Can You Spare a Dime? "For a Double Mocha Frappicino Latte"

By Mark Kennedy, ACSI, Eastern Canada

To me one of the profound mysteries about the North American Christian community is, “How can so many people in two of the wealthiest nations the world has ever known say they can’t afford Christian schooling for their children?”

Now I know that there are low income families here who can barely afford the necessities of life let along Christian school tuition. But what about everyone else? Well thanks to the research of the Vanier Institute of the Family’s ninth annual report, I am beginning ‘to get it’.

The report entitled, “The Current State of Canadian Family Finance” points out that:

• Since 1990, family debt has been rising seven times faster than household income—to the point that it is now equal to a record 131% of household incomes.
• More families than ever are living well beyond their means, despite low levels of unemployment, modest wage gains and an 18% increase in real net worth since the year 2000.
• Among Canadians earning a net mid-range income of about $60,000 annually, credit card debt has almost doubled from $12,000 in 1990 to over $22,500 today.
• There has been a steep decline in the amount of money families are able to save annually from $7,000 in 1990 to about $1000 today.

It seems our income level is less of an issue than our level of spending. An increasing percentage of Canadian families are spending more than they earn annually and, for these families adding payments for Christian school tuition on top of everything else is an extremely unattractive prospect. So even if a family’s annual income is $1,000,000 they cannot afford Christian schooling if their yearly expenses are $1,300,000.

In the battle of spending vs. earning, spending is winning and Canadian families are losing. The seductions of rampant materialism has triumphed over balanced and controlled family finances.

And it can’t be all that comfortable for some of our industries either, especially if they have to come up with new or “improved” products that they hope will make perfectly good older things obsolete in order to keep their income levels spiraling upwards.

How much more difficult it must be for the advertising agencies that have to create ‘ex nihilo’ an irrational public appetite for new things that we have managed to live quite happily without up until now—convincing us for example that we really need a big screen TV and VCR, then a flat screen TV and DVD player, and now an HD, LCD screen and a Blue Ray player.

Do ad executives ever wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which the North American public says something like:

“We have finally figured out that we don’t need more and more and bigger and better. We are taking back control of our own money and our lives. We have decided to be content with lower standards of living for the sake of our children and for our own peace of mind”?

In addition, if we ever were to take that stand what would happen to our way of life? Would it mean that unbridled North American capitalism would join Russian Communism on “the ash heap of history”?

Maybe. The world’s nations and empires, political and economic systems rise and fall, live and die. And those who put their trust in them tend to share their fate.

But Christian families don’t have to be captives of secular society’s values and priorities. Jesus’ familiar words, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” are the key. In light of this principle, Christian families have some critical financial questions to think through:

• What should our priorities be in spending our limited (and often dwindling) financial resources?
• Is it wiser to invest heavily in temporal things like cars and houses or in eternal things like the lives of our children?
• What can we afford to live without in order to provide a Christian education for our children?

With our skyrocketing gasoline prices and with the inevitable increases in almost all other costs, those questions are becoming more and more pointed. And if Christian families don’t bring their spending under greater control and rethink their priorities in light of scripture, the answers will be crippling for their own children, and for the Christian school movement in Canada.

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