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>>Tithe + special offerings<<

Yep, the Assembly of God church I went to for 18 years called it tithes and offerings. I call it giving. When I went to that church I drove a bus for ten years carrying kids to church who’s parents used us as Sunday morning baby sitting. Yeah, that sounds cynical, but it’s not. I’m merely stating what was going on. If it meant we could get the children of drunks, drug addics, or just plain narcissistic to church, that’s great.

I also played trombone in the orchestra or ran sound for the services for pretty much the entire time I was there.

Why am I saying this? Because although I liked the place and the people, and even the message, and was VERY involved, I did have a few points of disagreement that only grew as I read the bible more and more. They are:

== That church was Pre-trib, but I became mid-trib
== That church believed in NO drinking, but the Bible, NOWHERE, advocates no drinking. It only talks about getting drunk. They are two different things.
== That church believed in “tithes and offerings”, yet it is solely an old testament phenomenon. And the idea of giving is all over the new testament, but it is NEVER called tithing.
==That church strongly clung to a Pre-Trib rapture view.
==That church has a “Christian Flag” complete with its own “pledge of allegiance”.
==They had messages in tongues with interpretations.

Those things didn’t cause me to stop going (except I disagreed with the church on them), except the last one was part of it. That is because all of the messages were generic stuff. You know, God saying “you are my people, I’m your Father, Trust me”. That sort of stuff. It didn’t contradict scripture so, although It made me nervous, I saw it as somewhat harmless.

Then one day the message (This was 1997) was that “in 2000 all the computers are going to crash”). Being a Y2K code remediator at the time, I found it unlikely that the word “ALL” applied. However, I finally had a “message” that I could use to confirm the validity of what I was hearing.
And we all know what happened, but I left the church before that for other reasons.

This is rambling but let me just sum up:

I don’t follow my church lockstep just because they say it is true. And I don’t tolerate adding stuff that is clearly not there and picking and choosing what specific rules they want to pull from the old testament and pile onto the back of Christians.

I strongly believe in the concept of giving of my abundance and it does work, be it ten percent 20 percent, or whatever. I’ve seen and experienced the results, both physically and spiritually. But tithing is strictly a Jewish thing. I choose not to participate in “tithing”, for I am not Jewish.

And there is LOTS of new testament scripture about giving, even regarding giving to preachers, etc.