The Tithe
9781465677921
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
No one not an unreasoning optimist believes that with our present methods of Church finance, it is possible that the World will be Christianized during the Twentieth Century. No one not an unreasoning pessimist believes that if all Christians practiced the Tithe System and devoted one-tenth of their income to the Master’s work that the World could not be brought to a knowledge of Christ within the next one hundred years. Answering the first question as to who is most to blame, it is my deliberate conviction based on more than twenty-five years varied experience and growing more decided each year, that the blame very largely lies at the doors of our Theological Seminaries and Theological Professors, the teachers of our teachers. They must bear a very large share of the responsibility. There will be, there can be no permanent change for the better while our religious teachers are taught to teach us a lot of generalities which do not have even the merit of being glittering on this, of all subjects connected with the Christian life of laymen and lay-women, the most important. There will be slow progress so long as such a large proportion of students for the ministry are taught that we laymen and lay-women owe everything to God in general but nothing in particular, nothing definite; that the time of payment, manner of payment, and even the amount of payment of whatever we owe, or think we owe, or somebody else tells us we owe, is left entirely to our natural disposition to benevolence or stinginess or to our moods and caprices. That payment to God of any definite proportion of our income does not enter into the Christian system; that all our benevolences are to be classed under the general term of “Giving,” thus placing our Heavenly Father and the street beggar to whom we may give a few pennies, in the same category. That it is right and not an insult to the Almighty to teach us that we can give money to God; that the basis and foundation of the Christian system of providing means for carrying on the Master’s work in discipling all Nations is founded on a few sentences from a letter Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, urging them to make a generous free-will offering in aid of some suffering fellow Christians down at Jerusalem. For obvious reasons, the reason he gives for urgency in the matter is very rarely quoted: “That there be no collections when I come.” Paul evidently had his share of human nature, and special collections which most Ministers so much dread was probably also his pet aversion.
