prayer in a box, handed to a frightened person at the right moment, is a very effective instrument, and you should know that it was designed.

The altar call.

Calling people forward is older than the phrase. At the frontier camp meetings, starting with the enormous one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, people under conviction were brought to a bench at the front. ⁴ But the organized version has an author.

Charles Finney was a lawyer in upstate New York. He was converted in 1821, and through the 1820s and 1830s he ran revivals across western New York. His methods included the anxious bench, a seat at the front where anybody under conviction was invited to sit in view of the whole room, so that a decision became a public, physical act.

Go deeperCane Ridge, the Burned-over District and the new measures

The camp meetings that copied the 1801 one at Cane Ridge numbered in the hundreds, and that bench had its own nickname: the mourners' bench.

Finney ran his revivals across a stretch of western New York that was worked over so often people called it the Burned-over District.

He brought a lawyer's habits to his revivals, and called his methods the new measures: meetings night after night instead of once a week, praying for people out loud by name, and letting women pray in mixed meetings.

Then in 1835 he published Lectures on Revivals of Religion. A revival, he wrote, is not a miracle. It is “a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.” ⁵

The man who designed the practice told you himself that it was a technique.

That is not a scandal by itself. Finney spent his life opposing slavery and was no cynic. But it is a method with an inventor and a date. It is not a commandment.

Go deeperFinney in his own words, and the phrase itself

Finney added one more image to his own sentence: a crop, he said, comes up the same way.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to mark a decision publicly. The phrase altar call itself is a twentieth-century American expression, newer than the thing it names.⁶

The offering, taught as a transaction.

This is the one aimed at your own envelope.

If you have heard that giving money to a ministry causes God to return more money to you, that your gift is a seed you are planting for a harvest, then you have heard the medieval indulgence wearing new clothes. Pay here, and receive there. The biggest difference is that the old payoff was in the next life, and now it is promised in this one, which is bolder.

It has a name in your country: the prosperity gospel. Oral Roberts, a Pentecostal healing evangelist from Oklahoma, built his ministry’s fundraising in the early 1970s around what he named Seed-Faith, in a book and on television. His verse was Luke 6:38. ⁷

Go deeperOral Roberts and the Word of Faith teachers behind him

And it has a paper trail.

What Roberts actually preached was blunter than the label: God is your source, give so that it may be given to you, expect a miracle.

Behind him is a line of teachers. A writer named E. W. Kenyon, who died in 1948, taught that what a believer says in faith brings about what he says. Kenneth Hagin took that up, taught it for decades, founded a training center in Oklahoma in 1974, and is usually called the father of the Word of Faith movement, the stream that produced most of the television preachers you could name.⁸

Nobody voted for this doctrine. It won a competition. Before the 1960s, stations mostly gave free religious airtime to the mainline church councils, which did not ask for money on the air. Then in 1960 the Federal Communications Commission let stations count paid programs toward their public-service requirement, so the religious hour went up for sale, and the preachers who could buy it were the ones whose message raised money on the air: your gift will come back to you multiplied. ⁹

The stations were not choosing a theology. They were selling time. But selling time selected a theology, and the one it selected was the one about seeds.

Go deeperTrinity Broadcasting, and how the mailing list worked

Then the delivery improved. Trinity Broadcasting Network began in 1973, went out by satellite and then by cable, sold and gave airtime to the same kind of preaching, and raised its own money in pledge telethons. Computerized mailing lists turned a viewer who gave once into a donor asked again, by name, every month.¹⁰

That is an incentive with a mechanism attached. It is how a teaching I never gave came to be broadcast on more channels than anything I did say.

They use one verse for this, so read it properly.

Give, and it will be given to you — a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over (Luke 6:38). That one is mine. I said it.

Now read the eight lines above it, which never get read from a stage.

Love your enemies. Do good to people who hate you. Give to everyone who asks. Lend, expecting nothing back (Luke 6:35).

I said expect nothing back, and a few lines later I said give, and it will be given to you. I said both in the same breath, to the same crowd.

So whatever the second line means, it cannot mean invest and collect, because the man who said it had just forbidden expecting a return. Read the whole passage and you will see what the measure is: it is about how you treat people. Judge people generously and you will be judged generously. Hand out mercy in a bucket and you get mercy in a bucket. ¹¹

The measure was mercy. Somebody changed the units to dollars.

Here is the test I would apply to any preacher, and you can run it this Sunday.

Does what he asks of you cost him anything? Who in this room would he never dare to criticize from the pulpit? And can I see the books?

That last one is not cynicism. It has an exact answer in law, which almost nobody in the pews knows.

Every ordinary charity in your town, from the food bank to the animal rescue, must file a yearly financial return with the tax authorities, called the Form 990, and that form is public. You can read it online, free, tonight, and see the salaries in it.

Churches do not have to file one. They are exempt by statute. A church can be a tax-exempt charity, take in millions of dollars, and never file a public financial return at all. ¹²

That is the law, and it was written for a decent reason: a government auditing pulpits is worse than the alternative. But it means the honesty of your church’s books is voluntary. Some churches publish audited accounts anyway, and some join a voluntary accountability body set up in 1979. Ask which yours does. ¹³

Go deeperThe Senate inquiry that went nowhere

Asking is ordinary care.

And if you want to know what happens when nobody has to answer: in 2007 a United States senator opened an inquiry into the finances of six large media ministries. Some cooperated and some did not. It closed in 2011 with no penalties, no law changed, and a recommendation that the industry police itself.¹⁴

When I sent people out, they went with no bag, no money and no spare coat (Mark 6:8–9). Whatever else that was, it was something anyone could check.

And here is the hardest one.

Suppose your pastor preached, this Sunday, exactly what I said in Unit One: sell what you have, cancel what you are owed, invite people who cannot return the favor, stop performing your giving in public. How many of the largest donors would still be there in a month?

You know the answer. Everybody in the building knows the answer.

I will be straight with you: that last one is my judgment, not a document. But you have a documented version of it coming in the next lesson.

Go deeperThe documented version in the next lesson

That next lesson names him: a pastor in Los Angeles in the 1940s whose national campaign was paid for by oil and manufacturing money, and who mailed sermon material to ministers across the country on behalf of the men who funded him.

When donors pay for the message, the message learns what the donors like. That is not a conspiracy. It is a budget.

That is not a scandal about your church in particular. It is the structural fact of a religion that has something to lose.

That is why the poor keep getting my teaching right, in every century, while the well-funded keep inventing reasons to avoid it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Luke 4:18–19, and note that I chose that passage.

Then look up: Luke 14:12–14 — who to invite to dinner.

Then look up: Matthew 6:1–4 — what I said about letting people see you give.

The Short Version

• The casseroles and the rides to the hospital are my movement. Keep those.
• Charles Finney designed the altar call and wrote in 1835 that revival is not a miracle. Tracts fixed the sinner’s prayer.
• Oral Roberts named Seed-Faith in the early 1970s, and paid airtime after 1960 selected it.
• Luke 6:38 sits a few lines after lend, expecting nothing back. The measure is mercy, not money.
• Ordinary charities file a public Form 990. Churches are exempt, so ask to see the books.

Think About It

1. Of the last ten sermons you heard, how many asked something of the wealthy people in the room?
2. If your church published every number next Sunday, what would change?