For several years, I practiced sacrificial living, giving up what a lot of Americans take for granted to give more to the Kingdom of God. I didn't have air conditioning, no calbe, drove a car with 178,000 on it, bought my clothes at thrift shops, was very frugal about how I decorated my small affordable home. I was giving about 30% of my income to missions and other Christian organizations at the time.
Then one day a missionary that I was supporting called me to ask for $850 to pay his rent. This man was supposedly working in the poorest most remote places of Nigeria, so I didn't understand why his rent was so high. After further investigation, I found out that he didn't live among the poor rural people, he lived in an upper class neighborhood in a very posh urban city, and that the church that he pastored has some of the richest members in the country. The average rent in Nigeria is $400 a year for a middle class neighborhood, and this man's rent was more than double that. He didn't even minister among the poor, he just drove through poor villages and had his picture taken so he could send me "proof" that he was hard at work.
Then the missionary I supported in India, who was supposed to be a travelling evangelist throughout an entire region, never even left home, never journeyed outside his home city and didn't do much evangelism inside his home city. Getting on the payroll of a mission organization is just another cushy job to him, and I was sacrificing and paying my hard-earned money to have him sit at home all day instead of getting a job.
A church pastor/teacher that my organization was supporting with large shipments of Bibles and teaching materials told me that he had never received anything from us, over the course of two years! We had sent a dozen shipments with nearly a thousand Bibles, at no small cost! When I started to track them down, he admitted that he took out a post office box but never paid the rental fee ($3 a year), so he had never gotten a single one of them.
I then realized I don't know much about any of the churches or organizations I was supporting.
So I stopped. I very much want to get back to sacrificial living, but I want to do it for the right reasons and give the savings to the right people. After having these experiences with two missions organizations, I don't know who can be trusted, but I will keep looking. Not everyone in God's kingdom is dishonest, and maybe the key is to stick with organizations with local home bases so I can keep an eye on what they are doing with what I give them.
I'm thinking that there are plenty of unsaved North Americans, I don't need to send my money overseas to have an impact on the world.
