HOW WE GIVE | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 2, 1904

HOW WE GIVE.

THE women of America spend far more for artificial flowers and kid gloves than the church does for missions.

Christians "lay up" annually, above all their comforts and luxuries, one hundred times the amount they give to foreign missions.

Many times as much money is puffed away in tobacco smoke by the men in America in one year as the church gave in a century to evangelize the world.

The church, as a whole, gives less for the evangelization of the world than is expended in idolatrous worship at a single heathen shrine in India—that of the goddess of cruelty.

The average gift of each church-member for foreign missions is about forty cents a year, or one-ninth of a cent a day. Is this the price we place on the redemption of the world?

One year, when $18,000 was spent for the raising of a crew, $150,000 in connection with a football game, $70,000 for a banquet, and $600,000 for a wedding, our mission boards were left groaning under a heavy debt.

One church spends twenty times as much for its choir as for missions; in another the printed programs cost more than they give to this great cause; in another the soprano costs enough to support two missionaries and a hundred native preachers in the field.

A ten-cent piece will buy a cigar, or preach the Gospel a whole day through native lips. A dollar will furnish an evening's amusement, or keep a boy in a mission day school for twelve months. With such possibilities in money, how can we waste even a penny?—Selected.