Abolish the Jesus Trade
Spread the Joy of Freely Giving
Years ago Randy Alcorn observed, “In the Christian community today there is more blindness, rationalization, and unclear thinking about money than anything else.” Abolish the Jesus Trade aims to help reverse this assessment. The Church is currently marked by underdeveloped thinking about Scripture’s teaching on money and ministry. The sale of the sacred has been normalized, not by prosperity preachers, but by conservative evangelicals. Busy building paywalls, we have torn down the sincerity of the Body of Christ.
Conley Owens, Jon Here, and Andrew Case present this collection of articles that seek to exalt the radical generosity of God’s heart, confront the commercialization of Christianity, and promote the biblical teaching that ministry should be supported but never sold. We are living in a time like the antebellum United States, where the majority of ministers regularly defended the slave trade from the pulpit, just as they defend the Jesus trade today. This calls for repentance, reform, and a return to Scripture’s primacy over economic expediency.
Read a short sample
This book is a collection of the articles on our website. We recommend reading some of them if you’d like to get a feel for the contents of the book.
View articlesGet the free ebook
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Listen to audio version
Most of the articles in the book are already available on our podcast.
Get a printed copy
The book is available at the following online retailers for the minimum price they would allow:
If you would like a free printed copy, we’re happy to pay for the printing and shipping for you. This offer is open to anyone. If you need more than one copy, please contact us.
Print the book yourself
You can supply a printing service such as Lulu with the cover page and contents to print yourself, if you would like. It must be printed 6x9 inches, and we use paperback perfect bound, standard black/white, cream paper, matte cover.
Download PDFDownload cover (Lulu)Download cover (KDP)If you’d like to print the book with a home printer, it will be best to print it in parts due to its size. The following files are designed for home printing and should be printed two pages per side (landscape). You’ll need software that can print booklet style, so that the pages are in the correct order when folded.
A4 (2 pages landscape)US Letter (2 pages landscape)Translations and adaptations
If you’d like to translate or adapt the book in an editable format, there are several options:
- Edit the EPUB using software like Sigil
- Edit this Word document (though the formatting is not as accurate as the PDF/EPUB)
- Copy and paste from our website which has all the articles
- Software developers can also edit the original Markdown the book is generated from
If you plan to translate the whole book, please contact us so we can guide you in doing it in a way that will be easily publishable when complete.
Why we’re giving printed copies for free
One of the distinctions we explain in this book is that if teaching is given freely, then it’s ok to charge for paper and ink. In practice, this means releasing teaching from copyright and making it freely accessible online, but we don’t expect everyone to give away printed books for free, as we are doing here.
So why are we giving away printed copies? The reason for the biblical ethic against selling ministry is that it undermines the sincerity of ministry (2 Cor 2:17). While charging for physical copies is not necessarily insincere (as selling biblical teaching would be), it has the potential to suggest an ulterior financial motive.
We don’t want anything to cast doubt on the sincerity of the message we’re sharing. That’s why we don’t charge for printing or delivery—and we don’t ask for donations either. Again, we’re not saying everyone must do this; we wholeheartedly encourage financially supporting ministry. We’ve simply chosen this approach because of the nature of the topic we’re addressing.
While we can’t afford to do this at scale, we provide everything needed to print in bulk should someone wish to, at the lowest cost possible.
If you have any questions about this, please read the book, because it’s exactly the kind of thing it explores in depth—and it’s free!