Seasonal Givings Slump

We must be right in the middle of the seasonal charitable givings slump.  The not-for-profit NGO that I am treasurer for has seen a slump in giving, the ministry my wife works for has been touch and go on payroll for the last month, and the radio preachers on almost every program have been beating the bushes for support day after day.  I even hear it on Sundays at church buried in announcements and such.  We are a semi-numbers church.  We don't post weekly attendance, but we have been running the box score on what we need to take in week by week to meet budget (usually thousands of dollars) and what we do take in (usually hundreds of dollars).  The only objection I have to this annual hand-wringing time is the tendency, when a group or church or individual finds themselves in a financial crisis, to respond by stating or exhorting that we only need to trust God to provide.  I've heard that all my life, and frankly it is based on the assumption that what we are doing is what God wants us to do.  I have seen too many ministries where maybe God was drying up the storehouses of heaven to say that the purpose for your existence has been served and you are no longer needed.  But Christian ministries and churches are hard to kill off once they take root.  An appeal to the general Christian guilt factor or to history or to calling is most often enough to squeeze enough to squeak on by.

But it leaves the question hanging unanswered.  Are all the struggling churches, radio ministries, outreach programs, etc. really doing the work of the kingdom and therefore could be inclined to believe somehow that divine intervention will allow them to continue, or are they just afraid to face the fact that in the grand scheme of God's activities on earth they are not really needed.  Just for the record, I have never heard a ministry say "Well, giving is down, and we are taking that as a sign that our work is complete.  We are liquidating what we do have and reinvesting it in some other ministry that is growing."  Just because we do Christian things is no guarantee that they are God-called things.  That's why older churches in New England are more prone to turn into museums of past glory rather than a tabernacle of God's abiding presence.  They become centered on keeping the doors open and no longer impact their communities with the gospel.  The summer slump should be a time for inner reflection and honesty, not stepped up appeals and fundraising schemes.