I attended The Great Adventure Church during my years at Emmaus Bible College in Dubuque, Iowa. As a “Bible college town”, Dubuque had a very interesting church dynamic. There were four churches in town that were led by Emmaus faculty, and while they all shared the same theological beliefs, they were vastly different in structure and practice. In addition, students comprised over half of the church body, which meant that summers and holidays saw attendance drop sharply, and there was a very high turnover rate as students graduated and moved away.

The first week I went to Great Adventure, I was shocked when it came time for the offering near the end of the service. The person administering the offering gave the usual introduction saying that the Bible commands us to give our money back to God, but then he added that if anyone had need, they should not feel obligated to give—rather, they should feel free to take money from the basket as it was passed by. They said this every Sunday without any guidelines or restrictions. They had no way of knowing if anyone took money or how much. But in the two years I went to Great Adventure, they never had any financial problems.

This is not a practice that every church should, or even could, adopt. It would be ineffective at a larger church, and it would be abused at an inner-city church. But Great Adventure knows its people—poor college students, many of whom have gone far into debt to study the Bible—and meets them where they are. Just as we entrust God with our money by letting go of it every Sunday, the leaders at Great Adventure entrust God’s money to those who need it by giving it back.