Plus here's a thought: Why is it the more successful the church the more financially stable the preacher? The only struggling preacher is the preacher of a struggling church. And a struggling church is a broke church.
How are you deriving success? Membership? Nice buildings? Not sure what your criteria is.
You're also seemingly discussing western Christianity, under a capitalist system, so money will by nature dominates.
Our culture runs on money and demands money -- whether for large buildings and ministries, or simply to pay for a car and gas to get to people to minister and for Bibles and food drives.
Church looks different across seas and/or in the third-world countries.
Because the culture is not greased on money, the church doesn't hinge on money.
This is why there have been movements to create home churches, so that money is no longer an issue. Church moves out of a large conglomerate that demands buku amount of financial resources into people's living rooms and kitches, where everyone brings potluck meals, contributes their own experiences with God, and singing is free. People avoid all the overhead and instead emulate the original first-century church, gettin back to its roots, focusing on personal relationships with a core group.
I also beg to differ a bit with the quoted thought: First of all, people tend to figure out their investment ministries, then continue to invest as long as things remain positive or neutral; they get attached. Second of all, all things have life cycles. A lot of the big ministries have taken downturns after their years of prosperity, especially if the investment was made in a particular figurehead (i.e., the pastor) and then that figurehead leaves.
Case in point: Crystal Cathedral / Robert Sculler Ministries:
Robert Harold Schuller (born September 16, 1926 in Alton, Iowa) is an American televangelist, pastor, and author known principally through the weekly Hour of Power television broadcast that he began in 1970. He is also the founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, where the Hour of Power program originates. On January 22, 2006, Schuller announced his retirement...
On October 18, 2010, Schuller Coleman announced that the Crystal Cathedral was seeking bankruptcy protection.[10]
Now if you're going to help make the money to help people wouldnt it be nice to get some of it or is it only okay for SOME preachers to do that well being wrong for others? Maybe it's wrong either way. Maybe not. I don't know. But there seems to be a double standard in the religious community when it comes to this. They all seem to say "It's okay to make money in Gods name" well some add "just not a lot of it."
Money will always a controversial issue within the church, because the answer is ambiguous (and, I think, subjective).
Is the church a business, or is it a ministry?
Within the last few months, my son turned 16. This past winter, he wanted badly to go on a missions trip to Swaziland, to help people. Then he went through this torturous period involving money concepts -- was it better for him to not go at all and just send the money, to feed starving people? Why did he need to go at all if he could just use the money directly to help someone? Why do people spend money on DVDs and computers and cars and houses and nice meals out, when many people in the world live without food or shelter? And he felt like he was getting the blow-off from adults in the church, who hadn't really engaged him but just said, "Well, it's a balance." (Which might technically be correct, in the end, but didn't help my son work through things.) He was feeling like, if he really wanted to serve God, rationally, he needed to sell all of his things and give the money away.
Hard questions, and some of the answers based on personal conscience.
I don't think religious people have an easy out, though, if they consider their profession another way of serving God. In that case, there is not any real difference between serving God directly in a church, for compensation, vs working in the secular world to "serve God" for compensation, is there? Money is money is power to do things, it doesn't matter where it comes from. So the question remains regardless of whether we are talking church or secular profession, if one is religious.
Good questions.