The top story on CBS Sunday Morning this week was about tithing, the main method many churches use to raise money. The idea is to give ten percent of all you earn to the church. But some people don’t like what is being done with the ten percent and some people believe that tithing is just flat wrong.
I’m a portrait photographer for a company that makes church directories-we go into churches and we take money out of them. Our business is selling portraits-not giving away free 8x10s and free directories. And sometimes we run into ministers who are shocked-shocked!-to discover that we are in their churches making money for ourselves. Most of these good people are the top dogs at the church with their snouts the farthest into the collection plates-they are not concerned that we are fleecing their flock, but that we are taking money they could be taking themselves. It’s hard to walk into one of these multi-million dollar buildings and not see that it is a purely for profit enterprise.
The CBS story focused on the handful of filthy rich preachers who have turned begging into their preferred method of spreading the word and fly around the world in private jets and live in mansions. A few disgruntled people who were driven out of churches for not tithing made up the argument that tithing as we see it now is wrong. It seems that tithing started in America about the same time as the odd idea of the Rapture having all the good people sucked into heaven while all the bad people are left behind-the 1800s. Lots of odd religious stuff started in America in 1800s.
The story ended on a positive note for tithing, with a church that is putting the money into homeless shelters and not corporate jets, or maybe in addition to the corporate jets.
A quick Google found 926,000 listings for tithing, lots of sites for and against. All churches are for donations, but not all are for tithing. I guess I am not even sure that all want your money. The world of church and money seems tightly bound. I have been in some very poor churches in some very poor neighborhoods-ten percent of nothing is still nothing. I have been in churches that have literature at the door asking for money with different gift levels like a PBS fund raiser.
Money is how churches keep score, just like everyone else. Like drug dealers, the problem some people have with these millionaire ministers is that they don’t pay taxes like the rest of. The system is wrong, and needs to be fixed. But I don’t think it is wrong that a minister wants to live like a rock star-wouldn’t we all do the same in their place? I never though Jim Baker should have gone to jail. If people are so damned stupid as to give all their money to these people, then they should be free to spend it however they want. Personally, I think they need to buy a lot more portraits with it.
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