Given that, in biblical teaching, money has a dark side as well as a light side, Richard Foster offers some helpful counsel:-

1.  Listen to the biblical witness about money.

2.  Consider money from a psychological and sociological perspective.  Do we regard money with fear, hatred, love, pride, shame?  What are the causes of Third World poverty and First World affluence?  What responsibility do we bear?  What resources are available?

3.  Develop money management skills.  Give attention to family budgeting, estate planning, investments, deferred giving, and so on.

4.  Gather a community of support.  Friends can share their hopes and plans.  Spouses can help each other.  Home groups can offer support.

5.  Bring prayer to bear directly on money matters.  Pray for one another for the binding of greed and covetousness and the releasing of liberality and generosity.  Pray imaginatively, seeing the power of money broken, visualising money being channeled into needy lives, imagining Christians in business controlling, investing, and channeling money in new, creative, life-enhancing ways, seeing governments diverting their vast resources away from bombs and into food.  Let us pray for each other, for wisdom to be faithful with our resources.  Learn to pray preventive prayers: pray for the protection of those who are doing well, that they may excel in the grace of giving, and be free from greed and avarice.

6.  Dethrone money.  Money is too high on our list of values.  Put it lower – far lower than friendship and cheerfulness, for example.  Profane it by giving it away.

7.  Side with people against money and things.  The Bible prohibited charging interest on loans, for to do so would be the exploit another’s misfortune, Ex 22:25.   Wages were to be paid daily, for many lived a hand-to-mouth existence, Deut 24:14f.  When a coat was given as a pledge for borrowed tools, it was to be returned at night even if the tools had not be returned, because the nights were cold, Deut 24:6-13.

We can apply this by being willing to lose money rather than a friendship, by supporting the ‘use’ of church facilities rather their mere ‘preservation’, by providing wages according to need and not just according to productiveness, by remembering that the child who break a toy is more important than the toy, by giving up a major purchase to feed hungry people.

8.  Root out all favoured treatment of people based upon money.  ‘Show no partiality’, James 2:1.  If in the world money means access to the corridors of power, in the Church is should mean no such thing.

Based on Richard Foster, Money, Sex and Power, 58-63