Live on free-will offerings?
I'm a Giving Counselor, not a pastor! Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "From Norm Teigen":
The Great Commission is ultimately self-perpetuation of the church. There always needs to be a church on earth to baptize and teach God's people and to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth under the Savior's promise to be with them as they do this to the end of the age. Consequently offerings are needed for the church to self-perpetuate. Self-perpetuation is not always bad in and of itself.
The baby bottles are little different than the Mite Boxes of LWMS. In fact, my WELS church happens to give offering envelopes to its members and asks them to return them on the appropriate Sundays as dated on the envelopes. Maybe Norman Teigen has heard of them too. From his letter, I would assume he has never used them and has also asked the ELS president to order them discontinued from ELS churches. I suppose he is also against end-of-year offerings which are apt to be given for income tax purposes more than solely to the glory of God.
What we need to be concerned about is socalled "development" work which is based almost purely on secular tactics. Doners, especially "well-healed" ones are buttered up with all kinds of fluff and talked into giving their money. Often the appeal is to their sinful flesh and not to the "new man," to guilt and not to the Gospel. In addition, development work will get money in any and every way and place possible -- auctions, fund-raisers, foundations grants, the government grants, insurance companies, tuition (from non-members -- and from any people possible -- unsuspecting lay people, the heathen, the heterodox, non-members in our schools, even from foreign students who pay big bucks. Any fool who will part with this money if fair game.
The church is now after third source income, when the church should have one source income.
The one source is our offerings to God given as an act of worship in our Sunday morning worship services. The second source that crept in is tuition at schools which were once funded by their churches. The third source that crept in is money from development work. I will suggest that the monies received outside our Sunday morning offerings have ultimately been the downfall of our schools and our synods -- both ELS and WELS. All the blessings of the big money years are now coming to naught.
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GJ - The multiplication of appeals has not worked well. I find the constant effort to tie the church and school into commercial promotions (grocery stores, Thrivent matches) an embarrassment. The message is - "We cannot support our own work, so we need others to bail us out." Commercial fund-raising is often found where congregations are giving 2% of their income.
Thrivent proved how vulnerable matching gifts can be when they decimated their programs and called off one matching deal three months early. Patterson rang the alarm bells early. "There goes my trip to Africa!"
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Money Abuse in the Synods":
I nominate Patterson for the WELS Salvation Army. He is a good man.
