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Prosperity is how much of a blessing are you to someone else. That’s the way that God evaluates it. (The Unjust Steward, Andrew Wommack, 40:38 onwards)

When you get to where the priority on your finances isn’t for you, but rather it’s to bless someone else, then God will assume the liability of taking care of you. And when God takes care of you, he will take care of you better than you would ever take care of yourself. (The Unjust Steward, Andrew Wommack, 53:44 onwards)

Go back to Ephesians 4:28. It says let him that stole steal no more. But rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have to give to him that needs. The reason for your working should be to have to give to him that needs. (The Unjust Steward, Andrew Wommack, 41:39 onwards)

I recently finished Andrew Wommack’s series on Financial Stewardship. Wommack is from the Word of Faith (aka Health and Wealth, Prosperity Gospel) movement but his views on money are amazingly refreshing. This movement has been heavily criticized (and I’d have to say most of the time probably rightly so) for focusing excessively on money and material things, and thus promoting or encouraging greed in its adherents.

I do believe strongly in God wanting to prosper Christians. Of course, there are nuances that need to be made in regards to my previous statement. I haven’t got it all figured out yet and one day maybe I’ll get down to thinking and writing more about it. But for now, I’m unsatisfied with the view of those who say that there are no promises of prosperity for Christians. On the other hand, I’m cannot agree with the lifestyle of a lot of these prosperity preachers. There have been too many documented abuses and excesses in the movement. And yet, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can learn from the message of these Christians.

I believe that if every Word of Faith preacher believed (and lived out) the same things regarding how money ought to be used (stewardship) as Andrew Wommack, the movement would have so much more credibility. As I’ve said a few times on this blog, I strongly believe in “Blessed to be a blessing” and “Prosperity with a purpose”. These are slogans thrown around in the Word of Faith movement. I think they are biblical slogans. It’s just that I think very few people in the movement truly live them out, eventhough they claim to believe in them. I feel that most of the time it’s just used as a justification for asking God to bless us materially.

If one day the movement is known for how much of a blessing they are to others, then I would truly salute them. Right now, I think it’s obvious that we hear a lot more about how God wants to bless us for our own sake, rather than to bless us so that we can bless others.

J. Lee Grady has an excellent article at his Fire In My Bones blog at the Charisma Magazine website. Grady is one of the guys I like to read as he’s a charismatic who’s not afraid to criticize aspects of the movement when he feels it’s needed. See, for example, his What Happened to the Fire?: Rekindling the Blaze of Charismatic Renewal which I read about 10 years ago. In the book, he addresses problems in the Charismatic movement like shallow theology, lack of discernment, pride in spiritual gifts, flimsy biblical interpretation and exaggerated claims of healings and miracles. These are of course criticisms that have been constantly leveled against the Charismatic movement. I would consider myself a charismatic, and like Grady, I have no problems with saying that the above criticisms are valid and that I have the same concerns too. There’s no need to be defensive about a movement/tradition you love and identify with because no movement/tradition is perfect. In fact, I always believe it’s good to be critical (in a constructive way) of your own tradition/movement. There will always be excesses and abuses somewhere in every movement and it’s better for the people within to address them, than those from the outside, most (not all) of whom I think would not understand the movement and tend to be ultra-critical, unhelpful and unbalance in their criticisms.

Anyway, his recent blog article is entitled Kenneth Hagin’s Forgotten Warning (7th March 2008). Kenneth Hagin, of course, is known as the “father” of the “Word of Faith” movement. Another name for the movement is the “Prosperity Gospel” movement.

In his article, Grady points out that before Hagin died, he passionately tried to correct the abuses he saw in the movement:

But before he died in 2003 and left his Rhema Bible Training Center in the hands of his son, Kenneth Hagin Jr., he summoned many of his colleagues to Tulsa to rebuke them for distorting his message. He was not happy that some of his followers were manipulating the Bible to support what he viewed as greed and selfish indulgence.

Hagin also wrote a book entitled The Midas Touch: A Balanced Approach to Biblical Prosperity (which is sold in New Creation Church’s bookstore) in 2000, a year after the above Tulsa meeting.

Many people who either criticize or support the Word of Faith movement probably don’t know the above. I’ve been familiar with the movement for about 10 years though only got to know about this book recently. I think many who criticize the movement do so without realizing that there are people within the movement just like Hagin who would not be happy with everything about it. The fact that he was passionate to correct the abuses he saw is totally understandable. That’s because he knew that abuses and excesses within the movement would cause Christians to associate such extreme and unbiblical teachings with the movement as a whole and thus throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Of course, I think it’s totally right to criticize and throw out the very many unbiblical teachings in the Word of Faith movement, as even Hagin himself did. But it’s thoroughly unfair to paint the whole movement as totally unbiblical and wrong. As I wrote here, I think there are some good in it. Critics who only point out the bad and cannot see past the more visible and famous Word of Faith preachers (who, I admit, do say a lot of unbiblical stuff) lose out on a whole lot of good, I think.

Read these two blog entries (here & here) from two Christians who, while generally more conservative, have been able to see some good in the movement, or at least recognize (unlike almost all critics of the movement) that there are some biblical foundations to some of the movement’s teachings.

I’ll just leave you with two criticisms Hagin had according to Grady:

1) People should never give in order to get.

2) The “hundredfold return” is not a biblical concept.

There, you’ve heard it from the “father” of the Word of Faith movement.

Last Sunday (17-02-08), Pastor Prince preached his first ever Sunday service message on Tithing. That is, this was the first time in all his years at New Creation that he preached a whole sermon on Tithing in a Sunday service. He told the church this. While I haven’t listened in on every Sunday service Pastor Prince has preached in to verify the truth of what he said, I have no problems believing him. I’ve been to enough services at New Creation to know that money has never been much of a focus there. Sure, there’s talk about God prospering His people materially (and I’ll touch on this another time) and New Creation would identify itself as a Word of Faith church, but it’s not a church where the focus is on money. The preaching and services are extremely different from what one sees on many of America’s tele-evangelistic programs. If they were just a bit similar, I wouldn’t be in New Creation.

Many charismatic churches always have a mini-sermon on tithing and giving before the offering bag is passed around. By a mini-sermon, I mean that someone talks about what the Bible says about giving for about 5 minutes or so in order to motivate the congregation to give more. What is normally said is that God will tremendously bless those who give to Him and you can’t out-give God and all that stuff. I believe that the Bible says that. However, I also believe that a lot of people are sick of hearing that over and over again. It can be done - and is often done - in a way where people think that all the church is after is their money. It’s also often done in a way that makes us feel guilty for not giving more. Furthermore, constantly emphasizing that God will bless us 100 fold or that He will bless us tremendously as we give to Him sacrificially tends to promote greed and self-centeredness. The result is that while people may give sacrificially in such churches, a large part of the motivation for giving is wrong. They give to be blessed in return and that’s become main reason.

One thing I love about New Creation is that they don’t have a mini-sermon before the offering bag goes around. They hardly say much before the offering. And this is in keeping with their philosophy that they don’t want to pressure Christians into doing what they may not want to do. They don’t want to make Christians feel guilty or condemned for not giving more. Sit through any service and you’ll realize how much of a non-event offering time is. They don’t believe in manipulating people and I’ve never felt manipulated into giving when I’ve been there. In fact, once I heard one of the pastors who MC-ed during the offering say something like:

While there’s an element of truth that God will bless us back when we give, let our motivation to give be because of how much God has given us, and not because we want to be blessed!

Let me just state that I totally believe that God desires to bless us materially. And I believe that God blesses us as we give to Him. All this is true, eventhough it can be and has been taken to the extreme by many churches that preach about prosperity. I do believe that if your motivation to give is to be blessed in return, that’s not sinful as there’s a biblical truth to that. But I also believe that this is not the whole truth. I think most of the time we should be giving to God and other people out of love, not out of the desire to be blessed by God.

Something that Pastor Prince said on Sunday that really impressed me was:

I don’t want 100% tithers. I want people to tithe from revelation.

As you can see, he wants the members to have the right motivation, to have a revelation of why we tithe. It’s no use if everyone tithes in the Church but do it from the wrong motive and without understanding why they do so.

Another thing Pastor Prince said was:

If you have to ask whether you should tithe from your gross or net salary, then don’t tithe.

The point here is that if Christians are so picky about how much to give God, then we may as well not give anything because we give it with the wrong motivation. The church wants their members to give cheerfully, to give out of gratitude for all God has done for them. Not to give because of guilt.

The way New Creation doesn’t make a big issue about giving is all the more remarkable when you realize that they still have to raise about S$100 million for their new building. I mean, most Churches have huge fundraising events and plead with their members to give sacrificially when they’re raising money for their new building. But if you go to New Creation, you don’t face that at all. To me, that’s pretty amazing. For that to happen, the leaders must have real faith in God to provide. And I believe they know that the church’s calling is to preach the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that they can leave it up to the people to cheerfully and willingly give to God (without external compulsion from the church) as the church focuses on how much God has given to them in Christ.

I believe Christians can learn much from the Word of Faith (a.k.a. Prosperity Gospel, Health and Wealth Gospel, etc.) movement. Of course, there is a lot to be avoided too. As I’ve learnt in my Christian life, movements are formed in reaction to something being neglected. Movements emphasize a particular belief or practice which had been neglected before. In their desire to recover the importance of a previously neglected belief or practice, they often go to the point of overreaction and overemphasize the previously neglected belief/practice. Because of their overreaction, excesses and abuses occur. People who observe such overreaction and excesses respond to the movement by themselves overreacting to it and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The result is not learning anything good from the movement and going back to the status quo of neglecting or underemphasizing the original doctrine or practice in question. This tendency of movements is true of Christian things as well as non-Christian things (e.g. modernism and postmodernism).

In the case of the Word of Faith (Health and Wealth, Prosperity Gospel) movement, certain Christians recovered the importance of faith in relation to prayer and also the fact that God desires to heal and prosper Christians. Before this movement came about, most Christians neglected the role of faith in prayer and hardly acted as though God desired to prosper and heal Christians. However, the movement was an overreaction and excesses and abuses resulted. The overreaction was in believing and acting as though every Christian could prosper and be healed in this life if they had faith.

As in most cases, I think the truth is somewhere in between. I don’t agree with the above movement nor their critics 100%. However, neither do I disagree with either side 100%. Therefore, I do think all of us Christians can learn much from the Word of Faith movement. If there were no truth whatsoever in the movement, the devil wouldn’t be bothered with it and there wouldn’t be so much controversy over it. But I think the devil’s plan is to make sure that there are abuses in the movement so that many Christians would thoroughly discredit it and therefore not care to learn anything from it. The devil delights in us throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Knowing the history of movements should alert us to the fact that there is always truth in all movements. The trick is to accept the good, and get rid of the bad - not throw everything out.

In America, a sharp-looking businessman stands up at a luncheon to give his testimony: “Before I knew Christ, I had nothing. My business was in bankruptcy, my health was ruined, I’d lost the respect of the community, and I’d almost lost my family. Then I accepted Christ. He took me out of bankruptcy and now my business has tripled its profits. My blood pressure has dropped to normal and I feel better than I’ve felt in years. Best of all, my wife and children have come back, and we’re a family again. God is good - praise the Lord!”

In China, a disheveled former university professor gives his testimony: “Before I met Christ, I had everything. I made a large salary, lived in a nice house, enjoyed good health, was highly respected for my credentials and profession, and had a good marriage and a beautiful son. Then I accepted Christ as my Savior and Lord. As a result, I lost my post at the university, lost my beautiful house and car, and spent five years in prison. Now I work for a subsistence wage at a factory. I live with pain in my neck, which was broken in prison. My wife rejected me because of my conversion. She took my son away and I haven’t seen him for ten years. But God is good, and I praise Him for His faithfulness.”

Both men are sincere Christians. One gives thanks beacause of what he’s gained. The other gives thanks in spite of what he’s lost.

Material blessings and restored families are defintely worth being thankful for. The brother in China would be grateful to have them again; indeed, he gives heartfelt thanks each day for the little he does have. And while the American brother is certainly right to give thanks, he and the rest of us must be careful to sort out how much of what he has experienced is part of the gospel and how much is not. For any gospel that is more true in America than in China is not the true gospel.

(Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions and Eternity, p. 89-90)