Outside the Camp

Before I begin this, per­haps a word of warn­ing is in order. I’m about to ask ques­tions regard­ing prac­tices within the Chris­t­ian land­scape that may be a lit­tle touchy depend­ing on the reader. Par­tic­u­larly I would like to look at some ways that worldly com­mer­cial­ism had crept into the Church and the man­ner that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are being admin­is­tered with a price tag included.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of teach­ing. (Romans 12:7) Some­times this gift is admin­is­tered through the spo­ken word, such as in ser­mons or dis­courses. At other times, teach­ing is pro­vided through means of the writ­ten word, such as in books. Within the New Tes­ta­ment writ­ings we have ben­e­fi­cial teach­ings for the Chris­t­ian today. Since that time, through the cen­turies we have many books writ­ten by gifted Chris­t­ian teachers.

In the begin­ning writ­ten works were hand-copied by trained scribes and quite costly. This lim­ited the audi­ence. Within the Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tion a sin­gle copy of a let­ter would be read aloud so that all could ben­e­fit. (See Rev­e­la­tion 1:3) Later with advances in print­ing, the costs of writ­ten works came down and it allowed for the less afflu­ent to own books of their own. In our day, with the devel­op­ment of the World Wide Web, it became pos­si­ble to pub­lish writ­ten works with min­i­mal costs. For instance, PDF copies of books can be dis­trib­uted for next-to-nothing and printed on the home printer very inex­pen­sively. Which brings up the ques­tion, in this Infor­ma­tion Age is there any rea­son that books by Chris­t­ian authors can­not be freely dis­trib­uted on the Internet?

Why ask such a ques­tion? After all, few things in this world are expected to come with­out cost and it is accepted that peo­ple, such as writ­ers, should be com­pen­sated for their time and effort. How­ever, as Chris­tians we are called to live as part of King­dom of God and live by a dif­fer­ent stan­dard. More to the point, Jesus him­self com­mands against the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the King­dom. In send­ing out the apos­tles in their min­istry, Jesus instructed:

“Heal the sick, cleanse the lep­ers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” — Matthew 10:8

Sim­i­larly, the apos­tle Paul said:

“For we are not, as so many, ped­dling the word of God; but as of sin­cer­ity, but as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ.” — 2 Cor 2:17

For a sec­ond let’s use our imag­i­na­tion to trans­pose the mod­ern day norm to the days of Jesus. Could we imag­ine if the only way to hear Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount was to pay for a CD copy? Could we imag­ine if Paul’s let­ters to the con­gre­ga­tions were only avail­able at cost at the local Chris­t­ian bookseller?

If you are a Chris­t­ian author a good ques­tion to ask would be, what would pre­vent you from putting up a free PDF copy of your lat­est book? If the answer is, it would take away from sales of the printed copy, it might be a good fol­lowup to ask what is the motive in writ­ing? Is it for the enrich­ment of the Lord’s peo­ple or for ourselves?

Just as Guttenberg’s print­ing press sparked a rev­o­lu­tion of the mass pro­duc­tion of printed books, spear­headed by a printed Bible that now could afford­ably go out to feed the masses; the Inter­net has now brought near lim­it­less free­dom to reach an even larger audi­ence at a min­i­mal cost. With this in mind, it seems strange, and even detri­men­tal, to limit that mes­sage to those who are able to pay to read or hear. To tell a per­sonal exam­ple, I once ordered a book from a min­istry and as a result was given a free CD copy of a talk on the sub­ject of David’s Taber­na­cle. That talk, deliv­ered by a gifted teacher, encour­aged and blessed me greatly. I was thrilled to receive it! How­ever, as I’m not in the habit of buy­ing teach­ings on CD if it hadn’t been given to me I wouldn’t have heard it and would be at a loss.

Another shock­ing thing to wit­ness is the preva­lence of var­i­ous paid schools and classes to instruct ones in the gift­ings of the spirit such a prophecy or heal­ing. A brief Google search turned up sev­eral, with a top-listed school of spir­i­tual heal­ing and prophecy dis­play­ing a sticker-price of $4,200.00 (US). What can be said of such a prac­tice that is force­fully con­demned by the Scrip­tures? Con­sider the words of the apos­tle Peter spo­ken to such a man that thought he might buy the power of the Holy Spirit.

“Your money per­ish with you, because you thought that the gift of God could be pur­chased with money! You have nei­ther part nor por­tion in this mat­ter, for your heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent there­fore of this your wicked­ness, and pray God if per­haps the thought of your heart may be for­given you. For I see that you are poi­soned by bit­ter­ness and bound by iniq­uity.” — Acts 8:20–21

Con­sider, if seek­ing to pur­chase a gift of God is con­sid­ered a wicked act, how much more so those who seek to profit from such!

Oth­ers attempt to profit by their spir­i­tual gifts in sim­i­lar ways. I was in con­tact with a man who was greatly com­pas­sion­ate and was gifted in min­is­ter­ing to those strug­gling with emo­tional dis­tresses. In speak­ing with him he lamented that indi­vid­u­als would pay big money to obtain the ser­vices of a doc­tor or psy­chol­o­gist and he felt slighted that he sim­i­larly didn’t receive such pay­ment for the spir­i­tual ser­vices he had ren­dered over the years. At some point, he felt that God was call­ing him to open up a Chris­t­ian Coun­sel­ing ser­vice where he could fur­ther use his gifts. Before he even had the office he knew the scrip­ture that he was going to hang on the wall, 1 Samuel 9:7,8:

So Saul said to his ser­vant, “All right, we can go. But what can we bring the man [Samuel, the prophet], since the food in our bags is used up? We have no gift to take to the man of God. What do we have?” The ser­vant went on to answer Saul, “Look, I hap­pen to have in my hand a quar­ter shekel of sil­ver. I will give it to the man of God and he will tell us where we should go.”

Con­sid­er­ing the count­less encour­ag­ing verses within the Bible it seemed like an odd scrip­ture to use for a coun­sel­ing min­istry; how­ever, the man went on to explain he wanted that par­tic­u­lar scrip­ture so that those who would use his ser­vice would know that his charg­ing them was “Bib­li­cal”. From my per­spec­tive this is sim­ply pulling out an obscure Old Tes­ta­ment verse in order to jus­tify a prac­tice that has a ques­tion­able place in the Chris­t­ian Church.

I don’t know that I can dis­pute that it wasn’t a prac­tice in Saul’s day to gift a “man of God” in such a man­ner; how­ever, it would be wrong to turn a blind eye to other OT exam­ples. One that comes to mind is the account of the prophet Elisha’s deal­ings with Naa­man. (2 Kings 5:1–27) When Naa­man received the word of God that healed him from a dread­ful skin dis­ease he offered to pay Elisha. In this Bible account, Elisha refused to profit in such a man­ner say­ing, “As cer­tainly as the Lord lives (whom I serve), I will take noth­ing from you.” (2 Kings 5:16) On the other hand, Elisha’s ser­vant Gehazi secretly chased after Naa­man and accepted the pay­ment, an action that caused him to be severely cursed. Again, we have to be mind­ful of how much mileage we can take these pre-Christian exam­ples; but, I’m cit­ing this one to show that we can’t look at Samuel while ignor­ing Elisha.

As Chris­tians we have blessed to receive gifts from Jesus. But what is the pur­pose of such? Con­sider what Paul writes about this:

But to each one of us grace was given accord­ing to the mea­sure of Christ’s gift. There­fore He says: “When He ascended on high, He led cap­tiv­ity cap­tive, And gave gifts to men.” … And He Him­self gave some to be apos­tles, some prophets, some evan­ge­lists, and some pas­tors and teach­ers, for the equip­ping of the saints for the work of min­istry, for the edi­fy­ing of the body of Christ. — Eph­esians 4:7–12

The gifts we receive from Jesus are to be used for the work of edi­fy­ing the body of Christ. It would be a shame to cheapen them by attach­ing a price and thereby lim­it­ing them. The world’s econ­omy is based on sup­ply and demand, scarcity and lim­i­ta­tion whereas the King­dom of Heaven is about lim­it­less pro­vi­sion and free­dom. (See Matthew 14:13–21 ) The Lord’s econ­omy is about gen­eros­ity and giv­ing. I offer this as an encour­age­ment to the body of Christ to look at ways, both per­sonal and cor­po­rately, that we can move beyond the world’s com­mer­cial ways and into more of an expres­sion of Jesus and the King­dom of God.