When Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else, he will hold to the one, and despise the other, Ye cannot serve God and mammon," maybe that scripture needs a modern megachurch update?
Don’t look at me as if I am spewing heresy, read the papers today: “Half of 10 bigger charities here have business units” or “New Creation Church says it never meant to go into business.”
Alas, it used to be a cocktail mix of religion and politics - or theocracy. Now, it‘s a molotov cocktail mix of religion and big businesses - or theo-entreprenocracy.
ST further reports that “the New Creation subsidiary, Rock Productions, partnered property giant CapitaLand to develop The Star, a shopping mall cum performing arts centre in Buona Vista that also provides its place of worship. New Creation was the second largest charity by donations collected last year, bagging $122 million.”
Next comes City Harvest Church. The church, ”which collected $29 million last year in donations, owns Urban Property Investments (UPI), a vehicle for its investments in Suntec Singapore, where it holds its services.”
That’s not all.
“City Harvest's business subsidiary, UPI, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). The church also has a Singapore-incorporated subsidiary, Kosmos Global Private, an investment holding firm that holds Web news provider City News and the Ink Room (Bookstore).”
And here’s a word or two from CHC. ”A church spokesman told ST that it was advised by its law firm to incorporate UPI as a foreign company in the BVI, as the consortium investing in Suntec is a foreign BVI company.”
At third place is FCBC. “Faith Community Baptist's business subsidiaries include Gateway Entertainment, which produces magic shows such as those put on by senior pastor Lawrence Khong and his daughter, Priscilla, and Gateway Theatre, in Bukit Merah, where it holds its services on weekends. The church collected $26 million in donations last year.”
Mind you, those are the headlines for the three business-arms of the megachurches, and Mathew 6:24 (the scripture I started with about serving two masters) takes on a different perspective when churches are run on both God and a dash of mammon on the side.
And while the root of evil is the love of money, maybe the root of financial prudence is all about managing wealth, growing it to hundreds of millions, and keeping it safe in one’s shiny coffer?
I guess gone are the days where pastor shepherds their flocks with a long wooden stick with a crook at its end. FYI, that crook is for catching straying sheep. It is also used to defend the sheep from predator, prowling lions that roar.
Nowadays, the catch from the shepherd’s crook comes in a peculiar angle.
And if NCC and CHC 2.0 are taken as the beaten pathway for the body of Christ of the future, then should pastors of other churches struggling with bleeding and disillusioned membership adopt a pastorprenuership stand, and focus more on growing their ”Sovereign Wealth Funds” by forming joint partnership with multimillion-dollar businesses? I mean, why focus only on the Rock of Christ when you can grow so much more in numbers when you also conscientiously build on the Rock of Earthly Productions?
In any event, you can’t beat them. You just can’t. I know it is not about competition, yet most times, it is really about stultification - that is, standing in dumbfounded awe. This bewilderment is largely about how the megachurches and its theology have changed so much and so fast in the era of prosperity, post-modernism and the cult of personality to becoming indistinguishable from the methodologies of the world.
Their numbers and faithful devotion have reached the worldly stratospheres of redefined churchanity.
And if we often sing this familiar chorus that with Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm, then for these glittering megachurches, that hymn comes with a modern twist: With wealth in the vessel (or church coffers), you can create the storm, that is, the storm of publicity, attraction, bewilderment, emotionalism, spiritualism, and seeker-sensitive sensationalism.
What further adds to the complication are the loans and business losses.
City Harvest alone has on its books “a shareholder loan of $27 million that was interest-free, unsecured and had no fixed terms of repayment.”
The spokesman for CHC clarified that “a shareholder loan is unlike a bank loan in that it is financing provided to a company by its shareholder.”
Now, if you missed that, it is a clarification that turns all the tithers and offerers of the megachurch into shareholders of a largely business consideration in the context of what is supposed to be a body of Christ, with the latter as her chief cornerstone.
Be that as it may, here’s a forewarning by NUS associate professor Mak Yuen Teen: “But there are concerns about a charity extending such loans, which creates risk for the charity as the loan may not be repaid.”
What’s more, considering CHC’s shadowy past involving six convictions for the largest case concering the misuse of charity funds, the opacity persists with CHC’s BVI (British Virgin Islands).
SIT’s Professor Ho Yew Kee “pointed out that the BVI is a tax haven and it is very hard to obtain the financial records of companies there, as BVI "has few tax treaties with other nations, thus protecting the financial privacy of bank account holders””. So much for full disclosure and transparency. But, having said all that, trying to shed some light into the darkness of mammon's adulteration, does her members really care? Mm...
Now comes the losses...
FCBC subsidiary, Gateway Entertainment, lost “between about $50,000 and $3.7 million a year between 2014 and 2017.”
And NCC’s Rock Productions takes the cake here when it comes to losses. It “was in the red for the five years” and “lost between $12 million and $17 million between 2013 and 2017, after deducting for tax from continuing operations. Its total loss for that five years amounted to about $74 million.”
And after digesting all that, my question is this as I end: -
“With loans with no fixed period of repayment, with losses in the millions, with reserves reaching more than half a billion, and with many congregants struggling to make ends meet and entrusting their time, service and hard-earned money to the church, are there real/potential risk of conflicts between the pastoral leadership and their congregation, between the mandate of heaven and the mammon on earth, between the great commission and the great attraction, between one’s focus on Calvary and one’s focus on the profit margin, and between a broken soul denying all before his beloved Saviour and a camel going through the eye of a needle?”
Ps: Sorry to put you churchgoer through a morning of thought-provoking reflection. My intention is never to dampen your faith, but to hopefully deepen it. Have a blessed morning.
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