Earlyface

Questions Tithing Advocates Fail To Answer!

Our modern day tithe teachers do not have intellectual honesty.
Most of the pro-tithers cling onto Matthew 23:23 & Luke 11:42 and say that even Jesus said so, therefore the NT Christians need to tithe.  If they take Matthew 23:23/Luke 11:42 as a command for New Testament Christians to tithe here are the questions they need to answer:
1. According to Mishna and Flavious Josephus the 1st century Jews practiced
multiple tithes (almost 3). How did the early Christians practice all 3 tithes?
2. Did the early Christians who did not own farms and cattle give 23% of their earned income to their Churches?
3. Levitical tithes were yearly and it went to Levites according to their
locations. Who are the Levites today and who were the Levites in 1st century
Christianity?
4. How did the ?NT Levites? take the 10% of the 10% to the ?NT Priests??
5. If the NT Pastor is the priest don?t we have to tithe to the ushers, choir,
greeters and other Church staff members and let them tithe from their tithes to
the (senior) Pastor?
6. Why does the Senior Pastor collect all tithes today and give salaries to the
staff members and leave many Church workers unpaid? The OT High Priests did not
do that. The OT Aaronic Priests received only 1% of the total tithe.
7. In the OT the High Priests themselves did not tithe but why do our modern day prosperity
preachers tithe to their cohorts?

8. Regarding the festival tithe, do Christians need to go to Jerusalem to observe it as the Jews did? What is our Jerusalem now? Did the NT Christians practice pilgrimage to Jerusalem?. The festival tithe must be taken to Jerusalem. If that was prescribed to NT Christians we should make pilgrimage to Jerusalem like the Muslims visit Mecca?!?!?!

9. The 3rd tithe for poor (Charity Tithe): Why don?t tithe asking Pastors give their congregation the liberty to take care of the poor? Why would it go to the benevolent funds controlled by the Church board? Poor people need to go through hoops to get some help. That really complicates the process?
10. Even if we assume that tithing was commanded to NT Christians the pro-tithers fail to consider one important thing:

* The plurality of the NT Church leadership.

a. In the first century Christianity no Church was run by a single Pastor. The Churches were founded by Apostles and they in turn appointed elders  a.k.a Pastors (in plural ? more than one). Why can?t the tithe seeking Pastors follow that model today?

b. Also the early Church had all 5 five fold ministries in the Church.

Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, Evangelists and Pastors. Well, we all cannot agree if the offices of Apostles and Prophets exist today but we all can agree at least the offices of Pastors, Evangelists and Teaches exist in our contemporary Christianity. So the point is, even if the early Church received tithes it was divided amongst all 5 fold ministers and the money DID NOT GO TO A SINGLE PASTOR unlike what we see today. The tithing advocates today need to answer this question as well. They are unwilling to accommodate other types of ministries but want to dominate and control the finances which is totally unfair.

c. Acts 13:1

Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, prophets and teachers: Barnabas, and Simeon who was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.

In Acts 13:1 we see in the early Church of Antioch they had 5 ministers who were prophets and teachers.   Is it logical to assume all these 5 ministers received ?double portion? of the ?tithes? that that Church was receiving if it ever received money as tithe.   When Paul and Barnabas were commissioned as Apostles a few verses later did they start receiving half of the money they got when they had that dual calling of functioning as prophets and teachers.  In Acts chapter 13 we see their dual function of prophets and teachers was changed by the Holy Spirit to only one office in the five-fold ministry.

d. Many Senior Pastors have their associate Pastors. Most of them are not paid well and some of them are asked to ?live by faith?. These tithe hungry Pastors not only forget the poor but also neglect their own staff members. This example was certainly not followed by the first century Christian church.

Therefore the pro-tithers still would not meet the NT model of tithing even if it was practiced by the early Christian church.

New Testament Christians Don?t Be Deceived By these Mammon Lovers!!

Source: http://thewordonthewordoffaithinfoblog.com/2010/05/22/uncomfortable-questions-for-tithe-teaching-preachers