The Bottom Line

Luke 16:1-13

During the summers through college and into seminary, I worked as a sales representative for Northrup King Garden Seed Co all across the Upper Midwest.  My job was to call on retail stores that sold our garden seeds, inventory the displays, collect for what had been sold, take the order for the next year and ship the displays and unsold product back to the company.    I learned a lot doing that job.  I learned how to organize my time efficiently, work with customers, deal with concerns and issues, track sales, work with shipping companies, and many other things.  The company’s mantra, drilled into us during our annual training, continues to reverberate through my life, “plan your work…  work your plan.”   The congregation where I served my first call, Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Wauwatosa, WI, was made up of many members who worked in the business community as managers, CFOs, CEOs and business owners.   I learned a lot from them about management, HR, budgeting, finance, planning and leadership.  To this day, I continue to value insights from the business community and regularly read books from that world.

But, the church is not, NOT, a business.  While I believe we can learn a lot from the business world (and from other “worlds” outside the church) the minute we start to run the church with a “bottom line” mentality, we get into serious trouble.   The minute we start thinking that the measure of mission and ministry is the number of people we can get in the pews, the size of our offerings, or the growth of our institutions, we become slaves to the wrong master.   Focusing on the bottom line – however we measure it -- drives us toward scarcity thinking, survival strategizing and viewing people as means to an end rather than as beloved children of God.  In a consumer focused and consumer driven culture, it is easy, very easy, to get caught up in this kind of thinking without even noticing it.

While I don’t pretend to understand the subtleties of the economics at play in this week’s text,  I think I get Jesus’ point.  This is a cautionary tale.   While it suggests that we can learn something from the way the “children of this age” manage “dishonest wealth” it warns that we need to be careful not to be co-opted by it.  

The bottom line of Christ’s Church is not profit (members, dollars, programs, buildings, etc.), but service.  The bottom line of discipleship is not what we gather, but what we give away.  Remember, Jesus said that to find our lives we need to loose them!   This measure of ministry and mission leads to celebrating God’s abundance,  strategizing generosity, and walking alongside God’s beloved children wherever we find them:  both inside and outside the church walls.   This measure of ministry and mission leads not to shrewd plans, and clever schemes to attract people to the church, but to acts of love which embrace all people and all things as amazing and wonderful blessings from our gracious Creator.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading!