You can understand why churches might be eager to have parishioners hear her message. Church donations are way down, according to others who have come here today. As a pamphlet for participants describes it, the impetus is a "national emergency" fueled by the tough economic climate and manifest in chronic money problems among the populace that threatens core institutions like churches. "It can cost your church or ministry in the form of declining membership, decreasing gifts, forced cutbacks in program and staff, reduced outreach, and uncertain funding for mission projects," reads the pamphlet.
Speaker after speaker at the planning forum drives home the point that the purpose of this financial literacy work is not riches for its own sake. "We want to help you have more so you can give more," says Mark Biller, an editor for a Christian financial newsletter called Sound Mind Investing. There's another motivating factor for churches, tooone familiar to anyone who has seen the way missionaries operate in Third World countries. "See, money's just the hook to get to their life," says Bragonier of Barnabas, the organization that conducts financial seminars for churches. "I wait for them to say, 'Why are you doing this for me?' That's the time that I can say, 'Let me tell you about the savior.'"
Rick Dahms
Pastor Casey Treat tells the faithful to embrace prosperity.
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None of this means that the desire to help people get control of their finances isn't genuine. Meeting for coffee one day at a Bellevue Starbucks, Bragonier arrives directly from the home of an elderly, bedridden woman with multiple sclerosis whom he visits every so often to balance her checkbook. Not in performance mode now and looking relaxed in a print shirt and slacks, Bragonier explains how he used to work for a consumer finance company as the head of marketing for eight states. As his Christianity deepened, he began to want to do something about all the consumer debt he saw around him and the havoc it created in people's lives. That's when he heard that a group of people was forming Barnabas to teach the principles of a pioneering figure in the Christian finance movement, Larry Burkett. A longtime resident of Bellevue who recently moved to California, Bragonier has led the 19-year-old Barnabas group to become the dominant teacher of Burkett curricula on the West Coast.
A large part of the curricula concerns the evils of debt, which is seen not only as bad financial management but as an impediment to spirituality. If people are consumed with worry about how they're going to pay off staggering credit card balances, the logic goes, they can't concentrate on what really matters. "People are in servitude, they're in bondage to debt," Bragonier says. "Christians should only be in servitude to Christ." And so he exhorts Christians to beat back the beast of greed for things they can't afford.
An even more important principle, Bragonier says, is the distinction between ownership and stewardship. It's the latter concept that should govern our relationship with money, he maintains. "It's not our money, it's God's money." The implication is that we should be responsible with it and, again, give rather than hoard our profits.
IT'S NOTEWORTHY that Bragonier operates in a sphere that places the responsibility for people's financial state squarely on the individual. This is a particular Christian response to economic hardships, whereas other Christians read in the Bible a mandate for social welfare and economic reforms. To Bragonier, giving does not mean handouts. He believes God's design for welfare can be found in the Bible, which has rich farmers leaving the outside edges of their crops to be gleaned by the poor, thereby enabling them to work for their food.
Bragonier's teaching of frugality and humility strikes a different note than either Treat or Lapin, though, a harder one to listen to. It's the flip side of the same coin, perhaps, but it leads to different places. Bellevue financial planner Gary Koontz, for example, says that attending a Bragonier seminar many years ago changed his life. Before, he was simply trying to sell a product. Now he carefully considers whether a client can really afford it.
He's struck by how many people come to him thinking they don't have enough money to retire, when in fact they have plenty. "It never seems to be enough. I say, 'Why don't you take a trip, see your daughter in Georgia?'" He encourages people not so much to make money, but to spend it. His overarching advice: "There are a lot of things in life more important than accumulating wealth."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
