December, 1996 

Dear ICE Subscriber:

In the last month of the calendar year, people are more ready to sit down and evaluate their performance over the year — and the performance of the ministries they support financially. Then, in January, they make plans for the next year, such as losing the eight pounds they gained over Christmas. This is December. It's time for year-end tax planning and year-end evaluations. This is in preparation for January's longer-term planning.

We should make long-term plans even though we know that God reserves the right to overturn them. It is better to have a bad plan than no plan because we can revise a bad plan. No plan at all encourages us to drift along aimlessly. Most Christians recognize the need for their children to make long-term plans, at least educationally. This is why even the most blatant dispensationalist or amillennialist who insists that Jesus is coming soon is hesitant to tell a bright child not to go to the expense and trouble of becoming, say, a physician. If nothing else, the medical missionary still is a calling greatly respected in Christian circles. This is proper. But the same respect should apply to any other profession that can be put to good use among the poor and afflicted.

The issue here is lifetime Christian service. Formal education is a good thing if it is put to productive kingdom uses. This is why short-run myopia induced by Rapture fever or Parousia fever is such a bad thing. We should encourage our children to go as high as they can, as far as they can, by sacrificing their present pleasures and income for the sake of kingdom work. While we should not worship the academic credential, where the State requires it, we must encourage them to play the game and move forward with their careers.

Let me repeat: the issue is lifetime Christian service. I receive occasional letters from young men who want to know where they should go to graduate school. Rarely do they ask me this question: "What is the potential for both income and service if I pursue this degree?" They just think that they should go on with more education. This is to mistake form for substance. The goal should be service. Earning the degree is important only if there is a legal barrier to service imposed by the State.

Your goal should be this: to identify your most important area of service in which you would be the most difficult to replace. This is your calling. Now ask yourself: "Will anyone pay me to perform this service?" If not, you have another question to get answered: "How can I earn a living, so that I can fund my calling?" That is what I have had to do. My calling is not a market-generated service. It is a non-profit for which I do not get paid. I pour all of the ICE's income back into projects and products that have no ready market.

Seeking counsel is wise, but you must get counsel for first things first. Don't ask where you should go to graduate school until you are sure that there is no other way to perform your calling. Make sure that you have identified your calling. Here, too, counsel is valuable. But because a calling is not normally a person's main source of income, accurate counsel here is more difficult to obtain. Non-profit success indicators are more difficult to identify and assess than free market success indicators. Even a medical missionary may not know which mission station is best for someone with his skills.

There is one thing that you must learn to dismiss in your calculations: prestige. This is one of the most alluring of all the siren songs that covenant-breaking society offers. Here, you must keep Paul's words in mind:

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence (I Cor. 1:26–29).

One of the best ways to make money is to enter a field that has no prestige attached to it, and become the best person in that field. I think of day care centers. Men can earn incomes far above the national average, with relatively few academic qualifications, because operating a day care is seen as a woman's job. Prestige-seeking men do not enter this field. Competition is therefore far lower. This barrier to entry puts money into the pockets of men who are not repulsed by a low-prestige occupation.

There are Christian parents who will happily send their child to an expensive but prestigious university, who would be wise to send him or her to a local junior college, where the classroom teaching is better, classes are smaller, and the faculty is more conservative. The student will not make a lot of lifetime business contacts at the junior college, and the competition will be less intense, but for most students, the trade-off is worth it. Yet for the sake of vicarious prestige, Christian parents send their children into the humanists' main recruiting ground and spiritual meat-grinder. This is not wise.

We must be content with competence, thrift, and a lifetime of steady progress. In the race for success, the tortoise outruns the hare. The long-term growth of the kingdom of God defeats all rival kingdoms because of the compounding process. "Slow but sure" is the rule. "For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little" (Isa. 28:10). Here is another: "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62).

Alcoholics Anonymous has a phrase: "One day at a time." This is a biblical principle: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (Matt. 6:34). Better to work than to worry. But you should seek competent counsel regarding your proper work.

When you seek counsel, seek it from people who know what they are talking about. Warning: a lot of would-be Christian experts don't know what they're talking about. Let me give a recent example. I received a letter from the director of another Christian educational foundation. It publishes a newsletter in the area of Christian leadership, which is in turn tied to practical economic leadership, or so the organization says. The letter-writer explained how his ministry could not afford to support ICE because "we are devoting all our spare funds to building our work. . . . We do not charge for our subscriptions. . . ." He does require that each subscriber contact his ministry once a year. He then asked me to critique a pile of his newsletters and send him comments, "if you have any spare time."

I ask: Why would any non-profit educational ministry keep people on its mailing list indefinitely, free of charge? What principle of leadership does such a policy reveal? It may be good for the president — "Look at how many people are reading my stuff!" — but this policy places an extra burden on the donors, who are asked to keep sending money so that the ministry can send materials out to people who are just not interested enough to send in even a dollar a year. I can see putting such people on an e-mail mailing list, since there is no added charge for printing and postage. But mailed? This is wasteful beyond belief. It imposes economic burdens on the donors for the sake of massaging the ego of the director.

In foreign mission fields, medical missionaries often charge something for their services — a chicken or an egg or something of value — to those receiving the care. The price asked does not come close to covering actual costs, any more than we can pay God for Christ's sacrifice, but it helps the recipient retain his dignity and his sense of participating in the ministry. He is doing his part to keep the mission's doors open for the next person. Missions that do everything for free are teaching very bad economics to the recipients of the message. My view is that a newsletter recipient ought to pay something, or do something, to receive the information after a trial period. If he has no extra money, will he at least hand out free copies of the newsletters to friends? This helps the organization grow.

Because this man's ministry sends materials free of charge forever, I can understand why it has no spare money — say, $10 to buy a single ICE book a year. Yet he presumes that I have lots of spare time to devote to helping him improve his ministry. I wonder: What is the principle of Christian leadership that assumes that other busy professionals are ready and waiting to devote hours to helping his ministry free of charge, when he is not willing to spend a dime on their ministries? Where is any attempt to honor the principle of reciprocity which underlies both the free market and Christian non-profit organizations?

This man claims that he first found out about ICE after having read Chilton's "Prosperous Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators" in Princeton Seminary's Speer library. (ICE donated that book to the Speer library.) Actually, the word in the title is Productive, not Prosperous, but the idea is close. The main point of Chilton's book is that Christians should avoid the socialist principle of seeking something for nothing at someone else's expense. The letter-writer apparently missed this aspect of the book.

No doubt his intentions are good. He merely wants me to know that ICE's ministry isn't all that valuable to someone like himself, who is teaching the world about Christian leadership, because, as he says, his ministry "does not adhere to the academic discipline of economics, but deals in topics more in keeping with the Greek root `oikonomos', meaning household, and `nemo', to arrange, which we translate as household management. . . ."

So, I looked through the pile of newsletters, and the first article I came across dealt with Vilfredo Pareto's 80-20 rule governing the market's distribution of wealth. Of course, the man's ministry doesn't have anything to do with economic theory — just Pareto's theory of wealth distribution. You know: plain old New Testament Greek household management. Housewives around the world no doubt run their households by applying Pareto's optimality theory.

Then there is a long section in one letter devoted to what is known as the 50-year Kondratieff business cycle, one of the more popular myths in right-wing economic circles (and a few left-wing circles), and for which there is little long-term evidence. He then ties this cycle to the rise and fall of various parachurch revivalist ministries over the last two centuries. He argues that these revivals came only during the up phase of the economy. There is no footnote to Kondratieff, his theory, his evidence, his disappearance into Stalin's Gulag, or the extensive counter-evidence, such as what I mentioned in the long footnote on pages 145 and 146 of my book, Tools of Dominion. In seven issues of his newsletter, he cites only two economic sources: a pair of business magazine articles.

I ask: What ever happened to the division of labor (Rom. 12; I Cor. 12)? What ever happened to the suggestion that "Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety" (Prov. 11:14)? Why is it that Christians sit down at their word processors and tell other Christians to go marching into battle — which this man says we are in — without so much as an inquiry into what others in their chosen area of specialty have written about it? Because they think they are getting revelation straight from God. Anyway, they write as though they do.

The more I work with Christians, the more I am convinced that they are not ready to exercise the kind of leadership that the world desperately needs. The desire to get something for nothing is as ingrained in the thinking of most Christians as it is within the rest of the population. They think of God as a cosmic Sugar Daddy who does everything for free because Jesus paid all their debts, and so they can expect a free ride from other Christians. They forget: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more" (Luke 12:48).

My goal for ICE is to publish a body of work demonstrates that "something for nothing" is the principle of God's free grace, but it is not the basis of civil government. When the State offers something for nothing, some taxpayers will inevitably be crucified.

Sincerely,