hideous hymns, vocal vicars and theatrical thuribles. Religious Chat Thread Number 6!

[nickelbabe]

Welcome to the Religion Chat thread.
We're mostly Christians, but all are welcome.
a lovely soace to talk about church life, spiritual journeys and stuff in general.
It's not about debate, it's about chat.
Come oldies and newbies!

this is the previous thread

also, what would you class as 10% of the church's income?

I would say the same as HMRC's - it's after all expenses have been taken off.
If it were 10% of the gross income, then it would be a lot more than the money left over at the end of the year.
(ie, it's only possible if your "profit" is more than 10% of your takings)

at the moment, our bank account has just over £1000. 10% of that is doable, because it gives us money left over.
Our takings (before you spend any of it on the parish share or the church's work, heating and printing costs etc, is not high enough for us to give10% and still have money left over (I think it works out about £4000, but I'm not sure how accurate that is - but it's a lot more than the £1000 we've got left in our bank account)

further points to be made are that this year, we have paid about 1/5th of our parish share, which we have a special agreement with the diocese that we pay what we can, when we can.
I just don't understand why some people think it's a good idea to give away the Parish's income to other charities when we're not even paying our own way.
:(

I'm a fan of tithing personally and as a church because God is generous and it is good for us to be like him. Our church tithes and so did my last church. Actually I assumed all churches did.

But maybe your parish share counts as giving a tithe? I don't really know what that's for as I've never been part of a church that does it.

parish share - it's the money that the parish gives to the diocese for clergy (training, stipend housing etc etc etc), also known as a Quota.
It's Church of England.

jayne - so tell me about your church's tithing - who did they tithe to? was it 10% of gross income or 10% of profit?

and what denomination are you?

I've just done a search on the CofE website for tithing, and amongst several articles, I can't see a single one that refers to an individual church tithing outside of the parish. (not a recommendation)

I think our church mostly tithes to overseas missions and some uk stuff including a bible college. We are part of a network of evangelical charismatic churches. I think your parish share sounds like the kind of stuff we would tithe to.

My previous church tithed 10% of its net income and had retiring collections for various charities just about every week as well. My current is in a less wealthy area and I reckon we are tithing around 5% of net income with retiring collections for 3 nominated charities at key moments through the year which brings it up to a figure which is around 10% of our net income. Our parish share is huge but we are the biggest church in the benefice and so we are helping out two of the smaller churches who would struggle to pay part of the parish share.

We support three charities. One is local (homeless shelter) and two are overseas (school and wells project.) We had a big debate about what we support last year and we decided to support smaller charities which might struggle in the economic downturn.

I'm C of E.

Hmmn. I can see both sides to this and it has made me realise I don't know if our church tithes or not. I don't think I'd object to charities being supported provided that it was all done very openly, everyone was aware of it and I agreed with the aims of the charities. That's given me something to look out for next time a copy of the accounts is handed out.

we give to mission.aviation fellowship and we sponsor a child through world vision. it's not that we don't give to charity, it's just we don't tithe it.

I've seen the abbreviated accounts before and I don't think I've ever seen anything other than our parish share (or whatever it is called). The central body does run a lot of charitable type activites though so maybe that is what we do instead of tithing.

It's an interesting one. I like what Jayne says - we give because God is generous and we model God's generosity to the community.

In the OT the whole idea of tithing and Jubilee etc was as much about the community as about the individual. In Malachi God calls the people of God to bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, promising that they will see how he brings abundance to them. In our experience, both in churches and individually, we have found this to be true. When churches give, often beyond what they can, on the surface, afford, God blesses this, over and over.

In the NT the 'tithe' as such is abolished but Jesus' words imply a greater understanding of what giving is. Passages such as the one in Matthew 7 about treasures in heaven, and his conversation with the rich young ruler, show that Jesus expects us to give away. His own ministry was supported by several women who were giving away from their synagogue.

Paul's letters are full of instructions about giving away from the community of faith (the church) to either his mission or, for eg, the poor of Jerusalem. It is clear that he also expects churches to be generous and outward looking in their giving.

I prefer the word 'giving' to 'tithing' but think there is a principle in tithing we shouldn't lose - that of being obedient to God in our giving and then seeing his blessing through this.

I personally would not attend a church which did not give to the poor. I think that a church that gives outwards is a church that grows and a church that sees their own resources multiplied, and I think it's a completely biblical model of giving and generosity.

Parish share is a different matter altogether - it's basically supporting the minister and the diocese. I would not count this in the giving.

I've googled it out of curiosity. Every church in the CofS makes a contribution to the Ministries and Mission fund. 86% of this goes to the Parish Ministries fund and the rest to the Mission and Renewal fund.

Sorry, pressed send too soon.

The Mission and Renewal fund supports both mission in and out of Scotland and also helps to support social care services ran by the CofS as well. Off the top of my head I know that the social care services include care homes, homeless hostels, drug rehabilitation programmes and a residential post natal depression project.

As an congregation we also have separate collections for other things. I can recall collections for an orphanage abroad, the CofS homeless hostel in our city and a refuge for domestic abuse victims. These are separate though to the main collection.

One of the Roman emperors (think it might have been Justinian) wrote something like 'these effing Christians [I paraphrase] not only do they look after their own poor and sick, they look after ours [meaning pagan Romans] too.' Can we, should we do any less than the early, persecuted Christians did?

Love that niminy!

Love your post Mad. Great summary of the subject.

no, I didn't count the parish share as giving.

I just think at the moment it makes no sense to give away more than we have in the bank.
apparently, we used to tithe and it got us in financial trouble (but still didn't get us any more syccess in real terms)

our world vision.sponsorship is giving to the poor, and we do fundraising for other charities through the year.
and we do the shoeboxes.
I suppose the difference is that the parish's giving is small, in the MAF and sponsored child, but we organize and facilitate other giving by organizjng the coffee mornings, having some collections for a specific cause and by the shoeboxes.
we did have mike's place for a while, but hardly anyone used it (facility for homeless people to wash, get clothes clean and eat breakfast).

also, we're currently looking at helping the salvation army with their "food bank"

Our church doesn't tithe, we struggle to pay the parish share as it is! I'm with Nickel that it doesn't make sense to give away money you don't have. There is part of me that thinks well God will provide, but we also have to act in the real world and be good trustees of the money that is given to us. Its a dilemma, practical vs spiritual. We still do fundraising which is for specific charities, such as the Foodbank and Toybox.

I am still argh at the person who attended a funeral recently and tipped all the money out of the church collecting plate into the charity collecting plate! There were 2 plates near the door on the way out, each clearly labelled so people could choose. And no, she wasn't a member of the family either, I couldn't challenge her as there were too many people around and it wouldn't be appropriate, but I did sort it out quietly after everyone had gone (I was acting as Verger).

Yes but I think that being a good trustee means having certain principles in place that come first (in this case giving away to others) as Paul made clear.

Again and again, we have found that it is when we do this that God provides. It's amazing - you think how can that possibly be, but it is true. God honours when we give, both personally and communally.

How we give though can vary, so what nickels church is doing eg with foodbank, world vision etc is brilliant, as with Mary's church with Toybox etc.

I feel fairly strongly on this one, as you may have noticed

aaagh at that person Mary indeed!!

I've not come in on this discussion as I have no experience of Anglican churches.

My experience of any kind of giving is summed up in "God loves a generous giver". I'm with MHD in believing that God does amazing things when we are generous.
That is not to say that I think Mary and Nickel are wrong in what they are doing. You can't give money away that you don't have. But there may be a case for looking at what you are actually giving, what you 'should' be giving if you were tithing (after all you still have 9 times as much left over as you give away) and then consider whether it would really be that impossible.

I just wonder whether the people who give their money to the church know that some churches are then giving it away to something else.
I have no problem giving to charity, of course!, but if I give to the church (which is a charity in itself) for their work and they give it to someone else, I'd feel they weren't doing the work for which I gave the money.

I just wish I could find some actual CofE guidance on the church tithing.

Perhaps it's something you could actually talk about as a church in a 'how should we live out our values' kind of way? Perhaps as part of a sermon?