“Material Goodness as an Expression of Our Righteousness”: A Baptist President Warns the Church About Wealth

• Jamaica Baptist Union president Rev Norva Rodney warned against Christians’ preoccupation with wealth
• He said church and society seemed to value material goods as proof of righteousness
• He spoke at the closing service of the JBU’s 171st General Assembly
• He linked materialism to ‘freedom without responsibility’

In March 2021 the president of the Jamaica Baptist Union used the close of the denomination’s 171st General Assembly to challenge Christians about money. The Jamaica Observer reported that the Rev Norva Rodney warned that some believers had become preoccupied with material wealth and the pursuit of power.

“Ours have become a church and a society that seems to value material goodness as an expression of our righteousness,” he said.

Rodney described a culture in which comfort and possessions crowd out other values. “We are living in a world, where human pre-occupation, material things and creature comforts are dominant and this at the rejection of things spiritual, moral and of cultural value,” he said. He argued that this focus had produced self-centred attitudes, which he described as “freedom without responsibility, and relationships without personal sacrifices.”

The assembly was held under the theme “Keeping Faith with the Word in an Ever-Changing World.” Rodney’s words were addressed to Baptists, but they carried a message for the wider church in a society where success is often measured by houses, cars and land.

The warning speaks to a tension many Jamaican Christians feel between the prosperity message and the older Baptist tradition that bought land for freed people and built free villages. Owning a home, land or a business is not wrong, and for many families it is the foundation of security. The question Rodney raised is about motive and measure: whether property is treated as proof of God’s favour or as something held in trust. For church members at home and in the diaspora building houses and investing, it is a useful reminder that stewardship includes what we build, how we pay for it and whom it serves.

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