In this day and age I have seen some shameless schemes for profit. These schemes were not suprising from the world but also from the church. I think the use of religion for profit is deplorable for our day and age as much as it was for the apostle Paul in his day. There have been numerous things sold in the name of religion. In the reformation days it was relics-the goatskin of John the baptist, St. Thomas' finger. Nowadays it's books, videos, holy water, a piece of the cross. Now I have nothing wrong with paying for the cost of ministry and I believe a worker is worthy of their hire but where do we draw the line? I mean there are pastors with private jets and rolls royces and multimillion dollar estates while people are starving not only in Africa but in our own country. It saddens me that this is happening in the church and we defend it through a bunch of convoluted theology and scripture prooftexting.
When I started this blog I wanted to just get my thoughts out to as many people as possible and I have always toyed with the idea of making money from it. With that in mind I put google ads on there. I didn't make one red cent and the stuff that was coming up in the ads was sometimes questionable and often misrepresented my views on particular subjects. So I took them off in an effort to truly become authentic as I engage the blogosphere.
In that same vein I will soon have a paypal link for donations to my seminary education. This is more in line with the way things should work in the church. "Freely you have received, freely give." I think we should make it our aim not to align ourselves with corporate greed which I believe is one of the biggest most pervasive evils in our society. Tall Skinny Kiwi has written an excellent post on the topic of generosity vs hoarding called Wikinomics and Mission
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