Talking about Tithing, again

Well I just finished watching a sermon on tithing, and I just want to quickly pen down some words.
Firstly let me make this clear:  I have previously made some noise about how I disagree with tithing. Because of this, I have faced accusations that I am just doing this “because I don’t want to tithe.”  This is not true, and to rebut that I have made a lifelong commitment to give 10% of my income to charity.
I make that point just to make it clear that I am not doing all this because I don’t want to pay money, but rather because this thing is simply not true.

Let me give you a bit of background. This church is currently doing a whole series on stewardship, ultimatley because they are trying to raise money to repair their building.  Last week, I also watched another sermon from this pastor where he spoke upon the feeding of the Five Thousand as a paradigm for giving. The observations I made regarding that sermon are generally relevant.  Basically, he drew out lessons from that one instance, and tried to communicate that they were general principles about giving, without cross-referencing to other instances of giving. I believe that if you are going to teach about any subject, you should not look for just one instance of that thing and make everything there a general principle. Rather you should look across all the instances in the Bible, and draw out the principles that are consistent within all the stories. Then you can accurately say “this is what giving looks like in the Bible.” This is an example showing how easy it is to misinterpret or miscommunicate the teaching of the Bible.

For instance, in the sermon on the Feeding of the Five Thousand, he said that the boy gave his lunch to Jesus, who then blessed it, broke it and multiplied it. So the pastor drew out from that that if you want whatever it is to be multiplied, then you first have to put it into the hands of Jesus, and then he made it out that giving it to the church was our modern day equivalent of putting it into the hands of Jesus. OK, before looking at other passages, the boys lunch was multiplied but after being multiplied and shared around it was not given back to the boy, was it?! The disciples collected 12 basketfuls of leftovers after all five thousand people had been fed but the Bible does not record that it was given back to the boy. So it is already dodgy teaching to use this one instance to suggest that God is automatically going to multiply your gift for your own personal benefit if you “put it into the hands of Jesus.” Secondly as demonstrated by recent posts I personally believe that the modern church rarely represents Jesus so even if this was a genuine principle, if you put it into the hands of the modern church that so often has little connection with Jesus, you might as well be throwing it away.  Thirdly I am now going to think of instances where a gift was multiplied without being put into the hands of Jesus, or a prophet. The truth is that it is a Biblical principle that if you sacrifice to God your gift will often be multiplied for yourself, like when the prophet Elijah insisted from being fed first from the little amount the widow had left to feed herself and her son, and then God multiplied the flour in the flourbin so she and her son had plenty to eat.

But God is a God of genuine generosity, He is a God who gives, without necessarily making us pay for it beforehand. So for instance there is the story of the woman with the cruse, or jar of oil, who had nothing to pay her creditors with. And the prophet Elisha performed a miracle and the oil was multiplied. And there is also the example when the fishermen had been fishing all night, but had caught nothing, and Jesus told them to let down their nets on the other side of the net. And then they caught a big catch of fish. And Jesus did not insist on being given a sacrifice of fish beforehand. So to suggest that you always need to make a sacrifice or bring what you already have “into the hands of the church” before God will bless you is simply wrong.

So that was last week’s teaching. And this week’s teaching was all about tithing which happens to be one of my favourite subjects.  I believe that as a pastor you need to educate yourself on these things, and read things from people who disagree with you, not just read things from people coming from the same viewpoint. From my perspective I am a Bible believing Christian and I am all about God and the Bible. When I disagree with these things, it is not because I am somehow trying to undermine the faith, or the financial stability of the Church. It is because it genuinely is wrong and I believe that it is destructive to teach a doctrine that is wrong, no matter how well-intentioned.

I have already written an ebook refuting the idea of tithing being a commandment for our times. Now the thing is that people could argue that tithing is a good thing, tithing brings blessing, tithing is Biblical. And all those things would be true, but that does not make it a commandment for our times.
My ebook focused a lot on the fact that the tithe was about food. So first of all the Old Testament Israelites were not commanded to tithe everything, but only food items. This is relevant because in our times people try to insist that tithing, were performed, should be of all your income. That is, they try to make an equivalence between the tithable things of the Old Testament and all our income today. Well the fact is that the Old Testament Israelites would still have had things that had financial value but were outside tithing because they were not to be eaten. People say that the titheable things like grain, oil, cattle were the equivalent of money “in their days”. But God did not require a tithe of everything that was grown and had financial value, every agricultural product, like timber, or flax for linen. He only requested a tithe on food items.  This directly indicates the point of the tithe, and it was to be eaten, not to be used as a financial equivalent. And it has just occurred to me, will need to check out the Bible to wonder whether God demanded a tithe on highly perishable products like milk? Or maybe the milk was tithed to the extent that it remained in the udders of the goats and cows that were tithed?

So that was the argument I made in my ebook on tithing. Over the last few years though I have developed some additional thinking regarding this.
Perhaps even more compelling than the food argument is this:
Tithing is irrelevant in our times or ceases to be a commandment for these reasons: when people insist on tithing, they are making a false equivalence between the Old Testament Temple, and the New Testament church. To put it very simply, Old Testament Israel, to which God gave the law on tithing, was a theocracy, so there was no distinction between the religious administration and the Government administration, they were all one and the same. In the New Testament church, we do not live in a theocracy, so the Church has become a distinct thing from the Government. This is all the more true as the Christian faith has spread outside its origin in Judaism to permeate various Gentile cultures.

I believe that tithing was not mentioned in the context of the church because people implicitly understood this, that the Church was not supposed to be a political Government, so it was not supposed to take over the function of the Temple. The pastor said during the course of his sermon that “it all belongs to God!”  Many pastors have said that. So are you suggesting that really, we should be giving you all our money? If we were to look into the Bible, where the New Testament Christians literally gave everything to the church, they did this in the context of sharing all their possessions. If we were to give you everything, would you then organise our housing, feeding, all our material needs? Because to be honest to be able to get affordable housing in London, I would personally love that, and I have always thought that that was a very obvious gap in the functioning of the modern church.

So where God was giving the law on tithing, that was a national law.  It was like a national food tax.  That is not relevant in our times because the church does not administer the Government. In our various countries we each have our own governments implementing taxes, and as Jesus said we need to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

Secondly, the Old Testament Temple like a Government was something unified and official. So when you gave your tithe or tax to a government official, there was something official about it, there was an element of accountability. In our times though, literally anyone can set up a church, and then start demanding your tithe. Where is the accountability, or the reassurance that it genuinely will be used for the work of God? Or the work of the nation?  That would be the equivalent of someone simply printing a letterhead and calling themselves a Government representative then going around from door to door demanding tax.  Erm, no! It is just common sense that if someone is demanding something official then it needs to have official, verifiable authorisation. Ultimately this is all why we have a proliferation of so many fake churches because there is such a compelling financial incentive via tithing to do so even to people who care little for the genuine things of God and anyone can literally just set themselves up as a pastor.

In his sermon the pastor also said tithing exists outside the law because Abraham gave a tithe to Melchizedek after winning the battle, however many hundred years before the law was given. Yes, Abraham gave a tithe to Melchizedek from the spoils of war once, as a result of a special one-off occasion. It was not a routine practice in his life. The pastor also said that Jacob said that if God brought him safely to where he was going then he would give a tithe of everything. What the pastor neglected to say was that firstly that was conditional, and even if Jacob did indeed do it, that does not make it a compelling commandment on everyone else for all time.

Fair?
The pastor also made this argument that other people have previously made:  if someone earning £50K per month pays 10% of their income, and someone on £5K per month also pays 10% of their income, then that is “fair” because they are both paying the same percentage. However the difference is that when someone pays 10% of £50K per month, or even per year, that would still reasonably leave them with a comfortable amount to live on, whereas if someone is only earning £5K per annum, say, then that is not enough to live on to start with, much less after they have paid out 10% of that. So in truth it is not “fair” at all. It is because of this principle that progressive taxation exists where people pay not just an increasing amount but actually an increasing percentage or proportion of their salary as tax as their salary increases. This issue is particularly pertinent in this church because it is strikingly obvious that most of the congregation are of African origin, or “people of colour”. This means that statistically speaking many of these people will be in lower paid jobs, if employed at all,  perhaps subsisting at the minimum wage, and simultaneously also struggling with rapidly increasing cost of living and house rents or mortgage payments. It is to these people that the pastor is insisting that no matter how difficult things are, they should be paying 10% of their income to the Church first. Do I need to spell it out that the (Caucasian) pastor himself is making a comfortable income off the financial sacrifices of these people, where I imagine that many of these sacrifices would be exceedingly painful?

Finally one issue that immediately struck me regarding this particular church and this particular pastor was this, when they announced their fundraising campaign: this particular sermon that we had today is part of their series on stewardship. However, from the outset they said that they are raising funds for repairing their church over and above people’s existing giving including their existing tithing.  Seriously?  If people are already giving tithes then this is exactly what it should be used for, the upkeep of the church etc. As leaders you know that your church is hundreds of years old.  Did it never occur to you that such a building would periodically need expensive repairs? Has it never happened before? If you as the church leaders fail to maintain enough in your budget for such repairs then I would humbly suggest that it sounds like you are the ones who need the sermons on stewardship.

Oh but guess what?  It turns out that they do have enough money in their budget!  The brutal truth that occurs to me is that the predominantly Caucasian leadership just want to bilk their generous, giving, committed, predominantly African/”people of colour” congregation out of yet more money. It might sound harsh, but from everything I have observed so far about this church, and also similar churches it sadly seems entirely plausible… But perhaps we will leave that particular can of worms for another day…like why does a predominantly African church have predominantly Caucasian leadership in the first place, hmm?