When Elim minister Phil Weaver found himself drowning in debt, he cried out to God for a lifeline. Now, the principles Phil felt the Lord revealed to him are to help thousands around the UK
Many ministers prefer not to tackle finance from the pulpit. Phil Weaver is not part of that group.
“We teach our church about debt and finance,” he boldly declares. “I could speak about the cross and debt every week – I don’t, but I could.”
And Phil, perhaps unusually for a minister, is rather well equipped to speak about money. Having worked his way out of significant debt in a short space of time, the principles he feels God gave him have become the basis of a financial education programme that is attracting government interest – the On Track programme.
The course, which comprises five sessions designed to be spread over ten weeks, offers a comprehensive overview of how to handle money. These are principles that Phil learned the hard way.
“Quite some years ago now, my wife, Helen, and I were in some serious debt – tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt,” he remembers. “I need to say that it was my fault. Helen kept saying to me, ‘We need to sort this.’ I was in the ministry at the time, preaching every week. My answer to her was, ‘We’re OK, we can handle this. It’s no problem at all.’
“I didn’t really listen to her. I just kept saying it was OK. I genuinely believed that, but then came the day that I realised I couldn’t sort it and it was getting way out of hand. I hit a certain figure, and I thought, ‘What’s the point? I might as well spend some more.’
“It’s difficult to say exactly what that figure was, but it was tens and tens of thousands of pounds. We had a wallet full of credit cards, all maxed out and being juggled. We had a loan for a car, loans for furniture; all those kinds of things. Christmas comes along and you don’t want your children to do without, so you take out a short-term loan. Many people live like it – many ministers live like it.”
It might be how many people operate, but Phil’s memory of that part of his life is rather bleak. “It was a pretty desperate situation,” he recalls. “It was not unusual to have Helen crying and for me to be worried out of my mind about the letters that came through the post and the phone calls and all those things. One day, I was asking the Lord about it and he said to me, ‘You’ve got to sort this, you’re wrong. The borrower is always the slave to the lender.’
“I started to think about it and pray about it and I said to Helen, ‘You’re right, I’m wrong.’ I set my mind and I asked the Lord how to do this. There weren’t so many places you could go in those days. I really felt the Lord gave me a system to get out of debt: I went to war with it.
“We reviewed our finances every week, sometimes twice a week and sometimes every day. Every penny we got, we threw at our normal bills and our debts. We went without, we sacrificed – but we never, ever sacrificed on the kids. We honoured the kids. We cut our cards up and within two years, we were completely out of debt.”
It may sound like a stunningly simple solution, but Phil is not out to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.
“It was very hard work,” he stresses. “But we got out of debt and I was so thrilled – I can’t tell you the excitement and pure joy that I was no longer beholden to anyone where finances were concerned.”
After they had paid off all their unsecured debts by starting with the smaller ones and working up to the larger, Phil decided to see if he could tackle his mortgage. At the time, they were only paying the interest on an endowment mortgage with 14 years to run and over £100,000 to pay.
“We sacrificed for another three years, but three years and one month later we paid the mortgage off, and the interest we saved was phenomenal,” he adds.
Holidays were ignored, extra hours were worked, car boot sales were visited, but after a little over five years of scrimping, saving and slashing debts, Phil and Helen didn’t owe anyone a penny. And now that process is over, Phil wants to help everybody else.
“The Lord started to speak to me about economic issues,” he explains. “For 10-12 years, I was prophesying that there was an economic crash coming. I taught my church about debt and tried to help them, and I set up EnQuire, which is our debt advice service. I wanted people to get out of debt.”
When Phil saw that people were content to firefight, he realised that it wasn’t just debt that was the problem. “I realised that all people were interested in was getting out of trouble. I wanted to come up with a programme to educate and change their mindsets: that’s how we came up with OnTrack. We’re helping people to renew their mind where finance is concerned.”
For Phil, finance is a crucial part of a Christian life. “You can’t separate money from God. When people get out of money issues, revival is linked to that. Money and revival are linked – there’s no question of that. The way you handle your finance tells us a lot about your relationship with God. You can’t divorce finance and spirituality – the two go hand in hand. I challenge the church all the time to get out of debt. Sixteen of Jesus’ parables directly deal with finances or possessions. Jesus spoke about money more than any other subject.”
For Phil, the OnTrack programme is still a daily reality – not just a method for getting out of debt that served him well years ago.
“Helen and I still review our money every week together – we’ve always worked together,” he says. “One of my maxims is that if you want long-term gain, you’ve got to sacrifice short term. OnTrack deals with people who have money, too. When you’re out of debt it’s about learning how to prosper. I believe God wants us to prosper, but I don’t like the connotations televangelists have given that word. We have always honoured God, and when we were getting out of debt, we gave more than we had ever given.
“We kept it between the family and God – we didn’t pray for money at the front of prayer meetings. We saw tremendous blessings come in: the principles of seed time and harvest really came into effect.”
How OnTrack works:
OnTrack is a financial education course that aims to tackle poor attitudes towards money and help people to move from debt to prosperity. Aimed both at the church and the community, there are two versions: one includes Christian content which explains the scriptural basis of the various principles over ten sessions, the other offers the same principles without the faith content over five sessions. The outreach version of OnTrack is a great evangelistic tool which can be used to help people in the community. The extended version of OnTrack, which includes scriptural content, is an excellent resource for church small groups to discuss together.
Sessions include practical exercises to get participants thinking, as well as advice to take away and put into practice and aids – like a wallet-sized notebook to record your spending in – to help you make it work.
OnTrack has been earmarked for nationwide use by the government’s Money Advice Service, and is available as a resource to Elim churches.