Hello all:
I recently wrote a post on the Immorality of Church Finance.
A piece of information I left out in that post was about how the church I am a member of got into the precarious financial situation we are in. In my church finance post, I mention a member that was a large contributor financially, who moved away. That same member bailed the church out of a scheme, in the form on a loan. He is still earning interest each month on his loan to us.
The scheme that he bailed the congregation out of was that of bonds. The church sold bonds to various members of the congregation to raise money. Those members were making significant interest on their investment…in other words, they were making money off of the church… a lot of money.
When the congregation couldn’t afford to repay the interest, or the bonds, a wealthy member stepped forward and purchased all of the bonds. Those members who bought bonds got their money back, with interest, and the church started paying off its debt to this member. All of this occurred several years before we joined the congregation.
I believe this to be immoral. Loaning money on interest to Christians is not a biblical concept.
Unfortunately, I see that we are not the only group that has subscribed to this method of church finance. When I opened up my weekly email from the Christian Standard, I found the following ad (Click to make it full size):
Maybe someday we will learn not to do things like this.
I’m sending an email to Christian Standard about this blog post. I challenge them to drop ads from CDF.
-Clarke