Did you know that Romans is a support-raising letter?

Back in October, Cory and I attended a seminar about support-raising. One of the support-raising coaches mentioned that Paul's intent for his letter to the Romans was to raise funds for his trip to Spain (verse 15:24). I decided that after returning home from the seminar I would re-read Romans and view it through the lens of fund-raising in order to uncover Paul's method for supporting his ministry work. God did, after all, sustain him through an entire life of ministry.

After finishing Romans, I didn't feel like I had necessarily gained any sort of concrete direction in my support raising. God didn't show me a 3-tiered system to fully fund a ministry - not that i expected him to. I did notice that Paul spent most of his letter sharing truths with his readers that applied the gospel to where they were at personally in their spiritual journey. He praised the Roman Christians for what they were doing well and cautioned them about things that could become a struggle for them. The actual part where he makes a request for assistance is very short and easy to miss.

I surmise that the Romans had a more difficult time giving funds than other Christian communities. Though Paul talks about money very little in an explicit way, he seems to talk about it through addressing heart issues that affect generosity and feelings of entitlement. Common themes of the "Roman Road" seem to take on a new meaning when thinking about money. The often-quoted Romans 3 refers to our inability to be righteous of our own accord and the foolishness of boasting about what we have. This is followed up by a passage about wages in Romans 4:4-5 "Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift but as an obligation. However to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness."

Trying to unpack this scripture feels like a brain teaser because Paul is taking something common in our daily lives (working to receive a wage) and using it as a metaphor to teach the Romans something about spiritual "works." Obviously God doesn't want to us to be bums and not work. This verse isn't meant to spur us towards a vow of poverty. The first part refers to a paradigm that the Romans had: You work to earn money and when you receive that money you are entitled to it because you worked hard for it. Perhaps the Romans where applying this principle to the "righteous" things they did for God, treating the title of "righteous" as something they had earned. The "man who does not work" is simply a man who does not seek to build up a credit of righteousness through his own doing.

The way I see it, this would have a great impact on the way the Romans actually view money. You work hard to earn money and perhaps you start to feel that your money is just a way to store your time in measurable increments. The difficult thing about this view is that is makes it extremely difficult to have a generous attitude when giving your money away. You start finding yourself thinking, 'Don't they know that asking for $250 is equivalent to a week of my life spent working. They are asking for a week of my life!" And when you do give it's hard to resist some feeling of self-credited righteousness. As if we are entitled to even one more breath on this earth. I say all of this because this is how I think about money.

Because I view money this way, it makes it extremely difficult for me to ask people for financial assistance in my ministry work. Going back to Paul's actual request for money in Chapter 15, he unashamedly uses the logic of, 'I've ministered to you, my dear friends, now help me minister to others.' If the Romans choose to financially assist Paul, that money will not benefit the Roman community, it will not be used to feed the hungry or help the homeless. It will be used to procure food and transportation for Paul's journey and to sustain him while he's away.

These are things that hinder my ability to ask for assistance - the CCO support-raising community calls it "mind trash." When I ask I'm afraid I'll get answers like, "You've moved away to another community and you're not using the money to benefit our people," or, "You should be working with another more needy population group like those urban youth you used to work for, " and even, "I thought you always wanted to be in Colorado, why aren't you there?" But I'm encouraged by Paul's ability to ask. He spent an amount of time in a community and then moved on. He wrote to these communities but sometimes did not see them again. He also spent time in wealthy communities and cities because he knew that privileged people with wealth could be very poor in spirit. And finally, I'm sure he had a favorite place to be (perhaps it was his homeland) yet he would not deny God's call to other places.

And actually, I have had some people tell me these things. I'm glad they've been honest. I hope that through this support-raising process I will get the opportunity to talk to the people I love about their beliefs about money. I've noticed many different ways of thinking and I hope that God gives me the opportunity to discuss this most-difficult-topic with people who are willing to share their thoughts. I also have begun to recognize that even if this job I have is short-lived and even if I come up short of my fund-raising goal, God is transforming the way I think about money and reshaping the way my heart feels about wealth. I'm very thankful for the experience. For the first time in my life I don't feel that my wages are given to me "out of obligation" from a higher impersonal entity. I feel that my wages are a gift. And subsequently, my time is a gift.