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Hav­ing estab­lished that the genuis of God is in His cre­ation of the con­cept and func­tion­ing of “the church”, we now look at some spe­cific issues related here.

How does a local church relate to the church of God?

Church is like mar­riage, there is a set form or require­ments to being in one, and what is not one, doesn’t meet the require­ments. When we speak of mar­riage in a gen­eral way, say, “all mem­bers of a mar­riage should com­mu­ni­cate”, we are speak­ing of mar­riage as a sin­gle uni­ver­sal con­cept. Not every­body out there is in a mar­riage. Two men liv­ing together in a homo­sex­ual rela­tion­ship is not a mar­riage. A man and woman, hav­ing duly sealed their mar­riage by civil law is the only thing that can be said to be a real marriage.

What is a bib­li­cal def­i­n­i­tion of a “church”.

A church is a group of saved peo­ple who join together in a local­ity (all of them liv­ing in that local­ity) to meet on the Lord’s day for the pur­poses which God has estab­lished for them as a “church.” These oblig­a­tions and pur­poses are:

1. Meet together to read and explain the Word of God.
2. Cor­po­rate prayer.
3. Singing spir­i­tual songs and hymns.
4. Praise to God for His faith­ful­ness in our lives.
5. Thanks­giv­ing for what God has done in our lives.
6. Col­lect­ing an offering.

These are the activ­i­ties we see in the Bible that a church does. Addi­tion­ally churches go out into the world to wit­ness their Chris­t­ian faith, usu­ally on some other day of the week.

A church also has some iden­ti­fy­ing marks:

1. They have spir­i­tual lead­ers, of which the one who gov­erns, admin­is­trates, and spir­i­tu­ally feeds the con­gre­ga­tion through preach­ing and teach­ing is the pastor.
2. They have offi­cially rec­og­nized ser­vants, the deacons.
3. They have a define meet­ing time (every Sun­day) and place.
4. Their mem­bers pro­fess to be saved.

One of the ele­ments of this estab­lish con­cept of the church is to col­lect tithes and offer­ings to be used in the work of the Lord. The prin­ci­ple NT giv­ing object (to the church for the pur­pose of…) is for pay­ing the salaries of their own min­is­ters. The rule here is that all valid salaries are for peo­ple work­ing locally in that church, and the except is for mis­sion­ar­ies. Mis­sion­ar­ies are only under­stood as a man evan­ge­liz­ing and estab­lish­ing or plant­ing a local church some­where away from his home church where there are no other good churches. Noth­ing else is a valid mis­sion­ary ministry.

Even with Paul, we see he is set as the prime exam­ple of a mis­sion­ary, but even he didn’t receive reg­u­lar dona­tions from his home church (Phil 4:15 “no church com­mu­ni­cated with me as con­cern­ing giv­ing and receiv­ing, but ye only”) nor from the Jerusalem church. He got most of his income from the works he per­son­ally planted.

Where should the tithe money go?

The basic prin­ci­ple we see here is that God wants the major­ity of the col­lected funds to go into work­ers that min­is­ter in the local church where the funds were col­lected. We do not see an empha­sis in the New Tes­ta­ment on build­ings, but on peo­ple ser­vants. That should be reflected in a bib­li­cal church’s finan­cial bud­get and giv­ing. Remem­ber, God will soon be back for us, and when we invest our resouces in build­ings, these same build­ings will be used by the Antichrist for the Satanic one world gov­ern­ment. Invest in peo­ple. Invest in evan­ge­lists and min­is­ters that grow spir­i­tu­ally those who accept the Lord. These invest­ments of God’s money will go up in the rap­ture with us. The rest will become assets of Satan’s rebel­lion against God.

This is not to say it is wrong for a church to have a build­ing, but being “fru­gal” would seem to be more bib­li­cal than a Cathe­dral built as a momu­ment to a pastor.

God’s genuis in the design of the church

I see the dif­fer­ence between a local church and a Chris­t­ian school as this. A Chris­t­ian school is always owned by an indi­vid­ual. This indi­vid­ual becomes a multi-millionaire with­out any doubt. In a local church sit­u­a­tion, the pas­tor never owns the build­ing and prop­erty, but it is a pos­ses­sion of the peo­ple in that church.

If a pas­tor sins, or turns to bad doc­trine (like speak­ing in tongues), he leaves the church usu­ally, and the dozens and dozens of years of tithes of God’s peo­ple stays with some men of God who search to con­tinue in the same doc­trine and con­duct of those before them who invested that money in God’s work. When it is a Chris­t­ian school, the owner stays the owner, and nobody can take his money and pos­ses­sions from him. Where the owner of a Chris­t­ian col­lege “goes” spir­i­tu­ally and doc­tri­nally, this is where all your dona­tions go with him. It is totally ridicu­lous for Chris­t­ian col­leges to want God’s peo­ple to dona­tion their tithes to these schools. The same can be said about all kinds of Chris­t­ian min­istries that are one dog run shows.

In the end analy­sis, you invest in the man of God and his min­istry. But there is a big dif­fer­ence between what is a “just salary” that a pas­tor receives, and what the annual gross income of a Chris­t­ian col­lege owner is. Let’s see, $20,000 per stu­dent per year, and they have 4000 stu­dents, so their annual gross is 80,000,000. That is a lot of money for one per­son to take in in just a sin­gle year. Yes, they have a lot of expenses, but that money came from Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies that are going broke to put their kids in a Chris­t­ian school.

Can what a Chris­t­ian Col­lege does, be done with­out all that expense? Yes through the sys­tem of a local church.

When you invest your tithes and offer­ings in a Chris­t­ian school, the own­ers, the board of direc­tors, and the prin­ci­ple peo­ple run­ning the school all seem to want to be anony­mous. Tryng find­ing out every­body in this, and it is not as easy as you would think. Try find­ing out the salaries of all these peo­ple, and that is next to impossible.

Go to any local church, and as the mem­bers if they know what their pas­tor makes, and most will tell you off the top of their head.

Rom 12:17 Pro­vide things hon­est in the sight of all men.

We don’t need to attack any spe­cific Chris­t­ian col­lege. The entire sys­tem of Chris­t­ian schools is flawed and unbib­li­cal. When Paul received a large gift to be dis­trib­uted (not for his own per­sonal needs, but for the suf­fer­ing Chris­t­ian brethren), he was worried…

2Cor 8:20 Avoid­ing this, that no man should blame us in this abun­dance which is admin­is­tered by us: 21 Pro­vid­ing for hon­est things, not only in the sight of the Lord, but also in the sight of men.

Why do Chris­t­ian schools hide their finances? Because they can­not jus­tify tak­ing in mil­lions and pay­ing high salaries to the top of the pyra­mid when their cus­tomer cows are poor peo­ple (and Chris­t­ian brethren at that).

Jas 2:14 What [doth it] profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?
Jas 2:15 If a brother or sis­ter be naked, and des­ti­tute of daily food,
Jas 2:16 And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be [ye] warmed and filled; notwith­stand­ing ye give them not those things which are need­ful to the body; what [doth it] profit?
Jas 2:17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

God’s prin­ci­ple is to help the poor, not fleece the poor. This is the pro­file of the false prophet all the way through the Bible. If you can­not dis­cern his doc­trine as bad, dis­cern his hand in your billfold!

Peter addresses these types of min­is­ters who have their eyes turned to prof­its rather than service.

2Peter 2:3 “through cov­etous­ness shall they with feigned words make mer­chan­dise of you”.

It is through their per­sua­sive argu­ments that they pil­fer your money.

2Pet 2:14 “an heart they have exer­cised with cov­etous practices”.

Isa 56:11 “yea they are greedy dogs whic can never have enough… they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter.”

Jer 6:13 “for from the least of them even unto the great­est of them every one is given to covetousness.”

Rom 16:18 “for they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.”

1Tim 3:3 “not cov­etous­ness”

Tit 1:7 “not given to filthy lucre”

When we com­pare a local church and a Chris­t­ian col­lege, we see extremes of dif­fer­ences. While a local church dreams of a mil­lion dol­lars in a new build­ing, most Chris­t­ian col­leges have one build­ing project after another, each costs mil­lions of dol­lars. Now even mis­sion boards can have a mil­lion dol­lar head­quar­ters build­ing as if mis­sions can­not be done if they don’t invest in this.

The down­fall of Chris­tian­ity in Amer­i­can hinges on divert­ing resources into “fixed ass­sets” build­ings and prop­er­ties instead of labor­ers on the field actu­ally wit­ness­ing and get­ting peo­ple saved, and get­ting them into a local church to func­tion as a Chris­t­ian. This shift has been sub­tle over the past 20 years, but it has seen the down­fall of Chris­t­ian mis­sions in our day, and it will get worse.

Far from God’s peo­ple under­stand­ing, dis­cern­ing, and con­demn­ing this false con­cept, they con­tinue to pour their tithes, and con­vince churches to like­wise pour their tithes into build­ings and properties.

Like­wise in this good ole buddy sys­tem we have called Chris­tian­ity, a few mis­sion­ar­ies are mak­ing tremen­dous amounts of money, pur­chas­ing houses in the USA and on the field, and liv­ing the life of lux­ury while other mis­sion­ar­ies are hav­ing to return to the states or not go to the field because there are no funds for their sup­port. All this gets a nice frost­ing coat­ing which jus­ti­fies it all. We just don’t have a dis­cern­ing Chris­t­ian as a typ­i­cal church mem­ber, and most pas­tors seem totally obliv­i­ous that any­thing is wrong either.