Photo by Dominik Gwarek from FreeImages

Once, when I was working on the mission field, I had to go and tell the head of one of our departments that the government had mandated 30% pay rises for all their workers.  “I’m not doing that,” he fumed.  “They’re already the best-paid workers in the area.”

“You’ve got no choice,” I pointed out.  “The Government says so.”

“We don’t have to obey them.  We’re working for God.”

I wonder if you’ve ever come across people like that, who think that their higher calling saves them from being accountable to lower authorities.  It can be tempting for all of us to take short cuts, and these days we can spend a lot of time making sure we comply with directives: health & safety, safeguarding, anti-discrimination rules, risk management, employment legislation, work and residence permit procedures, tax and payroll regulations, accounting rules, food hygiene – it can be hard even to keep up to speed on what is required in running an office, let alone make sure everything we do is compliant.

Particularly for smaller agencies, it can be a big headache.  It’s not that these things are in themselves bad.  In fact they’re not unreasonable.  But most of us are not professionals in the relevant fields and struggle to understand the nuances and subtleties of what we can and can’t do.  Particularly if we have to do it in a foreign language, in a culture that sidelines women, has significant levels of government incompetence, and in which a small ‘voluntary administrative fee’ is needed to keep the bureaucracy moving forward.

So it can be tempting just to ignore them, like my friend above wanted to.

That may work for a while, but what happens when something goes wrong?  Suppose you failed to do a risk assessment for a short-term trip on which someone gets hurt.  Or you don’t have a safeguarding policy in place when somebody accuses one of your staff of sexual harassment.  Or you didn’t bother setting up a pension scheme for your five employees because it would cost you too much and they’re happy with the current system.  Your organisation – and your trustees personally – are open to prosecution.

Perhaps even more significantly, the name of Jesus is harmed.  What kind of a witness is it when people think ‘Those Christians are always ignoring the law’?  It’s not only our reputation that is at stake, it is His too.  Paul told the Philippians to be blameless and above reproach in a crooked and perverse generation (Philippians 2:15).  In doing so we share in the character of Jesus and reveal it to the world.

Finally, in complying with regulations we’re following the teaching of Jesus who said:

Render under Caesar that which is Caesar’s , and to God the things that are God’s.

(Matthew 22:21)

How often do we try hard to do the latter without doing the former?