As Li Keqiang, premier of the China State Council, stated at the Fourth Session of the 13th National People’s Congress, “We will use the Internet Plus model to promote integrated development of online and offline businesses in more fields and create new forms and models of business, thus providing more convenient and satisfying services for consumers.”
This was an important message that showed that the economic era of the Internet had already come, but many of our Christian thoughts have fallen behind the times.
Nowadays, in addition to e-commerce platforms, some platforms that focused on culture and entertainment have already begun to integrate with people's lives. Establishing an Internet community to attract people through entertainment, they provide some convenient services in life for everyone to get rich benefits from the platform.
Assuming that Christianity also had a platform like Quick Worker (Kuaishou) or Tik Tok (Douyin), would it enrich the lives of Christians? If there was community marketing, could it benefit the development of Christian enterprises? If low-cost and high-quality services were provided, would they attract more Gentiles into the Christian community? Through providing services on these platforms, they could charge a certain fee which would be used to help churches in backward areas, provide pastors with insurance and solve their worries for the future. There would be fewer poor pastors, how great is this!
A concept that had always influenced the development of Christianity, was that the church could engage in commercial services. Because the Lord Jesus used a whip to drive the merchants out of the temple, people believed that God did not allow the church to do business. In fact, the Bible only mentioned expelling such activities from the temple, just like the church today. God did not allow these things to happen in the sanctuary, as they were incompatible with worship. He had not said that Christians could not do these outside of the church. There could be no business in the church, but would it not be good for Christians to congregate outside the church?
If the church, composed of the faithful, was not allowed to do business, was it same for individual Christians? What did they eat and drink? How did they survive?
We should be free to generate income to give out more love. We cannot simply say it is worldly to earn money, as Abraham was also as rich as Croesus.
The overall economic improvement of the church would be more conducive to its development. As the saying goes, a clever woman cannot make bricks without straw. No matter the trade, it is difficult to develop without financial assistance. The same goes for the church, which is also difficult to develop without economic support. So what does God want us to be servants for? If we push everything to God and only used prayers to give orders.
While churches today focus on the ministry of evangelism, we must also solve the financial problems of the church. I think the industry that is most suitable for church development might be to build a community platform for Christians in this era of Internet plus; we could make good use of business opportunities brought by the Internet, so the church can emerge from economic constrains and focus on spreading the gospel.
(The original article is published by Gospel Times)
- Translated by Abigail Wu
