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This weekend I have spent most of my "spiritual time" on searching the Scriptures on the subject of tithing, inspired by the ongoing debate at Rachel Cunliffe's blog. I blogged my results on The Scriptorium; it's too long to try to reproduce here, so go there if you're interested. The bottom line is that I don't believe tithing is supportable as a "doctrine", but a really good idea, especially if you're not disciplined about listening to God telling you where to give and when and then doing what He says. I do, of course, think that living life open-handedly is part of being a Christian; I just have a problem with the concept of coerced giving to support the "machine" that some churches have become. I should say that VBCC has never gone down that road--here your giving is entirely between you and God. I actually think it would be cool to do the "...and the believers shared everything in common" thing; logistically, in America, I'm not sure how it would be implemented. Anyway, I'm not trying to reproduce the debate here--I just wanted to share what I've been doing with myself this weekend and invite anyone interested to read what I wrote.
| posted by #Debi | 7:43 PM | |