Annual Council: Need to Communicate Importance of Worldwide Mission Offerings, Leaders Say

Silver Spring, Maryland, United States …. [Wendi Rogers/ANN]

Although local church offerings have held at approximately 35 percent of tithe over the past 40 years, overall worldwide mission offerings have not kept pace with tithe increases, Bob Lemon, world church treasurer, told Annual Council delegates Oct. 12.

“Virtually every charity has taken a hit since 9/11, but the Lord has blessed and our tithe and total offerings have continued to increase,”

he told attendees. A huge increase in insurance premiums have brought pressure, he explained, and, at the same time, the church is facing increased restrictions on the sharing of resources since the Sept. 11,

2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Challenging world church regions to spend time studying ways to have less dependence on appropriations from the world church headquarters, Lemon said, “We need worldwide support for mission offering. We need unity, but we do not need to have uniformity on everything.”

Lemon emphasized that the work of the Church is not finished, and many unentered areas of the world remain where the Church’s message has not reached.

“We need to give attention during this next quinquennium to the issue of empowering individuals to share not only in spreading of the gospel, but in bearing the burden of spreading it in areas where we are thin on the ground, where we don’t have an established work.” In some regions, he told attendees, there is a tendency to put all the emphasis on areas where the Church has already been established.

Mission offerings as a percentage of total world tithe have decreased sharply from about 65 percent in 1930 to about 5 percent in 2003.

However, Steve Rose, undertreasurer for the world church, reported that world mission offering has increased for the period Sept. 1, 2003 to Aug. 31, 2004.

But, he said, “When you add in all revenue, regardless of the source, and compare it to tithe, we’re still nowhere near where we were 10 and 20 years ago.”

Lemon said the Church needs to find ways to respond faster to new opportunities. “There is a huge challenge facing our church in the 10/40 window, [an area containing approximately 70 percent of the world’s population, but where only 1 percent are Christian]. We need to communicate financial information; we have to find more meaningful, more understandable ways,” he said. “I take blame for not having done that myself and will make that a high priority. We sometimes deal with the minutia and not the larger picture in our reporting. We need to communicate it in a better way.”

He added, “We have to have transparency and always be willing to answer any questions and provide information” to the world field.

Gordon Retzer, president of the church’s Southern United States region, said, “I don’t know how to do it but we need the best minds in the Church, wherever we can find them, to help us communicate this grand endeavor that we are in and its finances.”

There is a perception, Retzer said, that the world headquarters and the North American headquarters have everything they need while local conference offices and local churches are struggling. “That perception is really not the right perception. The needs we have at the [world headquarters] to spend money [to enter unentered areas and particularly the 10/40 window] are so grand, and somehow we need to communicate this new work and all we’re going into and the needs at the same time we communicate our bottom line.”

“My prayer is we all do it from a [God’s] kingdom approach,” Lemon added. “Until the work is done everywhere, it’s not finished anywhere.”

Copyright © 2004 by Adventist News Network.