YOU WRITE: “I summarized your meaning.”

No my dear you didn’t – when you say —- “You say sparkle is more important than survival?” —- it cannot be more clear. I did not say what you stated.

YOU WRITE: “With many more words, you communicated exactly what I summarized. If you didn’t mean what I summarized, you did a poor job of saying what you really meant.”

You are doing a very poor job of making exuses of re-arranging what I posted.

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I should have said you claimed to have said I posted:

“You say sparkle is more important than survival?”

Again, I didn’t make that statement it cannot be found anywhere in post #16 – when someone quotes another, either the quote is correct or it’s a fabrication, in which case it doesn’t reflect the authors belief – credibility is important -

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You and I have had many disagreements – I will make this point – you have said:

“You say sparkle is more important than survival?”

I didn’t post that statement, you decided what you wanted my post to mean and re-arranged it to meet your argument, I don’t play those games Tima –

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You say: the church can’t help but be an institution–God created marriage, the church, and the government as institutions.

You are making an error of logic and english here. The fact that God institutes something or begins something, doesn’t require it to be an “institution”, or an organization with a chain of command approach to leadership. The church is a body, an organism. No institution is ever like an organism. The bible teaches headship leadership. This is not chain-of-command leadership. The government is not a body, the church is. They are NOT the same. A husband is the head of his wife. Jesus is the head of the church. There is NO HUMAN HEAD in the church unless you believe in popes. We are ALL members of one another. Churches without hired pastors or pews are highly organized, just in an organism way. The most intelligient doctor in the world does not fully understand the organization of your body. The same should be true of the body of Christ. Chain of command is a bad substitute for what God has designed. Have you heard the line: every train needs a conductor, every army needs a general, every ship needs a captain, every truck needs a driver, therefore every church needs a Senior pastor”? Same bogus argument. None of these things are organisms. The church IS. Don’t compare their organization.

You say: rather than attacking the eye for not being an ear, or a church of 100 members for not being a house church or a megachurch.

I am not attacking anyone. This is a bogus defense mechanism from you that in no way justifies the spiritual priorities of institutional forms. If I say you are wrong about something, it is because I am seeking to correct you with the truth. This is not attacking. The Bible is given to us for “rebuke and correction, and instruction in righteousness…”

You say: Your assertions against a structured church in which the pastor is paid (as established by Scripture) have been addressed adequately previously, so I’ll ignore them except to make that comment.

This tells me that if I could show you that you were wrong, you would not want to hear the truth. The fact that you felt the need to make the comment tells me you feel very sure of yourself in your current conclusion. There certainly are scriptures that teach “the right to be paid”. If you read them out of the context of the scriptures that teach that this “right” should be “refused”, or if you are completely unaware of these scriptures, then you might want to request the references so you can see the whole context. If you have some pet tricks to rationalize them away, then I can’t help you with that anymore than I can help a Catholic stop praying to Mary who has been shown the truth by a protestant. If your tradition is more important than the truth, so be it. I know God can help you grow beyond these bogus conclusions, because He helped me do it. I was a comfortable, committed pew sitter, an exemplary layman, deacon, elder, Sunday School teacher for many years. Then I learned what it mean to be a Berean. Acts 17:11 I prayed for you, that God will open your eyes to see the great tragedies of institutionalized faith.

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You say: Today as in the past Tima, some of the givers are the needy, those without jobs, without enough funds to pay for their everyday needs. We in our churches help them, that is what we are called to do.

You are having difficulty because you are reading one statement and separating it from the context of what I stated before it. Thus you become confused by what I said. I am not talking at all about believers giving to meet the financial needs of believers in their fellowship. This is usually done with a “deacons fund” or direct giving from one believer to another. I am talking about where your “tithing” “giving” goes, your churches annual budget whether a singular budget where some goes for local “ministry” and some goes to missions, or a dual budget where one is for local and one is for foreign. The national figures are 78 – 85% is set by the rules of the system to buy “ministries” for the people who give the money. They get a weekly Bible lecture, a hired expert to help THEM with their troubles, a clergy man to marry and bury them. As the church gets bigger they add a hired youth expert, then a hired music expert, etc, on and on. The percentage stays the same. This is a system of POOLING, not giving.

You say: Where in the Bible does it say that 100% giving goes beyond those who are in need within the body of Christ/the Church (the givers)?

Here you demonstrate a lack of understanding of what I said. I am stating that giving is to go beyond the giver. There is not problem with giving to meet the needs of those who are in financial need. What you fail to see is that those within the body of Christ with the greatest needs are believers in the 10 – 40 window. They don’t have even one Bible. They don’t have running water or electricity even 1 day of the year. They only have rags to wear and there is no rescue mission within 5000 miles. They don’t have shoes on their feet. Do you know anyone within 50 miles of you in this condition?

You say: There’s nothing like a young college kid with joy in his heart, eyes that sparkle with dreams of spending his life telling others about Christ – and maybe bringing their medical talents with them.

You are telling me $75,000 should go to put spiritual joy and sparkling eyes into American high school students that MAYBE may feel called to go as a Doctor, rather than go directly to buy rice, and goats for orphans in India WHO DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TO EAT!!! You say sparkle is more important than survival? You are so blind to God’s heart and HIs call upon your life and the lives of all God’s people. This kind of blindness is very common among people who think God has asked them to sit in a pew every Sunday to hear a hired Bible lecture.

Have you ever heard of the scripture that says we are to “walk by faith, not by sight”? This tells us God will help us to understand His purpose for our lives without us seeing it with our eyes. He has given us revelation that explains it. He has people around us who have seen it and testify to us of the need. That is ALL we need to obey God’s call to reach out to those needs in strategic ways, rather than self-centered ways.

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http://www.apuritansmind.com/FrancisTurretin/francisturretinsalariesministers.htm

Mike

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Your assertions against a structured church in which the pastor is paid (as established by Scripture) have been addressed adequately previously, so I’ll ignore them except to make that comment.

I tend to agree with you about short-term missions trips, as usually not the best use of money. I just edited a book that made that case well (that wasn’t the main point of the book; it was about ministering to the poor without hurting them). STM trips can be a good thing, but they aren’t always. I tend to think two weeks ministering among the poor in one’s own community might be a better use of time and money for most, and send the money saved to an overseas ministry that can make it go a lot farther than international plane tickets.

One point I think you totally leave out, probably because it has never occurred to you–even if the average church does indeed spend most of its funds on local needs (and many of those local needs, like charitable giving within the congregation and paying a pastor’s salary, are completely biblical), a lot of Christian giving is not in fact channeled through the church, but through parachurch organizations and through individual Christians meeting individual needs. Thus, the numbers you give are nowhere near complete.

For the record, my church is working toward the goal of having 50% of its giving go to foreign missions…and that counts only giving that is funneled through the church. My pastor has repeatedly told our church that it’s biblically legitimate for some of our giving to go to other places than the church. (He says that several times a year. In fact, last time we had a missionary speaker my pastor stood up and said it again–he said explicitly that if any of us is called to channel some money to this missionary that we’ve previously given to the church, we have the church’s blessing and encouragement.) So we have giving through the church, direct giving to organizations and individuals, AND many individuals volunteering their time to various organizations that work in prisons, the inner city, etc. The idea of a big bad church gobbling up money is simply not reality.

The church is a body with many members–those of us in “institutional” churches and those in house churches. (I put institutional in quotes because the church can’t help but be an institution–God created marriage, the church, and the government as institutions.) All of us have our place, and a properly functioning body works together rather than attacking the eye for not being an ear, or a church of 100 members for not being a house church or a megachurch.

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