www.andrewmackay.net:

There’s a great post at Communicate Jesus that helps people to think about creative people who are Christians and whether or not they should provide their work to the church for free.

Paul bankrolled a bunch of very important creative enterprises. One was Christian television. I know that he backed Clifford Warne and his puppets and Bible stories and sent him to America so Clifford knew how to write and produce children’s television … One of the reasons he was so effective was that he paid the Christian creatives around him.

This is something I’ve put a little bit of thought into — I think it’s really a matter of scale. If a believer is contributing their talents to a side project without greatly detracting from their ability to make a living, that’s okay as “free work” goes. On the other hand, when the scale of the work is big enough to require the person forgo opportunities to make a living, I think it behooves the church to pay for the work.

It’s kinda like this: if we have a plumber in our congregation and he installs a new faucet for us and doesn’t want to bill us, I probably won’t quibble. On the other hand, if the plumber has to take a week to entirely re-plumb our facility, forgoing other jobs, I think we pay him for his work in 99.9% of the cases. Same goes for a designer or… pretty much anyone else.

What do you think?