Frank's Cottage

When I saw this graphic in an Internet atheism community, it made me laugh.

Is “religion” a multi-billion dollar “industry”? Yes. In 2012, the Economist magazine estimated the U.S. Catholic Church spends about $170 billion a year.

Furthermore, According to the Leadership Network, senior pastors of the largest 209 churches in North America earned (including allowances for housing) between $85,000 and $265,000 in 2012.

Now it’s time for other facts:

The Economist estimates that 57 per cent of the Catholic church’s U.S. spending went to Catholic health care networks, 28 per cent to colleges, six per cent to day-to-day operations at local parishes and dioceses, and 2.7 per cent to national charities. Do any other “industries” spend their money like this?

The median church in the U.S. has 75 regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings, according to the National Congregations Study. I imagine the number is very similar in my country, Canada. Can anyone credibly insist that these churches are raking in cash?

According to PayScale.com, the average Canadian pastor’s salary is between $34,876 and $74,500.  According to the National Association of Church Business Administration, the average U.S. pastor received $28,000 in 2012.  In addition, the association notes one out of five pastors has to work a second job to support himself and his family.

While the graphic I’ve included here drips with cynicism, most reasonable people can see that the reality is very different. While “religion” may be an “industry” for some people, a vast, vast majority of people who follow Jesus of Nazareth (considered by many to be the Son of God) are in it because they feel called by God.

Senior pastors, youth pastors, denominational leaders, church administrative assistants, bishops, archbishops, etc. will do “everything in their power” to keep on following where God leads.

For me, that meant moving across Canada to accept a position with a faith-based organization. Are we “benefitting financially”? If you translate that as having enough to own a very average home (on two salaries, including my wife’s, who works for a bank), then yes.

For other people, that means working in dangerous places like South Sudan, providing medical care to refugees. Or teaching people how to avoid the deadly Ebola virus in Africa. Are they “benefitting financially”? Not even a little. In many cases, they don’t own a house or a car.

So what does all this mean to you? It means that while there are some bad apples in “religion”, almost all people working in the faith “industry” are there because they want to make a difference in a world that we all know isn’t doing very well.

Many of them found their lives transformed for the better when they decided to follow Jesus. They realized that God was offering them a gift in Jesus; follow Him and God no longer sees the bad things they’ve done and the good things they’ve failed to do. Jesus’ sacrificial death on a cross cleaned their slate, so God sees them as He sees His son: pure and perfect.

God offers YOU that gift, too. Interested? Post your thoughts below and let’s have a conversation.

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George Carlin (1937-2008) was an extraordinary comedian and social critic who never made a secret of his contempt for spirituality and organized religion.

So while I don’t know if he actually said the crude and confrontational words in this graphic, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised.

Either way, let’s take a few minutes to examine the quote:

1. No, followers of Jesus of Nazareth (who many people believe is the Son of God) DON’T worship a “dead Jew” – Jesus followers worship a living person who transcends any kind of “organized religion”.

How do I know Jesus lives? First of all, I know He rose from the dead after his crucifixion by Roman authorities. In a letter to early Jesus followers, Paul, a missionary who spread the message of Jesus throughout the Mediterranean, wrote. “After [His resurrection], Christ appeared to more than 500 other believers at the same time. Most of them are still living today, but some have died.”

In other words, Paul is telling his readers that if they don’t believe him about Jesus coming back from the dead, there are hundreds of people who can back him up. That strikes me as very, very credible.

Increasing the credibility of this fact is that Jesus predicted all this. In one of the four source documents of his life, Jesus told his followers that, “I, the Messiah, am going to be betrayed and killed and three days later I will return to life again.”

2. Now you might be saying “So what? That was 2,000 years ago. Where is he now?” Great question. Now, Jesus is where He told His followers He would be – in Heaven, (a) advocating for people who follow Him, (b) living in their hearts and (c) changing their lives.

An early Jesus follower addresses this: “So Christ can save those who come to God through him. Christ can do this forever, because he always lives and is ready to help people when they come before God.”

Blogger Steve Simms writes about this on his website (http://stevesimms.wordpress.com/), noting “I have personally known hundreds of people who have been transformed and set free through an encounter with Jesus, including dozens of drug addicts and alcoholics.”

3. By now, I’m sure you have an idea about what I’m gonna write about the “on a stick” part of the Carlin quote. Yes, churches almost always have a cross prominently displayed. Yes, many Jesus followers have a cross somewhere on their bodies (mine is a Celtic cross, connecting to my Irish heritage, that I wear around my neck).

But I certainly don’t worship the cross and neither do any Jesus followers I know. We need and want to see it often because we want and need to be reminded that we, like every other human being (including YOU) have missed the mark of who God wants us to be. We’ve fallen short, ignored the love of our creator, gone our own way and messed up — often in ways we can’t see.

The cross reminds us of what Jesus did for us — His sacrificial death wipes our slate clean with God. When we believe in and follow Jesus, God sees us as He sees His son — perfect, without a single blemish.

So what do you think? Post your thoughts below and let’s have a conversation.

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