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One of the biggest issues around right now is debt; watch TV for half an hour and just see if a lot of adverts aren’t for payday loans, consolidation of loans, weekly payment stores and ‘buy now pay next year’ deals.

So when it comes to giving money to the church, a key question that a lot of people have is surely: How much should I give if I’m in debt?

I’m not giving a definitive answer here, but I’d like to suggest that the answer should be: Nothing yet, lots later. The reason for this answer is that if I’m in debt then the money in my bank account is actually owed to someone else, so (1) whose money am I giving to the church, and (2) how much am I giving to whom?

Before I get into the meat of this post I think it’s worth saying this: if you’re currently in debt so are reading this from a position of real-life experience but look at all the numbers below and think ‘nope, don’t understand it, it’s all too complex,’ I’d encourage you not to bury your head in the sand! If you need, print this post and take it to someone who does understand finances and can apply this to your specific situation.

Maybe an example will be useful. Imagine I’ve borrowed £5,000 to buy a car, and pay back £150 per month at 10% interest per year. My income means that I’m able to give £100 per month to the church. I now have two options:

Option 1 – Give Now

So I’m a bit of a geek and created a spreadsheet to work this all out for me, but if I give £100 per month then over the next 41 months (more than three years) I would have given £4,100 to the church, and £5,882.08 to the lender.

So I’d be down about £10,000, the church would be up about £4,000, and the lender would be up almost £6,000.

Option 2 – Give Nothing Yet

As an alternative, instead of giving that £100 to the church, what would happen if I paid off the loan using it? Well, that way I’d pay off the loan in 22 months instead (so that’s less than two years), and I’d have paid the lender £5,492.44. By planning ahead, drawing up a decent budget, it would be possible therefore to re-engineer my cash over the same period of time (41 months) like this:

I’d be down the same £10,000 or so but the lender would be up less, and the church would be up £4,489.64 – that’s a difference of nearly £400 that could be used to feed the poor.

Conclusion

I’m not for a moment saying not to give; our fallen minds quickly look at the numbers above and think ‘but I could give the same, and keep that £400 for myself!’ What I’m saying is that instead of giving that £100 now, you look at what that £100 is worth over the life of the loan – in this case it’s worth almost twice as much if you pay it off now, so I’d drop an IOU into the pot for £190 per month!

Does that make sense? It does to me.

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39 years ago, 22 January 1973, a controversial court decision in the US changed the way abortion was viewed and addressed. The decision was called Roe v. Wade, and it basically set a precedent meaning that anyone can have an abortion right up to the date of birth, providing that killing the child in the womb would prevent any health issues in the mother. But ‘health’ in this case means any level of health; physical, mental, emotional, financial, anything you want. Obviously having a baby costs money, so the pro-choice advocates placed the choice firmly in the hands of the mother.

In response to Roe v Wade, every 22 January since people have remembered that decision, and have remembered the millions and millions and millions of children who have been killed since (1/3 of all unborn children in the US are killed). Internet articles have appeared all over the place again this year, so I wanted to mention a couple of them.

The Resurgence published a list of 15 things to consider about abortion before drawing a conclusion on it; here are a few:

• Existing fetal homicide laws make a man guilty of manslaughter if he kills the baby in a mother’s womb (except in the case of abortion).
• Living on its own is not the criterion of human personhood, as we know from the use of respirators and dialysis.
• Infants in the womb are human beings scientifically by virtue of their genetic make up.
• Justice dictates that when either of two people must be inconvenienced or hurt to alleviate their united predicament, the one who bore the greater responsibility for the predicament should bear more of the inconvenience or hurt to alleviate it.
• Jesus Christ can forgive all sins and will give all who trust in him the help they need to do everything that life requires.

Also, three sermons preached by John Piper have been made into a short 27-page booklet entitled Exposing the Dark Work of Abortion. Download it for free over here.

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A friend recently told me that there’s far too much teaching in the church and not enough learning, but I read this the other day and was intrigued…here’s a smattering of quotes to whet your appetite:

It seems to me the normal pattern of pastoral ministry should not one of drowning in administration or getting in over your head in meetings or under water in visitation. Normally, the pastor should say of his week, “I was immersed in the public ministry of reading, teaching, and exhorting from the Scriptures.”

From 1549 onward Calvin preached twice on Sundays and every weekday on alternating weeks.

The picture one gets is of a church with a  number of teachers, which would hardly be a necessity were there but a single sermon each week. In fact, if there were but a single sermon each week one could well imagine that all these prophets, teachers, and bishops might get into considerable competition for the pulpit. On the other hand, if there was daily preaching one might be glad to welcome a traveling evangelist from time to time.

A man in the ministry for over ten years who has been a serious student of the Scriptures knows more about any part of the Bible than almost anyone else in his congregation.

Perhaps those quotes on their own have been enough food for thought for one day…or perhaps you’d rather read it all in context over here.

So I do. And it turns out to be a warning that I’ve got low battery. But it feels so good to touch that phone again and slip it back into my pocket. Perhaps I’ll surreptitiously leave it on the table next to my plate in case it buzzes again.

Then someone else takes a quick glance at their phone as they text their ‘real friends’ to organise to go out for drinks after without me. Idiot. How rude. Put your phone away.

Thankfully, this entire situation could be avoided if we all committed to The Phone Stack. Everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table as they arrive – not only are you then constantly reminded of how intrusive mobiles are, but the first person to touch the phones has to pick up the entire bill. Ouch. I like it.

Now, before you hail me as a genius I’d like to point you to the source of this genius idea I’m going to enforce next time I go out anywhere. As you’d expect, there were initial objections but these have all been dealt with over here.

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Dustin Morrison, a soldier in Afghanistan, experienced a horrific explosion and ended up in hospital. It was bad:

You know you’re bad when a broken jaw, lacerated spleen and kidneys aren’t a top priority to address.

His family prayed for him to recover.

On Easter Sunday, doctors finally removed the machines—not to end his life but because they had witnessed a miracle. Against all odds, his lungs began to breathe on their own. When the news came to the family, Pedersen says that their reaction was overjoyed—but not shocked. “It was just like, ‘We know.’” She attributed the recovery in part to the thousands of people who were praying in the small communities of Iowa back home.

Still, the doctors were realistic with Morrison, explaining that despite the miraculous recovery he would never walk again. “I knew if I did,” Morrison says, “it would be of God. I’ve learned never to trust man before God.”

Ultimately, this journey to the shadow of death ended up bringing Dustin a real conviction to live as a Christian rather than just preaching Christianity:

An old friend recently pulled Morrison aside, complaining about his new lifestyle and all that he could be doing instead. “My buddy said, ‘You’re missing out on the some of the best years of your life.’ I said, ‘No, I’m just starting them.’”

Read the full story over here.

Perhaps I’m cynical but I’d have expected far more to lean towards evolution! The most surprising fact for me, however, comes in the detail:

…younger pastors are the least likely age bracket to strongly disagree that the earth is 6,000 years old…24 percent age 18-44 strongly disagree

So, this post-modern, liberal, cynical younger generation of pastors are actually more likely to believe in a ‘young earth’ – who’da thunk it?!

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This is a bit of a toughy. A sniper shooting a member of the public is a criminal but a sniper on the field of battle isn’t…but are both of them committing sin by killing a person?

In particular, if someone commits murder in self-defence, which of the following statements is true?

1. The person broke the commandment not to commit murder, therefore has committed sin.
2. The fall means that some evils are actually ok within certain criteria; murder is still, strictly speaking, sin, but in self-defence it’s not that bad.
3. Some sins, when committed within certain contexts, are the right thing to do and therefore are not sins; murder in self-defence is not sin.

A bit morbid for a Tuesday, don’t you think? Well on New Year’s Eve a widowed mum protected herself and her baby by shooting a man dead who had broken into her house. The story’s here and I’m confident once you’ve read it you won’t forget it.

Conclusion: I don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is to this, but I don’t think getting the answer particularly matters; the mum in the story needs Jesus for redemption whether or not this particular act is a sin or not. Thank goodness eternity won’t have any sin.

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The article over here is quite interesting and details how Martin Luther’s teaching in particular and the reformation in general went viral; a different sort of protest hundereds of years before the Arab Spring and everything else. Here’s a brief quote from it but if you’re interested read the whole thing:

Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.

As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s.