Covenanter Witness Vol. 54 - Rparchives.org

iver."
clothes for the occasion. Then the minister left
Cucuta, and lost track of the boy, who also moved
away.
The Outcome
When next he heard of him it was in a bulletin
of the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia. There
he read how, on or about 12th February 1953, a
young man, a Protestant, called Carlos Julio Tovar,
"bought two Bibles and twelve New Testaments in
the Protestant Church of Barrancabermeja. He plan
ned to sell them on a trip down the river to Puerto
Wilches. On the boat going down the river a govern
ment detective heard him talking to a woman about
the Gospel. The detective would have killed him on
the spot, but the captain of the launch restrained him
... On arriving at Puerto Wilches the detective took
Sr. Tovar to the police station, where they confis
cated the Bibles and New Testaments. They put him
to work carrying wood to the local slaughter house,
work which was too heavy for him. The night of
17th February the police took the boy to the slaught
er house, stabbed him twice with their bayonets, and
threw him into the Magdalena. Somehow, by five
o'clock the next morning he was able to get out of
the river and appeared at the house of one of the
believers at Puerto Wilches Somebody informed
the police of Carlos' hideout. Officers came, sought
him out, clubbed him to death, then disposed of the
body in the
The Bulwark
Churches Can't Live on Air
Yet People Spend Three Times as Much on Liquor as They Do on Religion
Did you skip church one Sabbath recently be
cause you'd been forewarned that there would be
another of those "money sermons" Or, if you re
frained from skipping, did you drowse through the
part that would have told you how your church is
run financially
If you went on that particular Sabbath, you
probably heard a restrained sermon to the effect
that now, when fear grips mankind, Americans need
spiritual guidance as never before and that, more
over, the whole world needs the leadership of demo
cratic churches.
The preacher didn't say anything very directly
about finances, though his text may have given
the general idea that even things of the spirit cost
money.
But after the sermon the chairman of the
board of deacons got up, and you began to think
of the roast and an afternoon nap, as he mumbled
through a reading of the church budget.
It was bigger than last year, he said, but the
money wasn't going to buy as much on account of
the price of everything. He said something about the
building debt and how, if it could only be paid off,
the new Bible school annex could be built before
materials got scarce. Only he guessed it wouldn't
get paid again this year.
(You wondered why in tarnation not. The build
ing was 13 years old and it couldn't have cost so
much to build back in 1938).
The deacon's voice droned on about how the
board was sorry that it couldn't raise the minister's
pay this year.
(With mild shock you considered the minister's
salary and wondered how in the world he got by
on it.)
Meanwhile, the deacon was saying that the
board was sorry, too, that it couldn't repaint the
preacher's house. Or reroof the chapel. Or give more
money to foreign missions, because those people
were surely doing a wonderful job in places where
a democratic church in action could set a valuable
example.
As a matter of fact, he said, instead of doing
any of those things the board had decided to cut
down on some benevolences and expenses.
February 23, 1955
It's too bad, he said lamely toward the end of
his speech, but that's how things were. Just not
enough money to go around.
Actually, you didn't listen very carefully to the
deacon's speech, and some of his dire predictions
you wrote off to his well-known pessimism. Any
way, the total amount looked to you like plenty of
money to run one small church.
So you pondered only briefly about increasing
your pledge this year and discarded the idea as you
thought about taxes and the high cost of groceries.
And that was that, as far as you were concerned,
for another year. You could settle down to churchgoing
without worrying that money sermons would
disrupt your spiritual (or possibly just sleepy) medi
tations.
It's rather a shame that you didn't listen more
carefully to what the deacon said. As a member of
a church, you really
are up against.
ought to know what churches
Take a Church
There are churches and churches. City cathe
drals that spend a couple of hundred thousand dol
lars a year. Tiny country chapels that get by on five
or six hundred dollars. But take a look at one that's
fairly typical as churches go, and see how it runs.
Back in 1924 a group of 43 residents of a suburb
near a large southern city got together and organ
ized this particular church. They bought a small
frame building for $3,500 and hired a preacher at a
salary of $900 a year. Most of the financing was done
by the national organization of their denomination.
Gradually the suburb grew, and people packed
the pews of the little wooden chapel. A building fund
was started, and by 1947 there was enough accumu
lated to risk going into debt for a new church. It
cost $85,000, of which $15,000 was a grant from the
denomination's national fund. The rest was obtained
through a bank loan at 3 J/2% interest.
Now the debt stands at $30,000, and the princi
pal is being paid off at a rate of $4,000 or $5,000
a year.
The church has a congregation of 513, and they
have pledged enough to sustain an operating budget,
exclusive of paying off the building debt, of $14,740
this year. Of that, some $11,000 is needed for actual
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