Lausanne World Pulse – LAUSANNE REPORTS – Unlocking the Church’s Potential: Resource Mobilization

By Ram Gidoomal
August 2010

The mission of the newly-established Lausanne Resource Mobilization Working Group (RMWG) is to enable the global Church to discover, develop, and deploy God’s resources for world evangelization. Our vision is for a global culture of generosity and effective stewardship of God’s resources. With this in mind, we are working to bridge the gap between wealth and poverty and, in so doing, support world evangelization.

One of the aims of the RMWG is to identify barriers to generous giving and effective stewardship to help unlock the resources of both the rich, young ruler and the widow and her mite.

Barriers to giving include:

• a poor understanding of the biblical commands to give,
• a poor understanding of the needs among ministries,
• the lack of information on opportunities to give, and
• a suspicion that the resources are not well utilized.

Our poor understanding of the biblical commands to give is reflected by the fact that from the US$18.2 trillion earned annually by 2.2 billion Christians across the world, the current level of global giving to the Church is less than 2.5% of income—well below the basic tithing levels. Global mission income makes up only 5% of this already low level of giving to the Church, such that the sum spent on missions ($23 billion) is less than the level of ecclesiastical crime ($25 billion)!

The global credit crunch has made matters worse, with many missions complaining of reduced income. But we believe that the global Church has an unprecedented opportunity to make a difference—as individuals working as a body, united through Christ.

India’s Obscene Contrasts
Current low levels of giving are also reflected in the extremes of wealth and poverty that we observe today—something that needs transnational and transcultural cooperation. These extremes persist not only between developed and developing countries, but within them as well. 

Ebe Sunder Raj, former head of the India Missions Association and current chairman of the Christian Institute of Management, offers the following input on Christian ministries in India:

Our motherland is a land of obscene contrasts. After sixty years of democracy, the disparities have not diminished; rather, they have increased in several areas. India itself is a place of immense wealth and poverty. The highest-paid corporate executive in the U.S. is an Indian, Sanjay Jha, who takes home US$104 million a year, while one-third of his countrymen back in India live on half a dollar per day. Turn to the Indian Christian world, and you will see that it is not radically different. There are Indian Christian ministers who own a huge amount of personal assets but still appeal through powerful marketing methods for more.

Raj contrasts the above with average grassroots evangelists and pastors in India who go and work in the tribal jungles and Dalit slums and are paid only $50 a month. Some of this is due to the lack of information on opportunities to give. Often, Christian giving goes disproportionately to ministries with the means to communicate their marketing message, while other ministries (which may be more effective and in greater need of support) go unnoticed because they are not, for whatever reason, able to communicate those needs.

Ram Gidoomal is deputy chairman of the board of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation, chairs the Resource Mobilisation Working Group, and will lead the Multiplex Session, “To Give or Not to Give…The Stewardship Dilemma,” during the Cape Town 2010 Congress.