The work and service of the Christian Church worldwide sometimes boggles the mind. Name a need, and do a brief “goggle” search and you’ll often find ten ministries already trying to meet that need.

And every one of them is asking for YOUR financial support.

So, you weed out the liberals, and the socialists and the ministries that compromise on evangelical doctrine, and you are STILL left with five worthy ministries begging for your support.

So which ones do you give to, and to which ones must you say, “Be warmed and be filled and I will pray for you brother?” J

Well, believe it or not there is an entire philosophy to motivate charitable fund-raising. First, there are the “starving orphan” ministries that show you poignant pictures of cute little kids in desperate circumstances. Surely, nobody is hard-hearted enough to turn their backs on these pitiful souls?

Hence, a person then is motivated to give because of guilt. The subliminal message is “Give money to OUR organization and it will relieve YOUR guilty feelings about living in affluence and comfort while little children suffer in desperate poverty.” Of course, whatever you do, DON’T look behind the curtain because enormous amount of the money given is often sucked up by the organization itself in salaries and administration costs.

Secondly, there are appeals to support what could be called “traditional” ministries such as missionaries. Most evangelicals rightly want the gospel to be shared, and sincerely pray “Here am I Lord- send Bob” Furthermore, Christians have a “romantic” view of missionary work which various mission boards capitalize on to motivate giving.

The image the sending organization wants you to have is of an intrepid soul, cutting through the bush with his machete to reach some tiny village oppressed by demonism and the local witch-doctor. In reality, MOST Western missionaries reside in the cities (after all- that is where most people live), in air-conditioned homes, and often have servants (labor is the one cheap thing in developing nations). In fact, the ONLY time many missionaries ever go into the “bush” is to get some nice pictures for the supporters back home! This is not to denigrate a missionary’s real work; but most Christians are in love with an ideal, than the real. So the “ideal” is offered as a reason to support these works. And again, few people know that missionaries have to raise considerably more than their salaries to support the “home office.”

One well known evangelical Presbyterian denomination just spent 5 million dollars building a new headquarters; and who do you think paid for it? We are not here arguing about the rightness or wrongness of a foreign mission’s board buying property but it is pretty hard to sell that “vision” to the people who give to the work. So, 20% or more is taken off the top of what the missionary raises to pay for “over-head.”

Thirdly, there are those ministries that try to target specific interests in the Christian community. Whether college campuses, discipleship ministries, political action groups, Christian education, etc., the Christian church is broad enough that somewhere, there is a group of people who are interested in some worthy endeavor and willing to support it. Again, the average donor might be surprised about how much money goes to pay for the organization’s office space, computers, secretarial and administrative staff; not to mention the executive salaries of the “head honchos.”

Finally, there is the last type of ministry, always under-funded and desperate just to survive. These are the research ministries; the ministries of men who are actually trying to work out the implications of a Biblical worldview.

The late Dr. Rushdoony noted that it was always difficult for Christians to see the importance of supporting the Christian scholar. Most Christians think that seminaries and Christian colleges already support Christian scholarship, but one only has to look at what is being produced in the Christian academic world to realize that much of it is hopelessly irrelevant. Men spend years becoming ever more expert in ever narrower fields of study. But seldom do such men actually think outside the limits of their own fields and attempt to apply Biblical principles in the real world. And when they do, it can be embarrassing. There were many conservative evangelicals (some of them Reformed) who offered abortion as a legitimate moral choice BEFORE Roe vs. Wade. And after that historic decision, how many seminaries or Christian colleges came out strongly against abortion until the average Christian in the pew took to the streets?

You see the problem here is that in order to get those prestigious degrees so loved by the credentials committees, the professors had to attend secular universities for their PhD’s. And as a consequence, many of them drank deeply of the well of humanism. When they finally got to teach, many times these men had compromised the faith-and hence many Christian colleges and seminaries offer warmed over Marxism, theological liberalism and humanism mixed with a few Bible verses. In fact, Christian colleges are usually adept at raising money in direct ratio to the success of their sports teams!

It could be argued that some of the BEST work being done in advancing a comprehensive and consistent Christian worldview is by pastors who try to squeeze in a little time for quality reading, and writing between visits to the hospital, meetings with the deacons, and trying to get enough people to attend their churches so that they can survive. Because they are working in the real world every day, most pastors are aware of the desperate state of their congregation’s souls. Some pastors hunger for a more consistent application of the faith; many just give up and try to survive. There are precious few men who can actually keep body and soul together while doing the kind of work that is necessary for real cultural transformation. There are even fewer who are willingly supported by their churches. After all, the average Christian thinks, “we hired YOU to minister to US-not to go around having a ministry to others!”

Nobody ever gets excited about scholarship; and few people see the need to support it. And even when they do, there is always the problem that some men think that they ought to be supported just so they can sit home and read good books, and occasionally pontificate on certain subjects.

The question must be asked of such “ministries,” what are they producing that is of actual benefit to the church of Jesus Christ? Sure, someone just might have an insight here or there, or might be able to critique some aspect of medieval theology that no one else noticed before-but how is it going to change people’s lives?

Well, allow us to offer some reasons why we think OUR ministry should be supported; a ministry like some others that is trying to focus on ideas and research. First, Highlands-Reformed really DOES support its pastor, taking on the burden of paying his salary, and covering administration costs. They really believe that it is worth paying their pastor to teach other people’s children through the Institute’s college course programs, lecture at various conferences and occasionally coordinate a ministry trip overseas because they have a vision that they ought to serve other Christians; not just serve themselves. And as a consequence as a church, we are able to minister to Christians from many different back-grounds and beliefs, slowly nudging them towards a more consistent Biblical world and life-view.

But even more to the point, the difference is that we want to make a difference in YOUR life! That’s right, a difference, a real difference, a practical difference by showing you how your Biblical presuppositions OUGHT to work out in various areas of life.

God said through the Apostle Peter that “judgment begins with the household of God.” If Christians do not understand and apply a consistent Biblical worldview, paganism, humanism and Islam will pass us by, and not in the far distant future either. For over twenty years, we have been saying that the key to cultural reformation begins within the individual heart and life of the believer.

Thus we are writing books on Restoring Relationships, Restoring the Family and Restoring the Church. These are books that the mainstream Christian publishers will not touch just because they call for a radical re-thinking of life. And the sad reality is that most modern American evangelicals do not want to change, they want to be told that they are nice people, that God loves them and accepts them right where they are, and that when things get really bad, He will rapture them out of trouble.

Our message is a little harder to sell. We think that the current deplorable state of Christian civilization is a direct result of believers abandoning a comprehensive Biblical worldview and that as a culture; we are literally selling out our children’s future for a philosophy of personal peace at any price.

But at the “Institute” we are calling men to change; and that is not a comforting message. We are telling Christians that if they do NOT change, their nations might end up like those in the Middle East; once Christian, now poverty stricken, oppressive tyrannies lost to Islam.

Furthermore, we are actually HELPING Christians TO change in Developing Nations by reaching the highest levels of their national governments and teaching them about capitalism, and hard work and obedience to God’s moral law.

But it is pretty hard to get people excited about middle-aged men giving dull, boring lectures to stodgy members of various members of parliament, or sitting at computers writing books, articles and essays. That’s why we have been putting extracts of some of our work in this newsletter; we think we have something to say that needs to be said; we just need some help getting the message out. It is a daunting task; even dramatic, exciting Christian ministries such as Frontline Fellowship have had truck-loads of Bibles and humanitarian relief sitting in warehouses because they did not have the gas money for a mission’s trip.

So why SHOULD you take the limited amount of money you can afford to give to support all the worthy ministries that are crying for your dollar and entrust them to us?

You shouldn’t. That’s right, you should not give to us because you feel guilty, or because you have a romanticized ideal of what we do, or even because we happen to be ministering in an area you think important.

You should only give if you believe that Christian culture is something worth supporting and advancing. You should only give if you think that the materials we produce are accurate AND effective vehicles to relay God’s principles. You should only give if you think that we are saying things that need to be said, things that a lot of other-wise worthy ministries are not or will not say.

You should only give if you think living in a nation of freedom, prosperity and peace is something worth preserving and that giving other nations the same opportunity, is something worth working for.

I admit freely, that all our work in other nations is an attempt to send a “wake-up” call to American Christians. Call me naive, or simple; but I really sincerely believe that Western civilization as a whole, and American Christian culture in particular has been one of God’s greatest blessings to the world; just as Western humanistic culture has been one of the worst curses ever inflicted on man-kind. I really believe that the preservation and advancement of Christian civilization is worth the investment of my time, my energies and even, if God so wills my life.

Do you share that vision? Do you want your children, and grand-children, and yes even GREAT-grand-children to live and love and work in a society based on Biblical principles, or one dominated by paganism, humanism or Islam? Do you want to see the gospel flourish in the rest of the world? Are you excited about actually discipling the nations as our Lord commanded?

If you share our vision, please consider supporting us with prayer, and also as the Lord allows, financially. No, we have no pictures of starving children, no big buildings, not even an intrepid missionary likely to be martyred; but we are committed to doing what we can to preserve the best aspects of Christian culture, and reforming the rest until that day that every knee bows, and every tongue confesses, “Jesus is Lord.”

Support for the International Institute for Christian Culture and Highlands-Reformed Church can be sent to:

Highlands-Reformed

PO Box 279

Colbert, WA 99005