John Wesley, the great English evangelist, once preached a sermon on Matthew 6:19-23 where Jesus urges us not to "store up for yourselves treasures on earth."

Wesley said Christians should provide plain, wholesome food and clean clothes for their families and secure enough material goods to carry on their business. Anything above and beyond this should be dedicated to the relief of the poor and evangelism.

Not surprisingly, Wesley raged that the churches in his day were populated with "living men but dead Christians." I wonder what he would say about our churches today with their budgets, programs, paid staff and building fundraising drives, particularly in light of recent 2001 census data on income and education levels in Canada.

The good news according to Statistics Canada is that:

• A full-time worker with a university degree makes $25,545 more than a full-time worker with just a high school diploma ($61,823 versus $36,278);

• Canadians are better educated than ever before, with 53.4 per cent of those aged 26-64 having a post-secondary education compared with two per cent in 1951;

• For the first time ever, more than half of all university graduates are women.

Obsessed with wealth
What the data doesn't adequately drive home is the disturbing side of our society's obsession with material wealth:

• Women still earn 70 cents for every dollar earned by men (although women's salaries jumped by 12.9 per cent during the last decade);

• Immigrants, who tend to be highly educated thanks to the federal government's high qualification demands, make just 63 cents for every dollar earned by their Canadian-born counterparts; and

• The national disgrace of poverty—1.5 million full-time workers survive on less than $20,000, an increase of 138,000 people since 1990.

It needs to be said that being a well-educated, high-income earner doesn't mean you're automatically excluded from being a Christian. Any Christian who argues in favour of "eating the rich" is spouting the political rhetoric of the anti-globalization movement—a large part of which consists of radical feminist, pro-abortion, anarchist and existentialist groups who use well-meaning but naïve church groups to advance a thoroughly humanistic ideology.

But if God is not a Communist, then surely He's made it quite clear that His heart is with the poor and the oppressed. And there's the great dilemma for the Christian church.

In 1974, evangelical Christian leaders gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland for an international congress on world evangelism. At the congress' conclusion, these leaders issued a clarion call to the wealthy nations of the world and especially wealthy Christians: "Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple lifestyle in order to contribute more generously to both relief and development."

Beyond the foyer
Christians need to carry their Sunday holiness beyond the church foyer and into their workplaces and communities when it comes to economic issues. They need to speak out against the shameful poverty in Canada, against the discrimination and racism that permeates our society and against the sexism that keeps women from taking their rightful places as valued persons wherever their God-given gifts lead them.

Many Christians and especially church leaders will protest they are doing these things already. The problem is they're losing the battle for people's hearts to materialism, consumerism and all the other "isms" competing for our loyalty—and whose advocates are louder, better organized and less divided than Christ's church.

The Apostle Paul told the Christians in Corinth, "Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality" (2 Cor. 8:13). What would Paul say to the churches in Canada?

Joe Couto is a government and communications professional working on Bay Street in Toronto. Joe is a keen observer of the church in Canada who formerly served as communications manager for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and is a frequent contributor to ChristianWeek. This is the seventh in nine-part series.