Churches of Christ -- Sermons; Sermons, American -- 20th century
That’s the reason I am reluctant to tell a rich man how to give away his
money. If he had sense enough to make it, he probably has more sense
about how to spend it than someone who could never make any. Of course
one should teach the principles that are revealed in the Bible
concerning the use of money, but I believe that the responsibility of
spending one’s money rests primarily upon the one to whom God has
entrusted the money, and that will apply to a congregation as well as to
individuals.
IV
A Three-Cornered Affair
Now arranging a program of missionary work is a three-cornered affair.
There is first of all the _missionary field_ in which the work is to be
done, and next, there is the _preacher_ who is to do the preaching and
third the _church_ to do the financing. By some means or other these
three must be brought to an agreement upon a plan of procedure. That
means that somebody must take the initiative in getting the work
started.
Sometimes a few members who live in the missionary field take the
initiative, and undertake to find a preacher and someone to support him.
They contact a preacher and ask him to come and work for them. They
contact some church or churches and ask them to support the man while he
works for them. Whenever there is enough leadership in the mission field
to take such initiative, that’s all right. But that is presupposing a
goodly degree of leadership in a mission field! There are many mission
fields which do not possess such leadership. Sometimes the few members
who live in these mission fields are relatively indifferent. They are
not always so. Sometimes they are the finest people on the earth, but
often they are not. And maybe the reason it’s still a mission field in
many instances is because they are not as wide awake and zealous as they
should be. So if a great many fields are ever reached, some of them not
having any members at all, someone else must take the initiative.
In other instances, the preacher takes the initiative. He selects a
field to which he would like to go and then he gets some churches to
support him while he does so. That’s the plan I used in going to
Richmond. It sometimes works all right and sometimes it doesn’t. For
very often a preacher who undertakes to do such work is comparatively
inexperienced, and is not nearly as well qualified to plan the program
of work as some congregation that helps support him would be. When I
went to Richmond, twelve years ago, one had to do it that way, because
at that time, so far as I know, no one congregation considered itself
able to assume full responsibility for the support of a missionary. But
I do not believe that this is the most satisfactory method.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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