Bart Barber’s excellent post on “a bloated Baptist bureaucracy we could do without” bumps against an issue that isn’t  discussed much:  are American churches, like other American institutions, locked into more programs, real estate and employees that they can really afford?

We easily talk about our American problem with spending.   For most Americans,  inflation-adjusted wages have been  stagnant since the 1970s.  We felt richer  because our house values kept rising, and wives started working. But a significant part of that “growth” turned out to be debt-fueled.  We kept planning for future growth to pay for the debt –  until, today, nearly 40 cents of every government-spent dollar is borrowed.

It is easy to grouse about the businessmen and politicians who made decisions in those years that were so obviously wrong. But we seldom admit that those same people and ideas went to church.

And at church, we demanded larger facilities and more personnel to meet the “expected” growth of our cities and suburbs.  Looking at the average Baptists’ finances, I wonder how much of their giving came out of borrowed money — and how much churches have borrowed on top of that?

Today, as Bart’s post notes, we seem to have too many megachurches (with great real estate) and too many little churches (with low minister to member ratios), at least in the South.  Those reflect, to some extent, the same problem: we’ve promised ourselves churches that suit us, whether or not they are affordable.

I’m not saying churches get “too much” — a tithe off ‘healthy’ finances would be far greater than actual receipts. And I think churches were more conservative than many businesses and governments.

But I wonder how much we’ve overpromised, particularly in non-core activities — and it it will hurt our ability to adjust to the real world.

Arguably, care of the elderly and poor is a “core” church activity.  And right now, we are facing a wave of  poor and  elderly,  who will need expensive care, at exactly the time the government must cut back on retirement, poverty and medical benefits.  Churches that cannot afford their present staff or programs may find it hard to meet those needs.

FYI: the hipsters are already hating on your church of the future.

I spent far too much time laughing at http://www.stuffchristianculturelikes.com/ and http://stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com/ this week.

But only after the sting wore off.   Jumbotrons?  Leading worship barefoot? Coffeehouses? Bono?   That stuff signaled a quality church in 1999, when I was in college.

And Twitter?  Apparently, only old people twitter — which is a low blow to someone who started Twittering this year.

All that to say, it strikes me that my generation has reached the point of put up or shut-up about relevance.  Are we better at putting the gospel in current context? Or just part of demographic destiny? Because it sure seems a lot of energy goes into criticizing old people, and claiming some kind of victory when they die or retire.

Is today’s church better at being relevant?  Mostly in the sense that teens who drank deeply of Nirvana’s angst, recoiled from the failings of Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell,  and saw John Piper on a jumbotron at a Passion Conference are now five years past Seminary.  They merely replaced a decade of Kennedy-era seminarians.

So please — please! — don’t spend too much time debating whether tomorrow’s  churches should be Purpose Driven or Acts 29.  It’s a generational fight, one that Boomers will lose by about fifteen years.   Churches for disco fans are nearly incomprehensible to fans of U2, and the younger ones will have the pleasure of the last laugh.

But I have some bad news for all my aging friends in flannel:  you’re doomed to lead churches full of Backstreet Boys and Hannah Montana fans.  You will be judged on your ability to interact with that culture, while the winner of the battle between the church of the 90s and the church of the 70s will still be a decade (or more)  behind.   The only worthwhile fight is one that helps churches live out the gospel, together, in their own communities, at the edge of the present.

I hope history shows that we did it better,  not that we just came later.

Do congregations make good decisions?   Rick Warren says, no, we’ve just imposed American democracy on church:

“what do the words committees, elections, majority rule, boards, board members, parliamentary procedures, voting, and vote have in common?  None of these words are found in the New Testament! We have imposed an American form of government on the church and, as a result, most churches are as bogged down in bureaucracy as our government is.”

Maybe you’d respond like Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  But political democracy isn’t all that encouraging, is it?

In his book, the Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that systematic bias means democracies have little hope of making “optimal” or wise decisions.  Popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, emotions, and personal biases combine to make voters consistently wrong about some issues, and they elect leaders who share those views.  So democracy will do what voters want, but when the question involves biases, the bias will win out over wisdom.

If congregationalism is just “church democracy,” and if democracy makes the wrong decisions, why do we hold to congregationalism?

Toward a Great Commission Resurgence identifies six “distinctives” of Baptist churches :  regenerate church membership, believer’s baptism by immersion, the priesthood of all believers, congregational church polity, local church autonomy, and liberty of conscience.

One of these, I note, is almost never debated in Convention life.   “Your church membership is unregenerate” is a real insult.  The lines of “autonomy” and “liberty of conscience” are hot topics.  “Your church lacks congregational polity” seems to be the reason Dr. Mohler allows for more levels of theological triage; truly tertiary topics are cheapened by the comparison.

But let’s stop and think about the basic idea.  “Congregational polity” implies that a congregation makes decisions.   And by elevating it to “distinctive,” Baptists appear to say that a congregation makes better decisions.

But is that true? Do congregations make better decisions?  Do they even make good decisions?

The Wall Street Journal has this interesting article about church “franchises,” based on “brand” models — the pastor is at one location, and appears at the franchises through DVD or video-link.    The focus of the article is Flamingo Road Church, in Florida (f/k/a Flamingo Road Baptist Church), “loosely affiliated with the Baptists.”  Flamingo Road hopes to have 50 churches and a $150,000,000 budget.   That would be equal to the entire 2008 Lottie Moon offering given by 42,000 SBC churches.

We’ve discussed this model before, but this article focuses on international franchises.  Are we on the verge of a global, branded evangelicalism?  Is that a good or bad thing?

A new study finds that $40 billion is being stolen from charities each year, on the order of 13%. Most likely culprit? “A female employee with no criminal record who earned less than $50,000 a year.” On average, she steals less than $40,ooo.

The most costly embezzler? Male executives earning $100,000 to $149,000 a year.

But won’t your audit catch it? No. “Most of these things are not caught by routine audits,” said Gary Snyder, who tracks nonprofit fraud in his newsletter, Nonprofit Imperative. “They’re usually done by someone in the financial area — the treasurer, the bookkeeper, the signer of checks — who knows how to avoid getting caught.”

If your members can’t trust the books, they won’t give — for good reason.  Good stewardship means understanding that audits aren’t enough to form a basis for the kind of trust that propels an effective ministry.

Caelan Cross, son of SBC-blogger Alan Cross, will be having a lymph biopsy this week. Please pray that it is not a return of cancer. More here.

Update: Cancer free!  Hallelujah!