If you are looking for a more traditional model, then leaving out the 10% alms/tithe is pretty sensible. This only seems to be a fairly recent thing and not one really backed by any biblical teaching (there are no mentions of tithing for Christians in the bible).
Right. 10% is actually a low bar. Jesus was basically couch surfing. He had high praise for what would seem like absurd giving to us. He told a rich man to liquidate his life and donate the money. The early church would sell real estate to pay each others' bills.
Even in the old testament, tithes were more like 23% though they included taxes to support government. But there were additional social welfare rules on top of that, like not harvesting all of your grain so the poor could take the rest.
The percentage notion is pretty dangerous in my opinion. Even in old testament times, there was no fixed percentage. How much did a carpenter tithe? How much did a widow tithe?
The teaching I have seen at churches in San Francisco (not all churches mind you - I have only been to 3, and one of them didn't do this) was teaching this absolute lie that all people should be giving God (by which they meant the church) money, and that by giving money to the church, God would repay them with more. It isn't biblical, and it is really not helping with the huge homelessness problem in the city.
Anyone going to a church that is teaching this should be doing their own research, and then challenging the teaching at their church.
I used the term "low bar" in an opaque way. If the question is, "How much do I have to give?" then the answer is "You're asking the wrong question."
Jesus talks about money in Luke 12, and his opinions (on inheritance and accumulation of wealth) would run counter to God-loves-rich-people theology. Heck, they probably run counter to what most Americans would consider common sense.
Having visited a church in SF which seemed pretty similar to the ones in the article, the thing I found absolutely disgusting was the teaching that everyone should be giving money to the church. There were homeless people coming to church being told that giving up a minimum of 10% of what little they had would be the right thing to do. These are the people that the church should be supporting, not robbing.
The bible talks about cheerful giving for ministry. The notion that all people should be on the giving end of the bargain is nonsense. The city has a huge homelessness problem, and yet as a visitor, my perception of the churches was that they were just making things worse.
From a definition point of view that is not a tithe. A tithe is a legal principle described in OT law. If I go to a church and give someone money, then that doesn't make it a tithe. Before the law was given there was the tithe from Abraham to Melchizadek, but this was a once off tithe on the spoils of war, which is also very different to what churches seem to be teaching.
In the Acts passage, everyone shared everything they had with everyone else - the money was being distributed to people who needed it. This means that some people ended up gaining possessions and some ended up losing possessions. Viewing it as percentages doesn't really make much sense - it is just lots of people sharing what they have with each other. If I choose to combine my bank account with my wife's, then you probably wouldn't say that I gave away 100% of my money.
> In the Acts passage, everyone shared everything they had with everyone else - the money was being distributed to people who needed it.
Actually, in that passage from Acts, everyone who had property was commanded to sell all of it, and to lay all of the proceeds at the foot of the apostles, who would determine how to use it for the good of the community.
Right, and then they distributed it among the people so they all had enough.
People with property sold it. People without property didn't sell it (because they didn't have any to sell). The apostles took the money and gave it to those in need. It wasn't a black hole of money where the apostles took it and used it to pay rent on a church building that people were encouraged to visit, the distribution was to people to meet their needs.
Without having been there, I imagine that the way this played out was that everyone gave everything they had, then the apostles worked out what the needs of everyone were, and then divided things up so everyone's needs were met. If people tried to hold something back then this just makes the practical matter of dividing things up much harder (instead of being able to say "each family gets N things plus M things per child", they need to take into account whether the family already has stuff and reduce N and M to compensate). Yes, the sin of Ananias and Sapphira was not that they made logistics difficult, but I do believe that what they wanted to be able to do was to just do a simple job of just distributing things fairly and transparently, and people holding things back made that impossible.
Giving money to a church makes a lot of sense, and is clearly biblical. Using that money wisely also makes lots of sense and is biblical. Churches that invest this money in expensive mixing desks or outrageous rent when there are people in their congregation who don't even have a place to sleep are not making good use of the money they are being given.
My opinion is that if a church has a regular person in their congregation who is lacking food and shelter, and the church is collecting money from people to spend on things like sound desks and coffee machines, then that church is stealing. People who give money to a church are giving it with the expectation that it be used in a way which is in line with biblical principles, and to be spending it on luxuries for the affluent when there is such obvious need is unconscionable.
