Should Christian Ministries Take Government Funds?

By Warren Cole Smith - Posted at MinistryWatch:

Published January 31, 2025

James Whitford of True Charity Says “No”

Last week the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo directing federal agencies to stop all grants and loans. The OMB wanted to review them and ensure they were in compliance with new executive orders issued by President Donald Trump.

The backlash against the memo was swift and strong. Of course, liberal groups objected, in part because the memo would have frozen funding to some of their pet projects, including the funding of abortion and LGBTQ+ advocacy. But the outcry was not just from progressives. A number of Christian groups, some of them relatively conservative, also objected. World Relief, the benevolence arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, said the freeze would hamper their refugee resettlement efforts. PEPFAR, an AIDS prevention effort in Africa and elsewhere that costs $5 billion a year, has been a favorite of evangelicals. It too faced a funding freeze. Sanitation and clean water efforts, many of them led by Christian groups in Africa, India, and elsewhere, faced immediate shutdown.

In fact, a spreadsheet sent to federal agencies naming the programs under review ran to more than 50 pages.

As a result of the outcry coming from all quarters, the OMB rescinded its directive in a matter of days. Money from the government trough will continue to overflow into these programs – including many run by Christian groups – for the foreseeable future. (Though the foreign aid freeze was not rescinded.)

But should it?

A lot of smart people – including many who have made a career helping the “least and the lost” in our broken world — say the answer to that question is, “no.”

Continue here...