I've sat in bamboo huts and in air-conditioned mission board offices. And in every one of them, I've watched churches wrestle with the same question: what do we do with our money when it comes to reaching the world?

Most of us never get asked that question straight out. We just feel the tension. We want to help. We want results. We want to obey the Great Commission without getting on a plane ourselves. So we write a check, hire a national to do the work, and call it missions.

Sometimes that's wisdom. Sometimes it's a shortcut around obedience. And once the money starts moving, most churches drift into one of two ditches: they either drown the nationals in support or starve them of it. Both ditches wreck people. Both ditches wreck the work.

Where the Trouble Starts

Jesus didn't say, "Send money therefore." He said:

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Matthew 28:19-20

That's a command to go. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us quietly reworded it. We turned "go ye" into "send money and find someone else to go." We started hunting for nationals, here or overseas, who would do the going for us so we wouldn't have to.

I understand the appeal. A national worker knows the language, the culture, the customs. He can often do things we could never do. There's real wisdom in supporting him. But there's a world of difference between partnering with a man God has already called and sent, and paying a man to be our substitute so we can stay home with a clear conscience.

One is partnership. The other is outsourcing our obedience.

Ditch One: Too Much Money

The first ditch feels generous. It usually isn't.

When we pour money into a work faster than the work can absorb it, we're not fueling faith; we're replacing it. And two things almost always follow.

We make them dependent on us. A national worker who once trusted God for his daily bread starts trusting a mailbox in America instead. The check becomes his provider. If it's late, his faith wobbles not because God changed, but because we quietly took God's place in the story. Hudson Taylor built his entire life on one conviction: God's work, done in God's way, will never lack God's supply. When we hand a man a system instead of pointing him back to the Lord who sent him, we've traded his greatest asset, dependence on God, for dependence on us.

We buy quick results with little effort of our own. Big money can make small faith look like fast fruit. Buildings go up. Numbers climb. Reports look wonderful in the newsletter. But works built on our money instead of God's Spirit have a way of hollowing out the moment the money stops. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase, not the treasurer.

Money can build a church building. Only God builds a church.

Ditch Two: Too Little Money

The other ditch feels like faith. Sometimes it's just stinginess wearing faith's clothes.

It breeds a bad attitude among nationals — and honestly, sometimes they're right to feel it. They've read the same Bible we have.

Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. James 5:4

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? James 2:15-16

A national worker can smell the difference between sacrifice and neglect. When we ask him to trust God for provision while we ourselves live comfortably and pay him next to nothing, we haven't taught him faith. We've taught him resentment.

It can hold back what God actually wants to do because of a method we invented, not one He commanded. Somewhere, someone decided nationals should live on less because they need "less" than we do, or because paying them well would "spoil" them. Nowhere does God say that. Scripture actually says the opposite.

For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward. 1 Timothy 5:18

And we do the very thing we'd never tolerate at home. No pastor in the States would be told to plant a church on air, with no salary and no support, and call it faith. We'd call it neglect. Yet we've told nationals to do exactly that as though the gospel needs less provision when it crosses an ocean, and as though their families need less food than ours.

Finding the Road Between the Ditches

I don't think God gave us a formula for this. I think He gave us something better: a Person to follow.

When the Word became flesh, He didn't mail in the incarnation. He didn't wire funds to Bethlehem and stay in heaven.

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

He came. He stayed. He gave His whole self, not just His resources.

That's still the model. Get close enough to a work that you can tell the difference between a man of faith and a man in need. Pay a fair wage cheerfully, the way you'd want to be paid. Trust God to grow what only He can grow, instead of trying to buy the harvest early. And never let a check take the place of your own obedience.

Nationals aren't hired hands standing in for our absence. They're brothers, laboring in the same field, worthy of the same honor we'd want for ourselves. Money, used right, simply frees a called man to keep doing what God already put in his heart to do.

That's not complicated. It just costs us something: our presence, our fairness, and sometimes our comfort. But it always has.