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Old 07-27-2009, 02:43 AM
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PaulB PaulB is offline
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: The Northwest of England
Posts: 158
Default tithing

Now that many of you have made it clear that we are not commanded to tithe it seems to paint a whole new picture to me in the realm of giving. If I tithe because I am commanded to do so I don’t really feel like I am giving out of the abundance of my heart but rather because it is expected of me. It is a bit like when a child is told to tidy his room (as you mothers will know!), if he/she does it to please you then you know that it is genuine (that is if they are not secretly seeking something in return that they know that you will give to them because they did it!). but if a child is under compulsion to keep that room tidy then genuine gratitude becomes all the harder to notice. It becomes a bit like a form of employment where we do it because it is expected of us rather than because we want to.

Jassy you make some very good points and I can see from your post that it has been a first hand experience for you. I have belonged to a couple of Pentecostal churches that have hammered tithing as a doctrine to the extent that you would have thought that you were sitting in a banking seminar for its staff.

I have experienced personal rebuke for being in debt with cc/loans (that is when I was in that position a few years ago with a wife and baby to provide for). I worked 6 days a week and spent many nights away from home often working 15 hours a day and sleeping rough at night because of my job. But what hurt me the most was the fact that after being personally rebuked for being in debt and then blamed for being in that position for “Not tithing” all of these ministers were living in luxury, going on expensive holidays and driving fancy cars. And to top if off – the stress on tithing was their way of dealing with the debt that the church had with the bank because of the massive building project that it had taken on.

They preached that you’ve got to have “faith” and that to be in debt was a sign of a lack of it, then they would batter us with the Malachi verses and just about everything else that they could use to get the offering back filled to the max. The churches where we encountered this were both brand new multimillion £££££$$$$$ complexes (one with a gymnasium and both with $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ spent on the development of the “music ministry”. If that wasn’t enough I don’t know how much was spent on them having trips paid for so that a number of them could go to Toronto in order to bring the “Toronto blessing” back to the UK.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ was spent on media advertising to push a self styled promotion known as the “JIM Challenge” (Jesus in me). It was all about buck and growth for bucks and popularity as I could see it. People didn’t matter, it was full auditoriums that counted. It was an awful time for us as a family and ended up in us moving on but the trouble was the church that we moved to was hardly any different.

Within one year we had to endure the same series preached twice on the Christians responsibility to tithe and what was worse was the fact that these sermons weren’t even the work of the pastor, he printed them off from one of these “church growth” websites (pastors.com) I think!

I also take Amanda’s point that these people will have to answer to God for the heavy burdens that they lay upon men’s backs and do nothing to lift it and that not all pastors are out to fleece their flocks. But you can see why I raised the question in the first place and why answers to questions like these are very practical and important to the common people.

Thanks for your responses

God bless

PaulB

Ps. Where is Fredoheaven? I haven’t heard from you in ages! Can you contact me on Paulonline@fsmail.net ?