Don’t Tithe To Us

Another way we blow up people’s negative assumptions when we preach about money is to tell them they don’t have to tithe to us. A few times when I’m telling people to tithe (by the way, I’m not a “If you don’t tithe, why don’t you incrementally increase your percentage until you give ten percent” kind of guy. Personally, I think that’s crap. To me it’s the same as saying, “If you’re living in disobedience to God now, why don’t you slowly decrease the amount that you’re disobeying Him until you get to the point of obedience.” Yeah, that’s great. No, we need to obey God. He says 10%, give Him 10%. Actually, I teach our people that 10% is the starting point, but a real bad place to stay. Give as much as you can…)

Anyway, when I tell people to give 10% (or more) to God, and they start nodding like, “Yup, I knew you were gonna make me give you my money,” I will sometimes say something like: If you’re thinking, “See, this is all about getting more money for Forefront… I would tell you that you still need to tithe (for all the reasons we’ve been talking about last week and today and more) but don’t do it to our church. If you’re suspicious of our motives for teaching you to tithe, then give your money to a different church. …

That totally messes with people’s minds! Then what we do is give the names and addresses of new churches and tell people that these churches probably need money more than us anyway, so “Screw the man!” by giving to them instead of me.