August 16, 2006
Controlling the Purse Strings
Picture this: Cheerfully you put your tithes in the offering plate…and then the church sends your check back to you! At our church if you want an end-of-the-year receipt for a charitable contribution to the church you must give your offerings to the ‘general fund’ or to an elder approved ‘special project’. For instance, I can’t designate funds to the youth group or a visiting missionary because these aren’t elder approved designated projects. I can however, designate money to go toward a new baby grand piano or a new van, because these are on the elder’s approved list. The congregation is told that these restrictions are required by the IRS. What they don’t tell us is that they could, if they chose to do so, approve all of the outreach ministries in the church. I feel that restricting offerings to the leader’s pet projects hinders the Spirit’s ability to work in the heart of the giver. Of course, I suppose if we were given the opportunity to be stewards of our tithes and offerings we might never get that baby grand piano.
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Gail;
----Anyone who understands the role of a servant would expect the elders to enable the members of the body to carry out what they feel God is wanting them to do. Our new life has been touted as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, with Him as the Master to whom alone the individual answers. So if someone sees the rice and ramen being fed the children at youth group as unbecoming to the Lord and wants to contribute what it takes to make better nutrition and impressions, to that person, it is of spiritual importance. Who has been given the right to deny this?
----Church leaders always have had some difficulty with accepting the concept of designated contributions. They feel that God has put them in a position to make the church to be this or that or the other. And of course, it takes money to shape a church. When contributions are designated to their special church changing program, they are more than happy to see the giver's ambition as spiritually driven. But let the giver designate that contribution to new curtains for the baptistry, and stand back God and all of us! Somebody's authority has been challenged!
----I thought servanthood was not a position of authority. Granted, part of their service is to protect the flock, so there is some authority that belongs to the position. But the New Testament limits that authority to only scripturally drawn guidelines, which curtains for the baptistry do not cross.
----Church leaders have tried every line of weasely logic to circumvent the scriptural limits of their authority. Thanks to the IRS, they are sure that their quest is now over, at least in the area of budget and finance. But intelligent people only have to ask the simple question you imply, Gail: would a servant not make a way for the ones being served to proceed unhindered in what they understand as God's direction?
----Once again, now with the help of the IRS, church leaders have been flushed out into the light. They are not as much the servants Jesus said they must be, as they are the masters that their actions show them to be.
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