If You Can Pay Those, You Should Pay These!

Dear Pastors & Bishops, if you can afford to host and pay a popular music artist when he charges you N1,000,000 or more for a single event but you do not have any member of your own worship team on payroll, you are in error! It doesn’t really matter whether you raid the church account to host such a guest artist or someone volunteers to sponsor the hosting: If you would not attend to the welfare of the ‘levites’ around you but you can pay a big-name artist some big sum he demands for dropping by at your single event, you look to me like a transgressor! Can we repent? Or must we continue to contribute to building this alarming culture where all that the next talented young musician you find in church is thinking about is how some day he/she will become popular too and start charging millions to perform? You complain that some of your musicians and choristers are not committed, but you do not care about their physical well-being, and you think that is OK? The keyboardist in your church is unemployed, and you won’t offer him anything but you expect him to keep coming to church to play? Your young drummer is available to play week after week because he can’t find money to further his education, and it is none of your business, or you rather wish he should stay that way? If your church policy is that no member of your music team gets paid for playing for your church, then your sin is great indeed if you lavish the church’s money on any invited high-charging guest artist. Let’s repent! A bunch of eager youths labor with you in your assembly, keeping your worship and music going smoothly from week to week, and it is some superstar that drops by to reap a harvest? And you don’t expect many of them to go find ‘more worthwhile’ things to do? Read Nehemiah 13: 10 – 11: ‘I also learned that the portions assigned to the Levites had not been given to them, and that all the Levites and musicians responsible for the service had gone back to their own fields. So I rebuked the officials and asked them, “Why is the house of God neglected?” Then I called them together and stationed them at their posts.’ Let’s do the right thing!