Where Your Treasure Is

The Church's True Mission and Money

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  November 4, 2026

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." — Matthew 6:21

Jesus did not say that where your heart is, there your treasure will follow. He put it the other way round. The money goes first, and the heart follows it. Show me a church's budget and I will tell you what that church worships. Not what it says it worships, not what is printed in the bulletin or carved over the narthex door, but what it actually loves.

By that test, Western Christianity has a heart problem that no renewal program, no strategic plan, and no consultant's report will cure.

The Money We Have

Let it be said at the outset: Christians are not poor, and they are not stingy in the aggregate. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, giving to Christian causes worldwide reached roughly $1.38 trillion a year in 2025. In 1970 it was $70 billion. The Church has never had more money in its long history.

The question has never been whether we give. The question is where it goes.

For decades the Gordon-Conwell researchers, beginning with David Barrett and Todd Johnson, have traced the flow of that money, and the picture has barely changed. Roughly 82 percent of all Christian giving goes to the pastoral ministries of local churches, overwhelmingly in nations that are already Christian. Another 12 percent goes to "home missions" in those same Christian nations. About 6 percent goes to foreign missions of any kind. And of that sliver, somewhere between one and two percent reaches the unreached peoples of the earth — the people who have no church, no Bible in their language, and no Christian neighbor to tell them the Good News.

Put it in plain arithmetic. For every $100,000 Christians earn, less than two dollars goes to reach people who have never heard the name of Jesus.

Here is a figure that ought to make every bishop and every vestry blush. Gordon-Conwell estimates that $92 billion a year is lost to what it calls "ecclesiastical crime" — embezzlement, fraud, and theft by those entrusted with the Church's money. That sum rivals everything the entire Christian world gives to foreign missions. We lose more to thieves than we send to the nations.

The People We Are Not Reaching

Now set that against the need.

The Joshua Project counts some 17,600 distinct people groups in the world. More than 7,500 of them are classified as unreached — fewer than two percent evangelical Christian, with no indigenous church able to evangelize its own people without outside help. Together they number some 3.5 billion souls, close to 44 percent of the human race. Gordon-Conwell puts the population with no access to the Gospel at all at more than 2.2 billion.

Roughly two billion of them are Muslims. Most of the rest are Hindus and Buddhists. By one widely cited estimate, 87 percent of the world's Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists will never meet a follower of Jesus in their lifetime. Not reject Him. Never meet anyone who knows Him.

And where do our missionaries go? Of some 450,000 foreign missionaries in the world, only about one in thirty works among the unreached. The overwhelming majority are sent to places that already have churches, already have Bibles, and already have Christians.

We are, in effect, reseeding the lawn while the wilderness waits.

Bricks, Mortar and Bell Towers

Walk through almost any American denomination and you will find the same pattern. The capital campaign is the great sacrament of the modern parish. Organs are rebuilt. Steeples are repointed. Bell towers are restored to summon congregations that no longer come. Parish halls are expanded for ministries that no longer exist. Fundraising consultants are hired at handsome fees to teach the faithful how to give more to the building.

Consider the most dramatic example. In February 2025, Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Dallas announced it had raised more than $76 million from its parishioners to renovate and expand its campus — the largest capital campaign ever undertaken by a parish in the Episcopal Church. Credit where it is due: that is an extraordinary feat of organization and generosity, and the parish has pledged a share of revenue from a ground lease to local outreach. Few rectors in America could have pulled it off.

But pause over the number. Seventy-six million dollars, raised in a matter of months, from a single congregation. It went, almost entirely, into one campus in one of the most churched cities in the most churched nation on earth. One wonders what a frontier ministry working among a people with no church at all could do with a tithe of it.

I do not say buildings are sinful. Solomon built the Temple, and the Lord filled it with His glory. Beauty in worship is not vanity. But the prophet Haggai rebuked a people who lived in paneled houses while God's house lay in ruins. Our problem is the reverse. We panel our sanctuaries while the nations lie in ruins. We restore the bell tower and forget why the bell was ever rung.

The Decline We Cannot Explain Away

Meanwhile, the Western church is shrinking.

Pew Research Center's massive 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of nearly 37,000 Americans, found that 62 percent of U.S. adults now identify as Christian — down from 71 percent in 2014 and 78 percent in 2007. Pew notes that the decline has leveled off since about 2019, but it also warns that generational replacement points to further decline ahead. Young Americans are simply far less religious than their grandparents.

Ryan Burge, the political scientist and former Baptist pastor whose data has become indispensable to anyone who cares about the American church, puts it more bluntly. In his 2026 book The Vanishing Church, he reports that the seven historic mainline denominations — the Episcopal Church among them — fell from about 24 million members in 1987 to 13.2 million in 2022. He predicts that in 20 to 30 years the mainline tradition will be largely extinct across many parts of the country. His own congregation, First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, held its final service in July 2024 after 156 years.

Barna's research adds a further, more damning layer. Barna found that 51 percent of American churchgoers say they have never heard of the Great Commission — the last command Jesus gave His disciples before He ascended. Only 17 percent could say what it meant. Among millennials, just one in ten recognized it. Barna's 2025 State of the Church report found that older churchgoers now attend eleven fewer services a year than they did in 2000, and churches that cut staff blamed falling giving and falling attendance.

And the money is drying up too. According to Giving USA data, religion is now the only major sector of American charitable giving that is shrinking once inflation is counted. In 1989 religion received nearly twice the share of total U.S. giving that it receives today.

A church that does not know its marching orders will not march. A church that will not march will not grow. And a church that spends its treasure on itself should not be surprised when its heart shrinks to fit.

Is God Displeased?

This is the question I cannot shake, and I will not pretend it is a comfortable one. Is the decline of Western Christianity simply a sociological phenomenon — secularization, affluence, mobility, the sexual revolution, the screen — or is something more serious at work? Is God withdrawing His blessing from a church that has kept the Gospel for itself?

I tread carefully. Nobody has access to the secret counsels of the Almighty, and I distrust preachers who announce God's judgments with too much confidence. But Scripture is not silent on the pattern.

To the church at Ephesus — orthodox, hardworking, intolerant of false teachers — the risen Christ said, "I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first." And then the warning: repent, "or else I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place." The lampstand was the church's witness in the world. It could be removed. History tells us it was. Ephesus today is a ruin visited by tourists.

The parable of the talents ends not with the thief or the adulterer being cast out, but with the servant who buried what he was given. He did nothing wicked. He simply kept it safe. Jesus called him "wicked and slothful," and what he had was taken from him and given to another.

Is that not precisely what we see? The talents are being taken from the West and given to others. The growth of Christianity today is in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The face of global Anglicanism, as Jerry Kramer puts it, is a young Nigerian woman. The Global South churches I saw first-hand in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in the early years of the realignment were poor by our standards, and they were planting churches with an urgency that put us to shame. They were spending themselves. We were spending on ourselves.

I am not prepared to say God is punishing the Western church. I am prepared to say He is not obliged to keep blessing a church that has stopped obeying Him.

A Better Way: Love for the Least

There is another way, and some are walking it.

Jerry and Stacy Kramer are two unlikely Anglican missionaries. Jerry is an ordained Anglican priest who does not wear a dog collar. For nearly 25 years they have worked in the Middle East and Africa — among ISIS-displaced refugees in northern Iraq, in war-torn Syria with trips into combat zones, among widows and orphans in East Africa, and among diaspora Iranians in Central Asia. Their ministry, Love for the Least, defines "the least" as the unreached, the unseen and the unwanted: widows, orphans, refugees, trafficked women, and Muslim peoples with little or no Gospel presence.

Their numbers would embarrass most dioceses. Love for the Least is active among more than 49 unreached people groups. Their network has seen some 15,000 new churches formed and disciples reproducing to the fourteenth generation. They prayed for one movement; today they help catalyze seven — two official and five emerging — in twelve countries. They have brought relief to more than one million war-displaced refugees and care for over 400 orphans.

Jerry's strategy is deliberately apostolic. "We go to zero or worse," he told me. "If a People Group is more than 4% reached, that's not for us. We pioneer and break hard ground, not sustain or maintain." And he holds word and deed together: "Compassion opens doors; the Gospel transforms lives."

Here is the point. This kind of ministry costs a fraction of a single building campaign. It does not need a cathedral. It needs people willing to go, and people willing to send them. It needs a church that believes the Great Commission is not optional.

What Must Change

At Lausanne in 1974, I sat and listened as John Stott and the drafters of the Lausanne Covenant called those of us who live in affluence to "develop a simple life-style in order to contribute more generously" to relief and evangelism. Fifty-two years later the call stands, and the response has been, by the numbers, pitiful.

So let me be specific.

Every parish should publish what percentage of its budget goes to frontier missions — not "outreach," not the food pantry, not the diocesan assessment, but work among people who have never heard. Most will be ashamed of the number. Good. Shame can be the beginning of repentance.

Every capital campaign should carry a tithe for the unreached. If a parish can raise $5 million for a new roof, it can raise $500,000 for a people group with no church.

Every bishop should ask, before signing off on the next renovation: how many unreached people will hear the Gospel because of this? If the answer is none, it is worth asking again.

And every Christian should look at his own checkbook — or her own bank app — and ask the question Jesus forces upon us. Where is my treasure? Because that is where my heart is.

The Lampstand

William Carey, the shoemaker who launched the modern missionary movement, was told by an older minister — so the story goes — to sit down: if God wanted to convert the heathen, He would do it without Carey's help. Carey did not sit down. He went to India. The church that sent him was poor. The church that hesitates today is rich.

The great irony of our time is that the Western church has never had more money and never done less with it for the people who need it most. We have built beautiful buildings for ourselves and called it faithfulness. We have restored the bell towers. But the bell was never meant to call us in. It was meant to send us out.

If we do not hear it, God will not stop His mission. He will simply give the lampstand to someone who will carry it. He is doing so already.

The only question left is whether we will repent before the light goes out — or explain the darkness afterward.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder, editor and publisher of VirtueOnline, the voice for global orthodox Anglicanism. His website can be accessed here: www.virtueonline.org He also writes on the Middle East. His Substack can be located here: davidvirtue2.substack.com