Rich Christians in a Hungry World

Josef Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

There are 6.7 billion people living on the planet earth.

One out of two people make less than $2 a day. One out of two people.

According to Andy Stanley, if you make $37,000 a year, that puts you in the top 3-4% of the wage earners in the world. If you make over $40,000 a year, that puts you in the top 1%.

If you own a car, you represent 3% of the world's population. If you own more than one car, you are really rich!

If your car has its own house (we call them garages) and your car has to share that house with bicycles and lawn mowers and other stuff, you are really, really rich.

On average, study after studies show that American Christians give less than 3% of their income to charitable causes. And the studies show that the more you make, the less you give. This is almost always the case.

Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision writes:

The total income of American churchgoers is $5.2 trillion. (That's more than five thousand billion dollars). It would take just a little over 1 percent of the income of American Christians to lift the poorest one billion people in the world out of extreme poverty. Said another way, American Christians, who make up about 5 percent of the Church worldwide, control about half of global Christian wealth; a lack of money is not our problem (The Hole in Our Gospel, p.216).


Bottom line, here's what this means. American Christians continue to consume more and more of the world's materials, while remaining relatively silent about extreme poverty.

The average Christian gives less than 3% of their income. And according to Stearns, less than 2% of the giving goes to foreign missions of any kind. Here's what that means - The richest Christians in the history of the world is giving about five ten-thousandths of our income to the rest of the world.

Come on church! We can and must do better.

That is my hope. That is my prayer. And I want that to be my church.