Whether or not — and to what extent, and at what speed — the international market economy is recovering is beyond the scope of this paper, and certainly beyond my expertise as a writer.
But from the ground up it still looks like, to say the least, we are in ‘interesting’ financial times, and some list it as ongoing through 2010 at least (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010). What does this mean for the church?
Allergic to debt
Previous generations of evangelicals had a very different sort of relationship to financing. Charles Spurgeon deliberately ensured that his massive building expansions were only completed once all the money had been donated, allergic as he (and many other evangelicals of his generation) was to being in debt. D.L. Moody apparently felt the same, his legacy in this regard carried on by Moody Bible Institute which manages its enormous portfolio of donations and operating costs purely on an annual donor basis and without an explicit foundation.
