Financing A Kingdom Revolution

For those who missed it, Andrew Jones of TallSkinnyKiwi fame wrote about the unseen financiers who supported the Protestant Reformation.  Jones writes about different important “Kingdom Investors” who at various points gave significant amounts of money and resources to aid the spread of the Reformation. Reading the post, I was struck again by the need for a financial revolution that undergirds every genuine move of God.

Wolfgang Simson will be the first person to tell you that much of what you’ve heard about money in church is wrong. We often teach about money in a way that causes us to put all of our hopes in non-Kingdom financial principles.  However one thing that remains true is that all Empires (including the Kingdom of God, which is the empire we belong to) have a financial system in place to fund their activities.  Not all money given to a church is used well, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use our finances to further this Kingdom revolution.

The truth is that all of us have a part to play in financing the advancement of the Kingdom.  I remember reading Brother Yun’s book Living Waters where he described offerings that the Chinese house churches would take for members being sent off as missionaries.  Some of the members of the house churches were so broken because they didn’t have money to contribute that as they wept, they would place themselves in the offering sack as pledge to devote their whole selves to the cause global evangelism.

This is the kind of giving that moves forward the Kingdom: Financial giving that flows from a life fully given over to Jesus.  That’s what makes the testimony of the early church so powerful.  They were continually giving everything extra they had to the cause of Jesus and His Kingdom.  This enabled the poor to be taken care of and the Gospel to continue to spread through the apostles and others.  Today the Kingdom of God continues to spread, but it does so with little access to the funds that could so enable to spread quickly and without the financial sacrifice that is characteristic of an apostolic movement.

So how do we finance a Kingdom revolution? It begins with giving our very selves to God and letting our finances reflect that level of sacrifice.  In our next post we’ll look at where those finances need to flow to.  But today, let me ask you this question: What do you think holds us back from joining God in financing the advancement of the Kingdom?

Photo Credit: International Money Pile in Cash and Coins by epSos.de