Raising Church Funds

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 20, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 33.

Raising Church Funds

Speaking at the annual meeting of the East London Church Fund last week, Lord Salisbury rebuked the scandalous methods resorted to nowadays to get people to give. They were taught, he said, that they must eat a bad dinner, or attend a ball or garden party, before they could be charitable.

“So it goes on. There must always be some secondary machinery. The largest effort a Christian makes he makes in response to an organization, by which he is invited to purchase worthless articles at ridiculous prices. . . . It was a strange contrast to what happened in the earlier days of Christianity. When they read of what happened when Paul exhorted the Corinthians to send relief to their suffering fellow-Christians in Jerusalem, they did not read that it was found necessary to have a bazaar, or a public dinner, or even a public meeting with a Roman magistrate to make a speech.”

Lord Salisbury’s speech is a crushing rebuke of that spirit which is so rampant. When people refuse to give of their means to the Lord’s work, it is not entertaining that they need, but converting. It ought to make the organizers of these devices pause and think when the premier and statesman is forced to rebuke this resort to worldly methods of money-getting. Statesmen have also to pass laws to keep some of these same elements from establishing lotteries and gambling for church purposes, and even then we now and then read of raffles at church bazaars patronized by the highest in the land. Let all keep separate from these things. If a man believes the truth, he will freely give to send it to others. If he does not believe it, the Lord does not need his funds.—Present Truth (London, England).