How do most churches value the five capitals? How does yours? It’d be great to say that spiritual capital is the highest, but do we actually behave as though it is? What gets discussed at board meetings? What are our measurements of success? What is the thing that assumed to be the highest good? The thing we leverage all our capital for? Isn’t it usually to get more people to come to church and for the giving to increase?

 

Of course every tradition is a bit different. For example, the more historic denominations are often very influenced by the academic world, valuing intellectual capital much more highly than spiritual capital. This ends up affecting the way we do theological education, the way we place value on leaders, what we are willing to invest money in, and more.  Even our church cultures can train us to value the five capitals in a way that puts them in the wrong order. Any wrong order always leads to foolish investments and a life that just doesn’t work.

 

Also, Prosperity Theology equates financial capital with spiritual capital, assuming that our financial abundance is an accurate way of measuring our spiritual abundance. It’s easy to fall into this trap, because financial capital is the most measurable and concrete kind of capital (because people have been measuring it longer than the others). Prosperity theologians tend to treat financial capital as the same thing as spiritual capital, and so they serve Money as God. This ultimately causes their theology as a whole to be unbalanced and unhelpful.

 

Excerpt From: Mike Breen & Ben Sternke. “Oikonomics.” iBooks.