Imagine that Martin Luther is your pastor (which is easier to do if you are paedo-baptist). As wonderful as this may seem, he would be an exacting pastor. He would not be afraid to chastize his congregation. Luther would not be one to follow contemporary church growth strategies and would not use gimmicks and campaigns to increase the church coffers. Luther’s methods would be much more direct and to the point. How do I know this?
The following is what Luther once said to a Lutheran congregation when the church’s giving was not sufficient to support its pastors:
I hear that you people will not give the collectors anything and turn them away. Thanks be to God that you unthankful people are so stingy with such a contribution and give nothing, but with foul words chased away the deacons. I wanted you to have a good year! I am amazed, and I do not know if I will preach any more, you uncouth rascals (Eric W. Gritsch, The Wit of Martin Luther [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006], 96).
Perhaps he’d even go so far as to make your giving records public if you did not submit to his correction.
This is interesting to me because I have been pondering lately if it is biblically warrated for a church to levy a tax (as it were) upon its members. I have heard about and seen a number of churches do things which virtually a tax. While I believe that membership taxes are neither commanded or exemplified in the NT, I think the techniques themselves bother me less than the attitudes behind them. Often it is not a matter of paying the pastor or not, but rather of funding the construction of the church’s new “family center” (read racquetball court) or not.
I can only imagine what Luther would say about the idea of a church racquetball court!
In response to above, I agree. It would seem like churchy dues. That’s weird to me.
Yes, it does seem weird to us. But, if you think about it, so does passing wooden dishes around the room every time we meet. Customs on something like how to collect money can vary widely (I once visited a church where the ushers were each equipped with a bag on the end of a wooden pole, which the would extend to the people in the pews to drop their contributions into).
My question is really more if the church has warrant from scripture to place its members under an obligation to give in specified amounts, proportions, times, etc. We already know that giving is an obligation for believers, but I wonder whether it is right for churches to make that more specific or not. Probably the most common way in which churches do this is by insisting that members should be tithing (however it is defined).
Actually, the idea seems reasonable enough. Churches should want their members to experience the grace and joy of giving generously, and often they view the 10% pitch as a way to motivate their members to get on board. But what if they did so by means of a $100/month tax or due rather than a 10% push? Or what about pew rent (with an extra premium for cushioned pews)? Those ideas sound really strange to our ears, but are there anything in the NT which makes the 10% push or passing the plate more acceptable, or is it just that we are used to those things?
Of course the matter of giving and receiving must be handled in some fashion. In Acts 4, people were laying their gifts at the apostles’ feet (what the significance of that is I don’t know). Further, Paul said quite a bit in his letters to motivate people to give to the collection for aid to Jerusalem. Are plate-passings, faith-promise campaings, or even church taxes really so far from those things? There must be a way to biblically determine how our chuches should function in these matters, a way which strikes a path (however broad or narrow) between no giving obligations on the one had and obligatory communisim on the other. But, it seems like most of our churches think a lot less about that than they do about groundbreaking for the new racquetball courts.
KWR