I’ve been thinking lately about the inherent dangers of charities. And churches. Not the universal church—which can’t be seen, but the ones with buildings and budgets. I say this not as someone looking in from the outside, but as someone who’s been the director of a pro-life charity for more than 20 years and been in the church for significantly longer. Here’s my working theory. The older and larger an organization becomes—be it ministry or otherwise, the more susceptible it is to mismanagement and corruption. There are simply more ways to go astray.

As organizations get bigger, the number of less productive staff invariably increases. It’s driven by that pesky little Pareto principle—or 80/20 rule—which states that 20% of any given labor force does 80% of the work. The exact percentages vary, but the general principle is fairly ironclad. It’s the same one you hear bemoaned from the pulpit whenever a capital campaign is underway. No matter the church, you can rest assured that an exceedingly small percentage of congregants do most of the giving. On the labor side, not only does growth diminish relative output, it also tends towards the creation of busy work. That is, things that don’t really need to be done—and wouldn’t be done—except for the fact that there are employees who need to be occupied with something to justify a paycheck.

As organizations get older, its leadership tends to get older too—which can create problems all its own. I speak here from personal experience. I hope and sometimes believe I’m a wiser man today than I was at Abort73’s outset, but I know I’m a more cynical and fatigued man—who has more expenses and less inclination to endure the privations of youth. Having a car without air conditioning was no problem in my 20s. It goes harder with me in my 40s. It’s not entirely bad that the idealism of youth gives way to the more insular concerns of middle age, but it does have vocational ramifications that must be reckoned with. Jordan Peterson asserted the following in a recent interview with Dr. Simone Gold:

You can figure out quite quickly what (an organization) actually does by looking at what it spends most of its time on, or its money. I learned this [during a year-long internship] for Alberta Social Services when I was [around] 18. That's when I got some policy experience. And Alberta Social Services at that time did not have sufficient data gathering capacity to answer the question, how much of the money that we spend goes to the end user. Well, the answer was very little because like with most charities, almost all the money spent by social services was spent on the administrators of the social service program. And so, you know, your first pass diagnosis of a system like that is that, well, it's clearly there to employ the people on whom it spends the bulk of the money.

In other words, the purpose of an organization is what it does—not what it’s supposed to do. This is what led Peterson to conclude that the purpose of Alberta Social Services was not to serve the needy in Alberta. It was to provide jobs for its administrators. So even though a charity might begin as a good faith effort to serve the downtrodden, its functional purpose can easily devolve into something more like self-preservation. It becomces less devoted to providing for its supplicants and more devoted to providing for itself. Churches, it should be admitted, are prone to this same tendency. I have lived now in five different states, visited 49, and come across all sorts of church mission statements along the way—but I’ve yet to read one like this:

First Fundamentalist Church of the Holy Pentecost exists to put on an hour-long service one morning a week while providing a comfortable income for its staff. 

That, of course, is a fictitious church and a fictitious mission statement, but I suspect it’s more honest than many of the mission statements out there. Maybe most. Nobody wants to be called a Sunday-morning Christian, but most churches operate as Sunday-morning enterprises. It’s been baked into the system for longer than anyone can remember. If you were to take away Sunday mornings, what would the average church have left? Perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps Sunday morning is where nearly all church resources should be directed. But maybe not. You’ll remember, after all, that in the judgment of the sheep and the goats, Jesus says surprisingly little about the quality of our worship services. Nor does he give any mention to evangelism. What he asks instead—which I once wrote a book about—is this. What did you do for the least of these my brethren?

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. If you were tasked with taking all the money that comes into all the churches in your community, and spending it so as to maximize the advance of God’s kingdom, what would that look like? Or what if you were tasked with taking every church property in your region and utilizing its every building, playground, kitchen, and classroom to maximally provide for the least of these? Or finally, what if you were commissioned with taking every church employee in your city and redeploying them with an eye towards making straight the way of the Lord? Isn’t there at least a chance you’d come up with something besides putting virtually all these resources towards the putting on of an hour-long service once a week?

At this point, I should put myself back in the crosshairs because—as someone who’s never been on a church’s payroll or served as an elder—it’s relatively easy to cast stones. I should also point out that there are huge swaths of the Pentateuch that go into painstaking detail over the dressing of priests and construction of the tabernacle—which indicates that God does care about the aesthetics of service and ceremony and has something more than naked efficiency in view. What that implies for the Christian church today, I’m not entirely sure. But having essentially asserted that the functional purpose of most churches is to put on a Sunday service and pay their pastors, couldn’t I also say that the functional purpose of Abort73 is to pay my salary? Because I certainly get most of the money that is given. In a word, yes, but with an important caveat that may well apply to pastors too.

When Jordan Peterson called out Alberta Social Services for channeling so little of its received funding into actual social services, he was following a common line of critique. It assumes that the best way to evaluate a philanthropic organization is to measure the amount of money it keeps against the amount of money it passes on to its targeted beneficiaries. But there is a category difference between a soup-kitchen type charity and an education-based charity. I’ve written about this before. The first is meeting physical needs. The second provides something less tangible. In principle, a church should be operating in both realms, but Abort73 sits firmly in the latter. Teachers eat up most of a school's budget, but nobody would consider this a bad thing in principle. Teachers are in fact the product. That being said, there are good teachers and bad. Some are worth the money and some aren’t. And some begin as good teachers but gradually do less and less over time. For more money. That’s the fate I fear and fight in myself.

It strikes me now that while it’s relatively easy to go into ministry for the right reasons, it’s hard to stay in for those reasons. What I mean is this. When you first enter ministry, you generally have all sorts or other options available to you. You’re motivated, not by constraint, but by the genuine desire to do some good in the world. But when you remain in ministry, it may simply be that your other options have run out. The longer you do anything, the less suited you are to do anything else. So maybe you came for the mission but you stay for the paycheck. “I have this against you,” Jesus declared—through John—to the church in Ephesus, “that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” It may even be that there are pastors out there who no longer believe, but can’t afford to leave. You see the structural difficulties.

The great thing about businesses in a free and open society is this. The checks and balances are built in. If the product or marketing isn’t up to snuff, the money doesn’t arrive. It’s that simple. Either something changes or the business shutters. But this is not the case for organizations in which revenue is not directly tied to a product or service—which reduces the necessity to get things right. It’s much easier to accommodate mediocrity when the person who pays the bill is not the one who receives the service. The survival of a business demands vigilance and responsibility. The survival of a church or charity might not.

I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush or infer that the potential pitfalls of expansion and longevity are a fait accompli. Moses’ father-in-law provides a nice scriptural rationale for growth and delegation, but there are inherent dangers too. When Moses added more judges to hear the complaints of the people, he almost certainly increased the pool of formal complaints in the process. And it was complaining, you’ll remember, that ultimately kept Israel locked out of the promised land for 40 years. It’s the same problem encountered by city planners who make roads bigger—to alleviate traffic—only to invite more traffic in the end. And in adding more judges, Moses also multiplied the opportunities for corrupt judges and judgments.

Yes, healthy things grow, but so do cancers. This is why Elon Musk was able to gut the staff of Twitter without hurting the business. It turns out they weren’t needed. They were mostly dead weight. This is what happens when the means become the end—when a noble vision descends into mere vocation. Churches, at least, have a mandate for existing. Businesses too. But charities, as an institution, have much less of a leg to stand on. The moment they become entrenched, it seems, they become subversive. Planned Parenthood, let us not forget, is a charity—which receives a half billion of our tax dollars every year. One of the things we laity are beginning to realize, in this unique historical moment, is that global charities are among the most fraudulent and insidious entities in existence. Walter Kirn, who I can’t listen to enough, noted on Monday that USAID is “a festival of greed posing as a festival of justice.” His cohort, Matt Taibbi, added that “everybody in the world knows what USAID really is, except the people who pay for it.” Elon Musk’s take, as our new efficiency czar, was this: It’s not that there’s a worm in the apple. It’s just a bowl full of worms.

If you’re not already familiar with Paul Kingsnorth, be advised. He will mess you up. He has a knack for casually saying things that call wide swaths of your life into question. Things like: smash your smartphone, walk away from social media, and stop trying to save the world. More annoying still is my growing allowance that Mr. Kingsnorth may be right. That’s because he is one of those rare Christians who tries to arrange his life—not according to accepted Christian sentiment—but according to the words of Christ. That is an exceedingly dangerous thing to do. Or as Kingsnorth would say, an exceedingly uncivilized thing to do. His recent essay/lecture “Against Christian Civilization” has raised many eyebrows, but it’s another of his pieces that speaks more to the topic at hand. This comes from his article, “The Moses Option:”

I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

It’s not that Paul Kingsnorth thinks saving the world a bad thing. He’s just fairly convinced that none of our programs can do it. Having spent much of his life as an environmental activist, he is acutely aware of all the ways activism can go wrong. “We do not have a ‘problem,’” he writes, “that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects.” Our problem is that age-old one: “a turning-away from God, and thus from reality.” It’s a problem that can only be solved, he argues, by turning back again—which is something societies can’t do. “Only people can, one at a time.” This, in fact, is what Kingsnorth did himself not all that long ago. He become a Christian—not because he could argue himself into it, but “because [he] knew, suddenly, that it was true.”

Is Kingsnorth espousing, then, a sort of passive acquiescence to all the evil we find in the world? He is not. “Activism and action are not the same thing,” he argues. We are none of us called to be inactive. “If this notion (of world-saving) is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself,” he adds, “then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual.” He drops a line from C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves to help shore up his position. “The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the world are the ones who save it.” Kingsnorth, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t go in for embracing the world to win the world. Even as a pagan, he had no patience for the “trendy vicar.” Kingsnorth is a narrow-is-the-way-and-few-are-those-who-find-it Christian. He writes:

Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in… Elders, saints, and mystics are notable these days for their absence. In their place we are offered a pick ’n mix spirituality… you will find no exhortation to sacrifice or denial of self, and certainly no battered and bleeding god-man calling you to pick up your cross and follow him.

And just like that, my internal grumblings over personal deprivations—like air conditioning—are revealed to lie somewhere between silly and contemptible. To be a Christian is to be unworldly. That is both its appeal and its repugnance. The fragrance of life, to some. The aroma of death to others. “Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies,” Kingsnorth observes, “and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.” And so does calling out the evil of abortion. Abort73 isn’t local, per se, but it is small and personal. And there is no fundraising department, PR agency, or marketing team. It’s just me, doing research, writing articles, recording podcasts, designing T-shirts, making posts, answering emails, and sometimes asking people for money. I think Kingsnorth would be okay with that. More importantly, I think Christ would be too.

I spent the last two months of 2024 trying to recruit new monthly donors to Abort73. It was the most concerted fundraising push I’ve made in a long time, maybe ever, spurred on by a rapidly diminishing cash reserve. I was not particularly successful, but a spate of year-end giving helped push D-Day back at least another few months. In sharing this with a donor and correspondent from Australia, he made a timely observation. “I’ve noticed that in a number of spheres with the Lord, He pours and then waits… Moments of deep closeness to Christ, and a powerful peace in His presence, followed by what seems an endless desert.” That image of the desert took me to the gathering of manna in Exodus, which God provided one day at a time. Those who tried to stockpile, were entirely thwarted. So though I might prefer the security of having Abort73’s funding solidly accounted for on into the future, it may be that God prefers I focus instead on the problems of today—and trust him for those of tomorrow.

If you’ve spent much time in the church, you’ve almost certainly encountered this question somewhere along the line. What would happen if everyone here gave like you? It’s a query designed to prompt guilt and giving, but I’ve never been moved by it. My thought is always the same. If nobody gave to this church, it would either go under or its operations would have to radically change. And either scenario might be an improvement. If people have to be strong-armed into giving, the problem might not be the people. Of course, the same is true for Abort73. Charities and local churches can both outlive their fruitfulness. They are transitory institutions, by definition. They serve a temporary purpose for an unspecified period of time. They are a means, not the end. Which means I needn’t worry about the longterm survival of Abort73. Sooner or later, its end is coming. I will continue to pour in with as much faith and wisdom as I can muster. But whenever this particular charity goes the way of all charities, that will be okay too. Individual charities can die, so long as charity doesn’t. The more we understand that, the more faithful we'll be as givers and receivers.