The Gospel Was Given Freely

A Reflection on Commercialising the Great Commission

As I started learning more about missions and found myself jumping into the pool — fully employed, yet burning with a desire to share the good news of Jesus — a quiet question began to form in my heart:

When did we start monetising the Gospel?

Because the Gospel I read about was never sold. It was carried. It was whispered in prison cells, shouted in marketplaces, wept over in upper rooms. It moved freely from life to life, from city to city, because the people who carried it had encountered something so real that no business model was needed. Only urgency. Only love.

"Freely you have received; freely give." (Matthew 10:8)

And yet, here we are.

The Temple and the Marketplace

There is a scene in the Gospels that I keep coming back to. Jesus walks into the Temple courts, the place set apart for prayer, for seeking God, for drawing near, and He finds it filled with merchants. Money changers. Vendors selling doves. A sacred space turned into a commercial transaction.

And Jesus is angry.

He overturns the tables. He drives them out. Not with a policy paper, not with a committee meeting, but with holy, uncontainable grief that the house of His Father had been made into something it was never meant to be.

"My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers." (Matthew 21:13)

I wonder sometimes if He would do the same today. Not in a temple made of stone, but in the industry we have built around His name. Because the Church was meant to be a house of prayer. And somewhere along the way, parts of it became a marketplace.

When the Church Cannot Afford to Sing

There are small congregations all over the world, meeting in simple rooms, with secondhand chairs and borrowed projectors, hungry to worship. And they cannot legally display the lyrics of a modern worship song on their wall without a licensing agreement they cannot afford.

Songs written about the glory of God. Songs that declare His faithfulness and proclaim His name. Locked behind copyright fees and subscription tiers, inaccessible to the very communities that need them most.

Meanwhile the songs climb the charts. The artists walk red carpets. The publishing deals are signed. And somewhere in a small church in a village, a worship leader quietly goes back to the old hymns because at least those are free.

I am not saying that artists should not be supported or that creativity has no cost. But when the songs of the Church become a product that the Church itself cannot access, something has gone deeply wrong. The tables are full again. The doves are for sale. And the people who came to seek God are left standing at the door wondering if they can even afford to enter.

Glory to God, and the Applause That Follows

There is something else that quietly troubles me.

The worship artist takes the stage and receives the award, and the first words from their mouth are "Glory to God." And the room erupts. And the cameras roll. And maybe they mean it. I want to believe they mean it.

But I also know the human heart. I know how easily "glory to God" becomes a thing we say with our mouths while something quieter swells underneath. The recognition. The validation. The slow, subtle satisfaction of being seen and celebrated for something we made in His name.

This is the conversation the Christian music industry rarely has with itself. Because it has become exactly that, an industry. Shaped by performance. Measured by streams and award shows and production value. What began as pure adoration poured out before God has in many spaces become a polished show performed about God, which is not the same thing at all.

Worship was never meant to be entertainment. It was never meant to be a career. It was breath. It was response. It was the only thing left to do when you had stood in the presence of something far greater than yourself.

The tables are full again. And I wonder if Jesus is standing at the door, grieving.

Preaching the Gospel, Selling the Brand

It is not only music. Walk into any Christian bookstore or scroll through any platform and you will find the Gospel repackaged and re-priced in a hundred different ways.

Preachers who stand entirely on Scripture, who draw from a well that belongs to all of us, selling that same water back in leather-bound editions with their name on the cover. Sermons turned into courses. Discipleship turned into content. The Word of God, which is living and active and free, dressed up in someone else's branding.

And the deeper danger is this. When the Gospel becomes a product, it begins to orbit the one selling it rather than the One it is supposed to proclaim. A preacher stepping out of a luxury car, wearing a thousand-dollar sneaker, preaching on the cost of following Jesus, that is not just an image problem. It is a theological one. Because the life we live is part of the sermon.

Paul understood this. He made tents. He laboured with his hands precisely so that no one could confuse the message with a transaction. He wrote to the Corinthians, "I would rather die than allow anyone to deprive me of this boast, that I preach the Gospel free of charge." (1 Corinthians 9:15)

Free of charge. Imagine.

I Miss the Simplicity of the Gospel

I miss the version of this that does not require a platform.

I miss the idea of someone so undone by the grace of Jesus that they simply cannot stop telling people about it. No branding. No strategy. No monetisation plan. Just a person and a story and the quiet, unshakeable belief that this news was too good to keep to themselves.

I miss the church that met in homes and broke bread and sang without a setlist. I miss the missionary who worked with his hands by day and preached in the evening because the message demanded to be shared whether or not it paid. I miss the version of faith that was not a product, not a performance, not a platform, but simply an overflow of a life that had been changed.

Somewhere in all the noise we have built around the Gospel, the Gospel itself has gotten harder to see.

And I wonder if that is exactly what the enemy intended.

But There Is a Biblical Balance

This is not a call to poverty or a rejection of resources.

Paul affirmed that "those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel." (1 Corinthians 9:14). Jesus himself was supported by those who believed in the mission (Luke 8:2-3). The worker is worthy of his wages and sustainable ministry requires real support.

The question was never whether money is involved. The question is always what is the money serving.

There is a difference between a missionary who writes to resource the mission and a celebrity who mines Scripture to build a brand. There is a difference between a worship artist who releases music to help the Church sing and a label that locks those songs behind fees that price out the very people who need them most.

The issue is not compensation. The issue is capitalisation. Turning the Great Commission into a commercial enterprise and slowly, almost imperceptibly, making it more about us than about Jesus.

What Would Jesus Do?

He would probably walk into some of our spaces and start turning tables again.

Not because resources are evil. But because the Temple had been forgotten. Because what was meant to be a house of prayer, a place of honest encounter and lives poured out, had been filled with noise and transaction and performance.

The Gospel was always meant to travel light.

Fishermen. Tentmakers. Women with jars of perfume. Ordinary people who had simply met a risen Jesus and could not stop talking about it. Not because they were paid to, but because they were compelled to.

Maybe the question worth sitting with is simply this:

If there were no platform, no award, no book deal, no income, would I still go? Would I still sing? Would I still preach?

If the answer is yes, then perhaps the provision that comes is simply God's grace for the journey.

If the answer gives us pause, then maybe it is time to go back to the beginning. Back to an upper room. Back to a hillside. Back to a risen Jesus looking at ordinary, unimpressive, unsponsored people and saying:

"Go. Tell them. I'll be with you always."

No terms and conditions. No licensing fee. No subscription required.

Freely received. Freely given.

A reflection from someone still learning.