Material gain - and spiritual loss
Although I think that it’s good for clergy to have sufficient money to live on now, the point I want to make is that we no longer have to rely on God for necessities in our modern western world.

Today, I am retired, but I have enough to live on. I enjoy being like this, although I am still not quite used to it! – but it is true to say that the need for reliance on God for material things has gone.

We are part of the materialistic world, in a country where living standards for so many people have been going up and up ever since the 1960’s. I know there are people who still live below the poverty line, but we are very lucky in this country with the welfare state, and our poverty bears no resemblance to the acute poverty of other countries.

Being better-off is both a gain and a spiritual loss.

But does it matter?

The big question for Christians is this:
what sort of Christian church will this increased affluence create in the future?

I believe it is very important to remember that we do not belong just to an English or British church. How many English Christians have now realised that the majority of Christians on planet Earth live south of the Equator?

Europeans are definitely in a minority as far as numbers of Christians go. Our missionary societies are finding that the really vibrant Christian missionaries are now coming from Asia and Africa to this country, because we are more in need of spiritual help than they are.

Jesus once exclaimed that it was so hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God. We need to take this to heart and to realise ‘that’s us!’

Materially rich but spiritually poor?
We should not be surprised, then, to learn that outside our western, wealthy, materialistic culture, the poorer countries have seen remarkable growth in the size of their church membership. In contrast to this, in our area of the globe there are some countries where the state maintains the church buildings; some where old endowments and property have been sufficiently well-managed to produce millions of pounds a year; some where wealthy people support their local church (I am not saying that any of this is bad or wrong).

But by and large, if you want to find a vitally alive church composed of people filled by the Holy Spirit, endowed with real Christian love, devotion, enthusiasm and yet very practical in helping others, then the places to look are among the poor and the needy.

Here, we moan about the reduction of full-time ministers, and sometimes church people are reluctant to take on extra work for God on top of their normal jobs. But churches in poor countries, with no endowments and very little money, cannot afford many clergy either. So, once again, if you want to find lay people taking services and doing all manner of work in and through the church, then the best place to see it is where real poverty exists, and ordained ministries are very thin on the ground.

In the past we have made the mistake of exporting our Church of England services and our English culture to areas where some of our missionaries went.

Some of this legacy is good, and some of it is still bitter to national Christians. Once, when I visited northern Nigeria, I went to a church which was originally built for white expatriates. It was just like stepping into the Church of England of my childhood in the 1920’s! And what a contrast with other churches, where the music was Nigerian and the words in Hausa. There was spiritual life for you!

Materially poor but spiritually rich!
Lessons have been learnt since the days of the British Empire, and other countries now have their own liturgies and ways of self-expression in public worship. Their material poverty is producing spiritual riches. My daughter tells me of a service at Christmas, where the women’s fellowship in her Nigerian church sang in Hausa in a very lively way with beaten pots and drums ‘Bring, bring Christmas offerings!’

As they sang, scores of people made their way to the front of the huge church with offerings – not just money, but bags of grain and even chickens. People who had almost nothing, but were willing to be generous to those who had even less. What struck her most were the beaming smiles on everyone’s faces. They were enjoying giving away what they could not really afford!

Again, it is from the areas of the poor or the persecuted, that we find a faith which affects every part of life: work, recreation, home and politics too.

Unless you go to cardboard city, unless you go to the ‘two-thirds world’, you just do not realise how wealthy we really are! Often, when I was in Nigeria, people would call out “Take me to your rich land, Englishman!” Is it our material riches which make our nation one of the most godless in the world, I wonder?

Jesus, as usual, has something wise and relevant to say to my question, and I want to look at what he says next time.