The church-govt partnership sin

 By John Luluaki Professor of Law

 NEARLY everything that has been said by politicians, bureaucrats, church leaders, and others about the government-church partnership has been positive. 

I propose a contrary more serious view. 

I fear that this partnership may represent the beginning of the most devious long-term design by Satan to render churches powerless against a government and secular agenda to disobey God. 

Disobedience is sin. It represents a serious distraction of the churches’ responsibility regarding the Great Commission. 

The result is that the time partner churches will be required to spend managing the partnership would mean less time available to them to commit to accomplishing the Great Commission.

Additionally, this partnership poses other serious implications for churches generally. First, it represents a typically cunning design by Satan to exploit the spiritual and physical vulnerabilities and challenges being experienced today by churches generally, some more so than others, in this country.

Secondly, it represents a serious threat to the separation of church and state, a separation that must always be maintained to enable churches to be God’s voice against violations of God’s laws by secular decrees and laws. 

The partnership is dangerous to the neutrality of churches. 

The partnership opens up churches to the real and serious danger of forging allegiances with political entities and personalities that threaten the requirement for churches to remain independent and neutral. 

In this scenario, programmes run by churches under the partnership vehicle run the risk of being discontinued if the political pendulum swings against them.

More fundamentally, however, the question may be asked if the partnership is not a deliberate design by politicians, with the future in mind, to court churches and ultimately entrap them for political purpose. 

In other words, is this a design by politicians to assist, if not ‘bribe’, churches so that they are unable to take a neutral position when the next general elections come around? 

Is the ultimate objective of the partnership to paralyse the churches’ power of volition and secure their votes? 

After all, no one should bite the hands that feed them. 

Some individual politicians have already embarked on a programme of bribing churches in advance using public funds.

Thirdly, when churches have the option to access funds under the partnership, the importance of tithes and offering diminishes. 

Reliance by churches on partnership funds cannot render tithes and offering irrelevant nor can it replace them. 

God’s channel for increase generally for both churches and believers is tithes and offering. That is His promise! 

Connecting with the partnership comes with the danger of disconnecting with God’s channel for believers to experience God’s promise of increase, abundance and contentment of life.

Fourthly, churches claiming to be God’s representatives on earth must recognise the partnership for what it is – a disguise. 

It is Lucifer’s ‘little red riding hood’ tale to lure and entrap churches so that he can take over and ultimately secularise and destroy God’s agenda for churches in this country. 

Who is the ‘fox’ in Matthew 7:15? The state and politicians who are selling the partnership or believers and churches who have bought into this partnership product? 

In the classic legend of the ‘Pied Piper’, the town of Hamelin, in Germany, had hired the services of a multicoloured (pied) piper to lure away a large population of rats that had infested the town. 

The piper played his pipe and successfully lured the rats into the river where they all drowned. 

The piper was however not paid. There is an analogy to be drawn from this legend for the church/state partnership. 

In this case, who is the pied piper and who are the rats? 

Fifthly, it must be recognised that receiving moneys under this partnership comes with the risk of fracturing fellowship unity and relationships among church members. 

It does this by creating the environment within which suspicions and disagreements may arise regarding the use and management of these funds. 

This is unavoidable when partner churches are required to account for both tithes and offering, on one hand, and partner funds, on the other. 

Churches are accountable to mem­bers of their churches for the tithes and offering while it is to the government for partnership funds. 

Disagreements in large churches may be a ripple but a single disagreement, especially about money, in a small church may be a tidal wave. An underlying rationale for the partnership is to allow churches to align themselves with the 2050 Vision. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with churches being involved with government or accepting donor assistance in important aspects of the social sector to improve the lives of people in this country. 

To help the poor, the sick, and the needy is part of God’s will. 

However, while this in itself is not wrong, its implications on the principal spiritual role of churches in this country or anywhere else in the world are critical. 

It has the real potential of detracting them from the reason why they are churches.

Churches must remain aligned with God or lose their spiritual vision and relevance. 

Aligning with government and government powers will inevitably require forming groups within Brethren churches. 

And forming groups always entails excluding individuals and groups, factionalising the body of Christ, and generating disagreement. 

Can God’s representatives continue as one and with one purpose to truly serve and represent Him if there is disagreement? 

Of course, the portfolios of health and education, for example, are important social concerns in respect of which both government and churches must unite and be involved in improving services to the people in the health and education sectors. 

Classrooms of church run schools, for example, provide the best environment for introducing and promoting values generally such as honesty, respect, kindness, obedience, and compassion in young people. 

An increase in the number of church-run schools, and therefore of classrooms, only increases the number of young citizens to whom values can be introduced in an organised and acceptable way. 

It is in this environment that churches have the greatest opportunity of introducing God and His principles and laws to young people to complement and anchor the values they have been taught. 

Public or government schools, by contrast, are not as suited to playing this role.

If churches must build schools, clinics or hospitals, they must depend on God to provide them these funds. This is possible without entering into partnerships that threaten their place in society as God’s instruments and His voice. 

Ask churches that have seen God do this for them; churches for whom God has provided funds for them to build hospitals, schools and even universities. 

But as expected, churches that have experience in this area are precisely those that are stable and organisationally (though not necessarily spiritually as well) more disciplined and strong.

The above aside, it must be accepted nevertheless that the nature of the requirements of health and education remain fundamentally secular concerns. 

However, good works can never do what only God’s grace and righteousness can do – salvation and more! As such, churches must recognise and be vigilant against the likely temptation to use the partnership in the name of education and health to cheat the partnership for its own gain. 

For example, a few years ago, a very senior official from the AIDS Council expressed serious concern that a mainline church (named), having successfully applied for and obtained a large sum of money totalling millions under the country’s response to the AIDS programme, had applied most of those moneys towards adding to the church’s assets rather than towards the programme for which it had been given those moneys.

Churches must know who their partner is before committing themselves to this partnership. 

Their partner is an entity that has built for itself a reputation of stealing from its own people and sharing some of it with foreign conspirators; corrupting the system to get its way and accumulate undeserved wealth; enabling friends and cohorts enrich their own bank accounts at the expense of development for all and their well-being; continuing to pay the salaries of criminal elements of a constabulary that brutalises and kills innocent citizens and destroys their property; permitting openly gay and lesbian foreigners coming into the country in diplomatic bags despite the clear terms of our domestic laws that criminalise sodomy and homosexuality; playing mute against prostitution and allowing plane- and ship-loads of Asian prostitutes into the country; allowing locusts of illiterate and un-employable Asians coming into the country and taking up work reserved for citizens and clogging up employment queues at the expense of the rights and interests of citizens; and ignoring the clear risk threatening the values of our societies by a human rights agenda, sponsored by the United Nations, that seeks ultimately to replace God’s laws against  the sins of the flesh Saint Paul so strongly warns us against in Galatians 5:19-21.

It is not possible for churches to enter into a partnership with an entity that revolves around and thrives on political seduction without seriously risking their role as God’s in­struments; a scenario or context within which political expediency rather than high political integrity shapes one’s political space and, consequentially, the form of politics itself.