Memes about Religious Greed & Misguided Ministry

Selling Jesus

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So what we'd like to do now is look at some memes together and have a little light -hearted discussion about how we communicate some of these things that we're trying to spread.

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And just to clarify at the beginning here why we use humor. We're sometimes asked why we publish memes and satirical videos since they seem to be unfitting for the seriousness of the topic we're addressing.

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And we don't publish them simply because we like memes or wish to mock others as some other websites do.

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As pastors, as missionaries, we hold ourselves to a high standard and our reasons are biblical.

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And you can read some more about those reasons on our website if you go to sellingjesus .org

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and click on graphics. But let me just share my screen here and we're going to walk through some of these and talk through them.

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This is my favorite, probably all of them. John is the genius behind a lot of these so I'll chime in here.

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I was going to say I actually have to give Conley credit for this one because it's adapted from one of his ones which was

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I think on selling preaching CDs and so I just tweaked it a little bit.

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But yeah I think this is my favorite because it's so normal for today.

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So if someone was to say this at a conference today, no one would blink. They'd be like, yeah, that's completely appropriate.

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In fact, that person is being very generous. Wow, they're giving 50 % off.

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Oh, that's so nice of them. And so apply that to any preacher, anyone today. Everyone's like, yeah, what a great guy.

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But then this is what I love about the memes. You just take that and you apply it to the early church and all of a sudden you realize how embarrassing it is.

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All of a sudden it's no longer something admirable, it's actually something embarrassing.

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And I think this one does the best job out of all the memes of doing that. Just applying what we do today straight to the early church and realizing how bad it is.

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All right, the next one here. Yeah, this next one on the right here. I like this one because yeah, this is another instance of what most people would find in any

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Christian book today on the front matter, this copyright restriction.

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It could be a book about grace, it could be a book about generosity. It's going to start out with these very selfish sounding statements of all rights reserved and would be a little off -putting if you weren't used to it, but we're completely used to it now.

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I don't know anyone that reads that first page of a book that mentions the copyright. So usually you're just so used to flicking past that.

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Okay, you got the title page, you got the copyright statement, then you just go straight to the first page. But considering, in this case, this is

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God's Word we're talking about. This is the Bible. And yeah, if you actually read those first words when you open the

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Bible, it's completely contrary to the message of the Bible. That scripture may not be shared, quoted, up to a certain limit, etc.

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etc. Yeah. All right, this next one on the left here.

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We haven't paid the royalties for this song yet, Paul. You gotta stop them.

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When I was creating these, I was trying to express my frustration at why people just couldn't see how ridiculous these views are.

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And when I realized, I was like, what if the early church did this? That's where pretty much most of these memes came from.

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So yeah, again, just taking the practice we do, worship music at the moment, and applying it to the early church, would they have paid song royalties?

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And the fact that they would have actually been breaking the law if they had, you know, and today, if you use a worship song without having a license, you're actually breaking the law by worshiping

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God and using that song to do that. All right, so the one on the right, who serves as a soldier without charging every citizen?

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Who plants a vineyard and does not take a bite of every grape? Who tends a flock and does not drink milk from every animal?

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In the same way, those who minister should receive payment from those served. So Conley is the expert on 1

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Corinthians, so I'll let him chime in here. 19 .45 Yeah, I mean, once again, this is John's meme, but yeah, that's how most people take what

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Paul is saying. You know, what he says in 1 Corinthians 9 is, and to put this in a larger context, you know, chapter 6, he says, you know, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.

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So the right to sex does not mean the right to sleep with a prostitute. And then he also talks about food there, which he addressed later in chapters 8 and 10, where he says, use that same phrase again, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.

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So the right to eat food does not mean the right to eat things sacrificed to an idol. And then chapter 9 is an illustration of chapters 8 and 10, which are about food sacrifice to idols.

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And a lot of people just see him as giving blanket permission to take any kind of money, no matter in what form, when the whole point is the same thing.

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The right to receive money does not mean the right to charge, just like you have these other rights that are limited in nature, not plenary, so it is with this.

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But this is how a lot of people read it. If you have a right to receive, it means you have a right to receive from each individual the exact proportion that is due, rather than trusting

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God to supply you through those, as Paul is arguing for. That's a really good explanation.

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I haven't actually heard you put it in those exact words before, and that was really helpful.

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Often, one objection we'll get is that people are like, well, you know, selling my book, selling my teaching, this is my way of being supported.

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So you're saying that ministry should be supported, not sold. Well, this is my way that I get supported. It can sound nice, yeah, by paying for it, you're supporting the author, but yeah, the big difference with the way, you know, proper ministry is funded, the church, the early church, is that you're not charging every single person for every single bit of ministry.

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You're supporting the ministry, but when you say, you know, this way is a way of supporting me, you're actually saying, you know, every single little bit, every tiny little bit of ministry you get, you need to pay for it.

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Yeah. Why doesn't Jesus charge for his ministry like us? Yeah, no one is going to value it if they haven't paid anything for it.

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I think this is Andrew's one. Yeah, I've been on that soapbox for a while, but yeah, this is the classic objection that we get.

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Actually, the recent video, I don't know if you saw any, John, the recent video on Shepherds for Sale.

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Did anyone say that in the comments? Nobody would value her book if she didn't charge for it.

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I didn't see any. I was kind of surprised. That seems to be the knee -jerk reaction.

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If you look at Christians like non -player characters as NPCs, this is like their pre -scripted response in most cases to the issue of money and ministry.

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They all seem to have this pre -scripted response written and ingrained in them, and so we've done our best to undermine that in other videos and articles and stuff, but we don't need to belabor that here.

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Yeah. I was recently talking to a pastor who was resonating with a lot of these ideas and talking about how good it is to provide things freely, and he was saying that he was talking about the program that they have at the church to make sure that men who want to get further theological education have their tuition provided for and everything.

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And he says, but we make them buy their books because they've got to have some skin in the game. And I'm like, yeah, there it is.

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There it is. I mean, I would hope the skin in the game would be the understanding of your obligations before God and even your fellow church members.

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But also, I'll throw in there that if you are running some program like that where you're working with another seminary or something,

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I'm not saying that the church has to provide people all their books or anything like that. But the motivation should not be the skin in the game.

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Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This one, I'd probably say this, I feel like this one bites the most for people since I made it.

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It kind of came out of, I actually offered to write an article for TGC on that verse about Jesus saying that you can't serve both

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God and money and the implications that has for people that make money out of ministry. Yeah.

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And it's just really interesting because, you know, as a pastor, I'm always thinking, obviously I exegete the passage, but then

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I apply it. And I'm like, what is the best application, the best example for serving both

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God and money? And I feel like you can't really get closer than trying to profit from ministry.

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Like surely that is the best and clearest example of trying to serve both God and money. And the fact that people aren't willing to discuss that, you know, name me an author, name me someone in ministry that has really tackled this question in regard to ministry and in regard to how people make money and get royalties from their books, get royalties from their songs.

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You know, pastors are meant to apply scripture to themselves as well. And I haven't seen anyone apply this, try to wrestle with this themselves in ministry.

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Sometimes they'll give some kind of vague answer, you know, as long as you're not doing for the money. But when you're receiving money, it's, yeah, you have to wrestle a bit deeper than that.

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Alright, so the next one, we got the early church and Paul in prison saying, I'll put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.

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I'll always offer it free of charge. And then we've got the most prosperous society ever.

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Oh, I wish I didn't have to commercialize my ministry, but unlike Paul, my finances aren't very stable right now.

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Yeah. So there's actually a backstory to this one. Someone pretty much replied that on a, in a

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Facebook comment, like pretty much exactly that. And that's why I made a meme out of it. Cause that was their argument that, you know, unlike Paul, they don't have stable finances.

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I'm like, you think, you think Paul had stable finances? Like Paul didn't have electricity.

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Paul didn't have a flushing toilet. Paul didn't, you know, he got beaten and stoned and his life was not that great.

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And, and even when his life was at its peak, he still didn't have smartphones in that, you know, all these luxuries that we enjoy now.

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And, you know, I'm not sure, obviously not trying to minimize that people have real struggles today. And yes, there's, there's people in our society, even though they have a car and a smartphone, they're still struggling to get by.

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I'm not trying to minimize that. But taking a step back and looking at the big picture, we, we are the most prosperous society ever.

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America, but also the West, Australia included. And so it's, it's just an absurd idea that Paul would be better off than we are.

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Right. And, and this completely misses the whole point when people say this, oh,

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I'm short on funds or I'm, I'm living below the poverty level right now. So I have to sell my ministry.

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It misses the whole point that hello, God is waiting to bless you more than you can ask or think.

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Have you tried trusting him to provide for your needs right now, rather than your own financial prowess thinking that, oh, because I put a price tag on this, everyone's going to come flocking to it and buy it.

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And I'll, I'll finally have my finances covered. I mean, that is the opposite of what usually happens.

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Usually you just stop doing what you, you're doing because you weren't able to sell enough.

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Anyway, you just get depressed because you didn't get the blessing of seeing other people blessed by what you did because nobody bought it.

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That's sad. And then you end up poorer than you would have been if you had trusted

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God to provide. The one on the left here, um, church history class 2024, and then a hundred years in the future on the bottom.

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Well, it's kind of personal backstories to most of these memes. And so, you know, I was, I remembering being in church history class and hearing about the crusades and all those things.

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And fair enough, even myself at some points, I'm wondering like, you know, were there any genuine

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Christians back then during these times when, when all these crazy things were happening in the church,

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I'm willing to bet that, uh, it'll be the case in the future when things eventually change.

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They have to, cause you know, God's at work and people will look back and people are hoping they're going to look back at them and think what a great minister they were, like what a great job they did showing the gospel.

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But a lot of people are going to look back at this time and just wonder how on earth, um, yeah, Christians put up with the sale of ministry.

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Yeah. I was listening to Gary Thomas talk about how quickly you can fade into insignificance as, um, a very, very gifted minister of the gospel or whatever.

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And he, he was talking about this guy, this author, he was his favorite author of all time.

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He just can't believe it that this guy is not even that old. He's he wrote in the 1900s, but now you can only get his books as used copies.

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If you're lucky to find any, he just can't believe it. And so many people now don't even know who the guy is, but it's his favorite, favorite

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Christian author. It just makes you think, you know, like if you really want to leave a lasting legacy for future generations to look back and say, wow, um, this person made an impact and continues to make an impact.

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Well, the best way to do that is to free up your resources. And, uh, unfortunately, like most authors, even though he was famous in his day, maybe, or very influential in his day, his books were locked down and they're kind of orphan works now, and they're still under copyright.

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And so they're not able to be reprinted or circulated digitally and all of that kind of thing.

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And so it's something to keep in mind. Are you wanting your ministry to have that legacy impact?

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So next one, I made, I made this one for you, Andrew, because I know how much you love it to my heart.

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Yes. Yes. So we, we all have heard this a million times.

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Um, this definitely did get mentioned as it's, this is another one of the

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NPC automated scripts that people have as Christians who, who walk around mindlessly parodying this comeback to what we're trying to advocate.

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And it is you shall not Muslim Knox. And so it feels like this is an idol of some kind because people defer to it or put it up on a pedestal so often as the only thing that they need to really understand money and ministry.

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And that they think that it means that it gives you the right to commercialize everything in Jesus name.

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So, I think charitably, a lot of people assume that the, the economy that exists around ministry is like the only one that could exist.

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Right. And so it's okay. Okay. Books, the way that you get money is by selling the book, right?

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This isn't how it worked for, you know, many years. It wasn't until copyright came around in the 1700s that people started getting royalties on books as opposed to being supported by patrons.

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Um, but a lot of people assume that. And so then when you say people shouldn't be selling these things, they assume you mean they shouldn't be making any money at all.

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And even if you try to say something else, a lot of times it'll go in through one ear and out the other, because what you're describing is a different model than the one that you're used to seeing.

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And so they, they think that this is the main way someone would get money.

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This is, and so if you're saying it's not that, then you're trying to delegitimize the whole project, which is not really what we're trying to do.

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We think that authors should still be supported, you know, authors, Christian teachers, but not, yeah, just not through sales.

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Yeah. And it is genuinely difficult for us to understand why when we say ministry should be supported.

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So the first thing that we say in our, our phrase that comes from the Dorian principle, ministry should be supported, not sold, but people only hear the not sold.

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And then they assume all of these, these wrong things and don't even listen to the first part, which is it should be supported.

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They assume that the only way it should be supported or could be supported is by selling and this is their go -to verse to, to make sure they, they let us know that they know the

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Bible better than we do. Okay. So moving on, classic biblical counseling.

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Yes. And this is just a great ironic thing, and I've already talked a lot, so I don't know if you guys want to jump in here, but this is also, this is one of my pet peeves or soapboxes for sure, because biblical counseling is something that is needed, beautiful, wonderful, a gift from God to the church that we can counsel one another with truth in life.

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When we turn it into this money -making sort of scheme, it's just so ironic to be giving people this advice, especially when people are stressed about money and then charging them exorbitant prices.

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All right. So we've talked a lot about books. Here's just another, another one on the right.

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Yeah. And I, I think this meme is good at bringing out, you know, this isn't what people, most people want.

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We, we agree that most people, you know, they, they want to share about God.

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They want to help people grow in faith. And we know that they don't really want to be locking things down.

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They wish they didn't have to, but they just don't see any other way because everyone's telling them that this is the only way to get funded.

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This is what you should be doing. You need to go have a big publisher or you won't get seen. And yeah, you know, there's, there's ups and downs, but ultimately we need to be faithful to scripture.

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But yeah, I think this meme is good at bringing out that, you know, you don't want to be doing this when deep down inside your heart.

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Yeah. And then the reason, you know, the devil is screaming so loud is because that really represents the way the world is just so vocal about this.

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You have to be doing this. I mean, it's just, you're an idiot. If you're not making your passion, your passive income.

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Okay. I'll let John or Conley take this next one. I'll just briefly say these two are just trying to help people realize what they're actually saying.

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So when they say, you know, the worker deserves their wages, don't muzzle the ox. They don't think very deeply when they say that.

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And so these two are just trying to bring out, you know, what are you actually saying when you're saying that you're saying that, you know,

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Paul's permitting any form of ministry to be commercialized as much as you like. And when you press people, you know, most people will say, no, that's not what

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I meant. But then they don't really think, you know, okay, so what does it mean then? Yeah. I really liked this one,

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John, you did a great job with the All Rights Reserved. It really captures what the subtext is when you're reading the copyright page on all of these

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Christian books. It does not give you the idea of a selfless, generous mindset.

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Yeah. And those are the two views people have often, you know, there'll be some people that actually understand what it means, but most people will just be the first one, the ignorance, they just add it because it seems like it makes the work sound better or sound more proper.

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Yeah. And in terms of this last meme, basically I was pointing out, I've been pointing out to a number of people that, you know, if ministry wasn't sold, it'd be really easy to identify who the false teachers are because they'd be the ones after the money.

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It's not easy to identify them because everyone's doing the same thing. The good, theological, logically accurate and rich authors are doing just the same as the false teachers.

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They're all selling their books. And, you know, this is more talking about e -books here. So, we're talking about e -books because, you know, there's no reason why you should charge for an e -book.

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Yeah. Paying for printing is another matter we can talk about later. But, you know, if you are searching for an e -book, it should be easy to identify who is the false teacher and who isn't by the ones who's charging for it.

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Yeah. And just to be clear, this is not reality, what you're looking at. This is what we hope will be reality someday.

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Hunger for God and Keller's book and and Tripp's book there are definitely not going to be free when you go to Amazon.

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I think often they cost more than the false teachers sometimes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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So, there's this question of what how did the early church discern false teachers? You do see in Paul's writings that that he identifies false teachers as those who think that godliness is a means of gain.

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And in one particular chapter in the Dorian principle, I collect a bunch of verses where he talks about that.

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And you see that this is a litmus test that's that's to be used. And you see that with other things in scripture, other litmus tests, for example,

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John talks about the one who has the son, has the father. But there's some difficulty in applying that.

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You realize you have to ask what son does he have? You know, what Jesus does he have? It's not just, oh, he says he loves Jesus. So these litmus tests aren't all easy litmus tests, but they but they exist in scripture.

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And this is supposed to be one of them. So later on in the church, after the apostles, after the

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Bible is written and the apostles are dead, we have early church sources that show us that this is what they were doing.

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They were testing these things out. The Shepherd of Hermas talks about false teachers being those who charge for prophecy.

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There's some other resources. The Didache, which is written during the first century, even during when some of these apostles are alive, talks about someone who comes and stays for three nights, taking the hospitality of the people that used to consider him a false teacher and send him on his way.

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I collect some quotes about that in the book as well. There are examples that we have in the early church to show that this is what they were using as one of the big signs that someone's a false teacher.

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And later on, when many begin engaging in simony, you know, the sale of ordinations, this is what people would ask too.

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They would try to figure out, did this person engage in the selling or buying of ordinations? And that would determine whether or not they were a false teacher.

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Thanks for that. So, I think what we'll do is wrap it up here. Thanks guys for having some fun chatting through these.