Money, money, money

My life has been circling around the topic of money for the last couple of months. In Agapè we are still running the campaign of ‘Funding the Family Business’, dealing with the changes in our structure of staff finances. Not only will staff be employed in the near future, for many this is also the time to raise their income to a more healthy level. Of course this also has implications for our personal finances. Apart from that, those who follow my Twitter updates know that the 2009 budgeting process has taken a lot of my time, and those who are in the Agapè database know that we’ve been actively seeking support for different projects and initiatives.

And then there is of course the economic crisis. In the recent Agape Europe leadership conference we’ve been discussing the possible implications for our movement, and there is at least consensus that we are facing a time of radical change.What you see happening now in the world is – as I said before – in many ways the effect of greed and immorality. In economical terms, one of the problems we have created is leaving the gold standard as the basis for creating money. Today, the monetary system is not based on actual value of an underlying good (gold, for example), but on debt. See this simple but shockingly convincing documentary ‘Money as debt‘. Note by the way the remarkable parallel with spirituality, in which we have abandoned the ‘gold standard’ of an absolute truth and exchanged it for a myth of egotism and self sufficiency.

So, I thought it was a good idea to speak on this in church last Sunday. I tried to explain the ‘worldly’ concept of wealth, riches and money, and to contrast that to the ‘godly’ system. See my powerpoint (in the download section of this site) for a comparison of these two perspectives and/or listen to the sermon (in Dutch, of course).

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