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Creflo Dollar - Official Fundraising Video for $65 Million Dollar Private Jet.
(How many widow's mites is that?)
Posted on 07/17/2015 9:18:52 PM PDT by Dallas59
Most people who attend church are used to seeing the offering plate passed around the pews. People donate what they can as a proud member of the congregation.
But a Tampa woman told ABC Action News her church says she must pay more than $1,000 a year in donations or she wouldn't be considered a member.
"People were really friendly there, and I really enjoyed being there," said Candace Petterson.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcactionnews.com ...
I would be out of that church in a nanosecond.
Does the pastor have a jet?
Stupid article. What church?
If his parishioners abide by his rules, he soon will have one.
Greater Mount Moriah Primitive Baptist Church
Find a new church.
Bareback pews, flat, sour pop & crackers and a hair-raising sermon on how you will send eternity sidestroking in a lake of fire ... that’ll be a hundred bucks, please.
This is a trend. My brother brought up the local church that we went to as kids....they’d brought a new guy in three or four years ago for minister, and he’d gone to a ‘subscription’ concept. Deacons bought into this. They’d go and figure roughly what a guy was making or actually ask people what they made (similar to what LDS does in a way), and then said this is the monthly amount that you must meet. My brother figured that they lost around a quarter of their membership in just two months. This was a southern town and I doubt if the church had more than two-hundred people showing up on a typical Sunday.
Since that point of loss....they’ve relaxed the rules a bit, and tried to recruit the lost people back, and done some PR work to get newer members. Their reputation has gone kinda south with the collection episode.
What you see is a gimmick for churches to stabilize their collection episodes and meet monthly goals. A business practice of sort. I don’t blame them, but when you start asking what I make....I just barely admit that to the wife and IRS. I wouldn’t sit there and say much to these guys. In my book....you’ve crossed a line and lost my respect.
Time for Islam to move in.
Sounds like Germany
They did that in my parish in Vancouver canada. The ploy is that printing out the envelopes is “expensive’ so the minimum for each envelope is $2 minimum. One time when I came back there for Christmas I filled the enveloped with $2 worth of pennies. Compared to my liberal idiot parish locally where they don’t care what you put in.
Creflo Dollar - Official Fundraising Video for $65 Million Dollar Private Jet.
(How many widow's mites is that?)
This article reminds me of an incident many years ago at a church I was attending. There was an elderly couple who were members and rather poor. They were tithing to the church, and one day I happened to overhear the pastor on their case to give more. I felt so bad for them. God loves a cheerful giver, and if one is forced to give - it becomes legalistic and not cheerful.
My mom and dad were members of a local church (southern persuasion is all I’ll say). Because of politics, behavior of the deacons, hiring incompetence with ministers, etc....they quit the local church. That was back in the late-1980s, a decade after I left for the AF. They had been around this church for roughly 20 years. And no, they didn’t go and join another church.
Somewhere along 2005, this same church.....same deacons and another new minister....went into hyper-drive to bring the folks who’d quit over the years back (there were probably 50 such folks who just got fed up with the politics).
So, they came knocking at the farm door. The deal here was this...they could come back at regular status, if they would make donation of a significant nature. When my dad brought this up a year later...I had to ask what the amount was. $1,500. I asked what exactly did he have for some status (before or after the quitting). He just grinned....that was the problem to this encounter.
So, I asked how he had handled this. He looked at the minister and deacon and suggested that there was special place for behavior like this, and it wasn’t in heaven. He suggested the door was there for them to leave the farm house. They didn’t take it well, but said they’d pray for him. He said he wouldn’t waste any prayers for their behavior.
Part of this story....I didn’t really grasp until two or three years after my dad told it. My brother told me the ‘rest of the story’. You see...the deacons had gone out and signed up some guy prior to the Bush-Kerry election, and he’d insisted on a contract with a dollar amount if they fired or released him early...somewhere in the $15,000 range. Well...shockingly enough, weeks before the election...he came out of the pulpit one Sunday pushing folks to vote Kerry (against Bush). Oddly, the deacons went a bit crazy and then fired him. Well, he pulled out the contract and lawyers got involved. Yeah, they owed him $15,000 for firing him.
They didn’t really have this money and had to borrow a bit to cover this cost. When the new minister arrived...money issues were in the way, and he talked the deacons into the $1,500 deal to get previous members back into the church and to their original status. I asked my brother what status, and he just grinned....there was no status...either you were a Christian or you were not.
Gimmicks....all in the name of the Lord.
There is only so far you can push people who are giving voluntarily before they either push back or simply walk away; religious education (in my mind) was the glue that kept a congregation together, and without it giving can be a tough sell. My town had half a dozen Catholic schools when I was young (and financially supporting them was a point of pride for the congregations); now there are none. What exactly are people contributing towards now? Keeping open urban schools (with primarily non-Catholic students, to give them “alternatives”), or some other liberal agenda items?
Once the state wrested the business of charity from religious organizations, there is little outside of sacramental obligations tying people to them.
Wow, that’s horrible. I suppose there are many stories like this around the country. You can’t sell someone’s status “in the church.” First of all, God is the one who calls a person to a certain ministry and equips them to fulfill that calling. It seems that there is a lot of politics involved in many denominations, and I don’t mean federal, state or local - just church politics. Sad.
My church has a formal membership standard. Anyone can attend, but to be a formal member with the ability to speak at annual meetings, vote on church matters, get wellness calls, etc, you have to go through membership and tithe at least something.
The members of the early Church sold their possessions and laid the money down at the apostles feet.
They were members of the Church and lived in common with the other members and actually worked for the Church.
The alms obviously came from believers who were not members of the Church.
This is a hard issue. If the members don’t support the church it has no option but to close and then where are they? Because if these members don’t support the church they go to now then they probably won’t support a church they go to in the future.
On the other hand, my mother was raising four children on her own with no help from our father and the local church sent her a bill telling her what her expected donation should be.
It was the last time she ever went to that church.
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