The story he tells is not only of the change from public to voluntary support of religion, but the rapidity with which it took place by embracing either a private club model (e.g. pew rents) or a voluntary member-supported institution model. The latter won the day as democratization triumphed over gentility. By the middle of the 19th century a rich array of approaches to such voluntary member support had been developed, bringing with them the reality that characterized a Protestant pastor who was turned “however willing or able, into a development officer among his own people.”
Many of the enduring features of the overarching story of church finance and funding — from the time when private voluntary support became the norm until now — are foreshadowed in these early years. One of these was the struggle between “agents,” who crisscrossed the colonies in search of financial support for various philanthropic endeavors, and local pastors working to establish a systematic approach to the voluntary support of local congregations. Another is the evolution of a (somewhat fluid) distinction between mission activity supported by voluntary contributions and prescribed “apportionments,” “assessments,” or “per capita” to pay the cost of being a connectional church.
Yet another enduring feature of the story is recounted in a brief but fascinating chapter on the building of churches. Driven not only by the need for an initial church building, but also by the competitive impulse of having one’s own church edifice keep pace with others in the community, a long term pattern of what the author calls “nearly constant investment in local churches’ capital stocks” was established by the time of the Civil War. The outworking of this feature is explored provocatively in a later chapter that examines the approach to building churches that moved from an institutional to a consumer mentality in the 20th century.
With such enduring features established early in the American Protestant experience, the period of 1870-1920 is analyzed as having “reinvented” the tithe and identified “stewardship” as the dominant category for dealing with financing the church. The compensation to ministers is also examined in a complex chapter that shows a gradual, but persistent decline of the pay for clergy in relation to a number of other professions. Hudnut-Beumler, though clear that a number of factors have worked systematically to reduce clergy incomes, is inclined to attribute some of this decline to the clergy’s concept of its office that stressed having a calling over being a profession. In addition, an important chapter on ministers’ wives demonstrates the ways in which declining income for pastors has affected their families and especially their spouses.
The period between the first and second world wars saw deeper exploration of the idea of stewardship beyond a legal obligation to tithe to a focus on all one’s dealings in the material realm, though the impact of such on the business practices of church members was sometimes hard to discern. This era was also one in which various techniques became standard features in much of Protestantism, including the every member canvass, pledge cards, and the divided offering envelope (for benevolences and current expenses).
The book’s analysis of periods from the mid-twentieth century to the present reveals a variety of techniques for funding churches, furnishing a rich summary of emphases and approaches to the task. This comprehensive survey of the stewardship literature of the past half-century will help pastors locate their own approaches amidst a panoply of choices. The effect is to humble any potential sense of uniqueness a current practitioner might harbor while rendering available alternatives that may have heretofore gone unnoticed.
James Hudnut-Beumler has done a remarkable service to many publics with this book, but especially to the public of American Protestantism itself. He is clear-minded at the end that the result of the 250-year legacy of voluntary support for religion with the accompanying competition for “religious” dollars has transformed religion into an expressive good that “undermines religion as a prescriptive guide to living.” As pastors and church leaders ponder the lessons of this volume for the life of particular churches perhaps none is more salient than this one.
D. Cameron Murchison is Dean of the Faculty, Executive Vice President, and Professor of Ministry at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.
