Tithing: A Biblical Principle for the Sustenance of Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Liberia (2024)

Hts Teologiese Studies-theological Studies, 2021

With its over 40 000 denominations worldwide, Christianity undoubtedly remains the most fragmented of the religions of the world. One of the main causes of the said fragmentation is apparently the practice of tithing, which both genuine clergy and many shady characters that have disguised themselves as ministers of religion in society regard as the quickest way of accumulating wealth or making money. Anybody who views television programmes on religion and listens to religious leaders who give Christian preaching on various radio stations nowadays cannot fail to observe the aggressive way in which such leaders opportunistically manipulate their followers and listeners to pay tithes using what has come to be generically known as ‘prosperity gospel’. Given the extent to which it has fragmented and continues to fragment the Christian Church, as well as to taint the image of Christianity as a religion, the question asked by many people today about tithing is: Are the Christians as obliga...

Journal Didaskalia

Tithing is a part of Christianity itself. Even so, the debate about the teachings of tithing among theologians is still ongoing, giving rise to two opposing camps, pros, and cons of tithing with their respective reasons. As for what is the main core of writing this research is to find out whether there is an influence of spirituality on tithing, and if there is, how much influence the spirituality of tithing. This study used a sample of 83 members of the Bethel Tabernacle Church in Surabaya who are already earning. Data collection techniques through questionnaires and analysis techniques data, namely using statistical analysis with the SPSS 19.0 program. As for the results of this study, it was found that the influence of spirituality on the tithe offering of the Congregational Bethel Tabernacle Congregation of Kalam Hidup Surabaya was included in the intense/high category. Second, the contribution of the spirituality variable in forming the tithing variable for the congregation of ...

Journal of Economics and Business

Every organization, be it the state or the Church, needs money to be able to operate. While the state raises revenue through the imposition of taxes on the citizens, the Church does it through collection of tithes and other offerings from her members. Among other collections, tithe constitutes a major source of revenue to the modern Church. This work thus sets out to determine the factors influencing tithes compliance by members of some selected Christian Denominations in Bamenda. Specifically, it investigates the effect of: (a) demographic characteristics; (b) perceived benefits derived from tithing and (c) management approach on tithe compliance. Data was collected from Christians of selected church denominations in Bamenda, Mezam Division in the North West Region of Cameroon using the stratified random sampling technique. The data was obtained from 351 questionnaires, 193 of which were issued to Presbyterian Christians, while 67 were issued to Roman Catholics, 47 to Full Gospel a...

Biblical overview of the principle of stewardship taught in Scripture and an exegesis on selected passages of the Gospel of Luke. Churches in the underdeveloped world are facing many challenges. Teaching believers the biblical concept of financial stewardship is one of them. In Argentina, and most countries in Latin America, there have traditionally been two opposite ways of addressing the issues of tithing, offering, and almsgiving: avoiding or abusing.

Northern New South Wales compared to census data reveals that there is a decided difference between the tithing behaviour of the under-fifty-year olds and those over fifty. It is suggested that this explains why there has been an approximately 40 % drop in NNSW tithe compared to incomes over the last 25 years. Giving to most Christian denominations has been falling steadily for some time (Ronsvalle, 1996, 52-53, 76). A recent publication oftheAlban Institute entitled Financial Meltdown in the Mainline? (Mead, 1998) outlines the impact that continuously decreasing fmances have had on many denominations (c. f. Wutlmow, 1997). From their study of the funding of a number of churches in the United States, Canada and Australia, though, Vallet and Zech conclude that a few denominations appear to be exempt from this general trend. These denominations include the Church

Namibian Theological Research Papers, 2020

Money can be a hot topic in Christian churches and the Namibian church is no exception to that. While many traditional mainline denominations struggle to raise the funds they need for their various ministries, prosperity type churches and Pentecostal church bodies seem to flourish financially in Namibia. Some people are quick to point out that the main reason for this phenomenon lies in the churches’ differing attitude towards the concept of tithing. While tithing plays a central role in Pentecostal and prosperity churches, most Protestant denominations rely on other ways of funding. In his paper, Thorsten Prill gives a critical overview of the various methods Namibian churches use to raise funds. These methods include collections, membership fees, fundraising events, commercial activities and investment trusts as well as encouraging members to give a tenth of the income to the church. In a second paper, Johann van Wyk examines the concept of tithing from a biblical perspective. He demonstrates that New Testament teachings do not support the claim that Christians are obliged to tithe. There are, however, a number of helpful biblical principles of giving which Namibian churches should apply. Most importantly, van Wyk argues, that giving in Namibian churches needs to become a matter of the heart; giving must be driven by love and grace.

IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, 2013

Transactional Offerings/Giving in Worship: A Parody of the Biblical Foundation of Giving and Receiving, 2023

Ancient rituals are mixed with patterns, symbols, and actions as a mark of reverence to divinities that their worshippers invoke, feed through offerings and sacrifice with the ultimate hope of securing their attention and intervention on dilemmas and unforeseen vicissitudes of life. The African philosophy of giving and offerings to divinities follows this transactional trend. On a general scale, Africans give gifts to deities, notwithstanding, no African will be comfortable to be paid a visit by a god; they'll rather offer sacrifices, rituals, or gifts to manipulate these impersonal divinities for protection from calamities and diabolical attacks, provision of necessities, or retribution on adversaries. Therefore, the African philosophy of giving and offerings to divinities is more or less transactional. It is not as though the contemporary correlatives of the historical heathenistic transactional offerings in worship had no parallels in church history. On the contrary, merchandising, exploitation, and profiteering bedeviled the church following after the conversion of Emperor Constantine and the eventual marriage between the state and church. This is not by any means conceptually different from the African traditional religion which manipulates divinities to their favor based on the kind of offering the gods are ready to receive. This notion of transactional offering in worship is pervasive in contemporary Liberian church and by all means, destroys real faith in God based on a personal relationship with the Lord through the finished work of the cross. Most Christians in Liberia nowadays have been made to believe that God blesses them to the proportion of their gifts and offerings and by extension fall into the error of equating gain with godliness. Therefore, the rest of this paper will focus on providing a biblical foundation of giving as a counter to the belief and practice of quantitative and transactional giving and offerings replete in the church of Liberia. It will do so by firstly establishing divine inspiration of scripture as the basis for Christian faith and practice. Secondly, it will discuss the Exodusian giving/offering among the returnee Jews, and fourthly, it will examine giving in the synoptic and the early church. Lastly, the paper will be summarized by synthesizing lessons learned as a biblical approach to the authentic Christian practice of giving and offering in worship in the church of Jesus Christ.

Jewish Studies Quarterly , 2015

My study focuses on rabbinic opinions that contest how the poor man's tithe should be administered. These divergent positions offer a window on the tensions between the biblical aim to prevent the creation of dependencies by granting the indigent equal access to the poor man's tithe and the social tendency that characterized the early centuries of the Common Era to reserve this gift for relatives and friends or to leverage it to establish patronage. I demonstrate that the halakhic debates on this tithe expose a dynamic process through which the poor man's tithe was modified, and ultimately transformed, to meet Greco-Roman norms of reciprocal relationships.

AJS Review, 2020

This article examines a story in the Jerusalem Talmud depicting a wealthy woman who expects Torah instruction in exchange for her tithes. This textual example is used as a lens through which to view the changing social, religious, and economic relationships of Roman Syria Palaestina, whereby the biblically described institution of tithing to priests expanded to include priestly descendent rabbis. Giving the priestly tithe to a rabbi, while advantageous in a period of rabbinic fundraising, presented a distinct set of challenges as it came to resemble patronage practices associated with Roman elites. Through close textual analysis of the wealthy woman's tithe, the prominence and consequences of scholastic donations are examined, both in rabbinic literature and in the broader late ancient Mediterranean.

The purpose of this study was to examine children’s mathematical understandings related to participation in tithing (giving 10% of earnings to the church). Observations of church services and events, as well as interviews with parents, children, and church leaders, were analyzed in an effort to capture the ways in which mathematical problem solving was related to the social context of tithing. I introduce the direct influence model to describe components of the practice itself and to identify supports and constraints that exist related to children’s opportunities to engage in problem solving that varied by participation frequency and mathematical complexity.

TITHING AND THE 'FAITH MOVEMENT' A FRESH LOOK AT MALACHI 3:6-12, 2017

Existing literature from leaders of the ‘Faith Movement’ suggests a problematic hermeneutic of Malachi 3:6-12 in a manner that forces an interpretation into the text. This essay therefore revisits the passage for a fresh textual analysis with a view to pointing out the problematic indices in the ‘faith movement’ interpretation and proffering an alternative understanding.

INTRODUCTIONIn recent times, both voices of believers in Yeshua have been raised about the demand for money and goods by religious organizations and their leaders to belong and participate in their services, which has made that in this sense they make constant reading of biblical quotes to demand it, taking references out of context in relation to this. On the one hand we can speak of the exuberant figures that religious organizations collect annually through their subsidiaries, demanding money for their services, be it tithes, offerings, covenants, or dues in some congregations that say they serve "God" and that they are "Christian", arguing many passages that have been extracted from the Bible, taken out of context, and even with this either convincing, arguing and even threatening that if this is not done, they are first excluded from participating in the services until they are expelled, we want to start not only by explaining what tithing was in Israel and what was the only place where it should be delivered, to indicate how after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the only place where he was accepted by Yahweh, everything that had to do with the practices in the first communities of believers in Yeshua was distorted, to what we see today as a way of extracting money from people.

Sociology of Religion, 2011

This paper explores how and why religious adherents participate in self-sacrificing behaviors, such as religious giving. Though previous literature shows that monetary giving can be conceptualized as a way to participate in the sacred, questions remain about how this sacralization process occurs and how it may differ across congregational contexts. This ethnographic analysis identifies distinct cultures of money sacralization by comparing and contrasting the “sacralized frames” of two religious congregations—one evangelical Protestant and the other mainline Protestant. We find that aspects of religious giving are sacred at both churches, but how money is made sacred is distinct, revealing differences between sacralizing the act of giving versus the outcome. Although both cultures of sacralization result in religious giving, they do so by making different aspects of the process sacred, and so are not interchangeable approaches to financial giving. While the sacralized frames in these two churches differ, the sacred persists, and the ways in which each church culture translates the mundane into the sacred matters for their motivations for and understandings of self-sacrificial giving.