On Tithe

According to the Bible, we Christians should give 10% of our gross income straight back to God. Since God doesn't exist in physical form to recieve payment, we give to his representative - the Church.

From my previous post, I am taking a sabbatacle from church. Does that me I am going to stop tithing? To be honest, I has been years since I tithed to a church. I have been pretty good at setting aside a portion of my income ever since I started working at a real job making real money. That will not change for the forseeable future. In the last couple of years I have supported my world vision child, donated a metric ton of food, financed missionaries, send Bibles to Iraq, dontated to the Tsunami relief effort, given a car to a friend of mine who REALLY needed transportation of the 4 wheeled variety, and given money to various random people in need. There will always be people to pay the much deserved salaries of the pastors, and to pay for the church building. Personally, I think we should be building people instead of buildings. Here is a radical idea - people are so much more educated and literate than they were even 500 years ago. Do we even need pastors? Not for teaching. If you want book knowledge, pick up a Bible and start reading. If you want to move beyond that, get into a small group and/or start living out the Bible with some other folks doing the same thing. To be sure, pastors do more than give a sermon on sunday. I wonder if what we do is pay someone to be Jesus with skin so we don't have to. I know a lot of people who are Jesus with skin, and I know alot of people who aren't. I am in the latter group myself.

Just a disclaimer - whenever I rant and rave like this, it usually because I am pissed off at myself.