Generosity and the Simple Church

I'm in the midst of J-Term at Luther Seminary in a class titled Vocation of the Theologian. The books we are reading so far have been incredibly thick and way beyond my intellectual capacity as it currently stands (We're reading Reinhold Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man: Vol 1 and Wolfhart Pannenberg's Anthropology in Theological Perspective.) While I have been listening to my classmates discuss these books I realize just how much smarter than me they are in these areas and how academic theology will never be my forte. My God-given ability is simply not to be able to recount hundreds of years of philosophy in 500 page books in order to propose an argument about the nature of Christian theology.

I may not be a superb academic theologian, but I am a dreamer. A fellow classmate met me for some coffee today and we spent a good hour and a half dreaming together about all the things a church could be. It was a great conversation which reignited in my dreams I have for the church. One such dream is to be a part of a generous, simple church.

I am using the term simple church to refer to a small house church (sometimes also referred to as cell churches) that would likely consist of somewhere between 15-30, maybe 40 people. Imagine this with me: 30 Americans gather together to be the church together via a simple, house church. For the sake of argument, we will assume they have no building costs and have chosen to operate without paid staff and therefore have no staffing costs. Also, we will assume that 60% percent of the 30 are employed and have an average income of $40,000 a year. If each of the 18 employed persons pledge to put just 10% of their earnings into a common generosity fund, the group would have $72,000 to use to spread the love of God.

Imagine what a group of 30 people could do with $72,000 when all 30 of them were constantly on the lookout for ways they could put the resources to use to glorify God. The group could decide to support  a local family struggling with unemployment. If a widow has a car break down, the group could buy her a new one. The money could be used to fund adoptions within the group, to cover medical expenses, to build wells in Africa, make loans to Kiva, build a park in the local community, by Bibles to handout, etc etc etc.

I have a lot of dreams about doing church differently. One of the big ones I constantly come back to is this idea of generosity through the simple church. I dream of a church that does not teach that generosity is equal to placing a check in a bag/basket during Sunday services. This kind of generosity makes me a passive giver. My job becomes simply being faithful in writing the check. Others (often including church staff, elders, and mission teams) are tasked with finding ways to put my money to work for God's kingdom, What might it look like for a simple church to do generosity differently? What might it look like to use money not for programs, staff, and buildings (not that these are bad things) but for charity, justice, and mission?

I don't pretend to know what it would look like, but I would sure love to find out.