Tithing Settlement is now Tithing Declaration

[filovirus]

10 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

When I read Malachi 3, the promises don't sound very 'spiritual in nature' to me, though I suspect everything can be spiritualised.

Here is the scripture reference: Malachi 3:10 Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. 11 And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the Lord of hosts. 12 And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the Lord of hosts.

I read this as a promise that there will always be enough, and that others will see Israel as blessed. I don’t see anything about promised riches.

We also have this promised blessing: D&C 85:3 It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration, agreeable to his law, which he has given, that he may tithe his people, to prepare them against the day of vengeance and burning, should have their names enrolled with the people of God.

Seems like tithing is there to prepare us as well.

 

[Calm]

37 minutes ago, SteveO said:

 

…yeah

Wish you the best.

Edit:  There’s clearly more to the story.   It sounds like a lot of factors that made the ordeal difficult.  But there was no basis for the way that letter was presented.

Chum has been posting about his personal experiences for awhile now. If anyone has been paying attention, they would have known much of the background and even if they had missed that, they would have know Chum is not a church critic and didn’t mean it in a bad way.

And if they had not been paying attention, maybe they should have been willing to ask a few questions before jumping to criticizing Chum for talking about his confusion. 

[Chum]

27 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I've been in at least two wards that included members who had been supported in one way or another for decades.

I mean it depends on the help. Years of Church welfare would be exceptional to me. What you said about members stepping up on an ongoing basis, to me that's the same as bringing the sacrament to a shut-in for years. I can get behind that.

I do know a couple of people who got food much, much longer than we did but that's the Bishop's call and he knows details I don't. The only time I ever challenged it was when I learned a member getting their cable bill paid while we were out of food. That was early in our mess and I hadn't asked for food yet - so I was arguably being less than fair. Also, the Bishop was kind of new and still finding his feet. He made sure we got food.

[JustAnAustralian]

1 hour ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Half of what you proposed as alternatives only pertain to people who have been endowed and/or live near a temple. Measuring temple attendance amongst Indonesian Saints, to take just one example, will tell you nothing about their faithfulness.

Exactly. The "key indicators" are:

• Sacrament meeting attendance (percentage)
• Endowed adults with temple recommend (percentage)
• Young Men priesthood attendance (percentage)
• Young Women attendance (percentage)
• Melchizedek Priesthood attendance (percentage)
• Relief Society attendance (percentage)
• Men holding the Melchizedek Priesthood (percentage)
• Members submitting temple ordinances in the last 12 months (percentage)    -- this is submitting through family search, not going to the temple and doing it
• First four generations of ancestors in Family Tree (percentage)

Only one of which is based on a two year interview.

[Chum]

1 hour ago, JAHS said:

Crappy or not, in the end it [obedience] really should be the only reason.

I hope I'm not being pedantic but I think I disagree with this. I think obedience has a purpose, to carry us between cause and effect. That is, for us to invest a bit of our own, to contribute to the spiritual vehicle that carries us to the intended blessings. I suspect HF's perspective is that obedience for obedience's sake is ultimately empty - that all his goals are tightly tied to happiness.

[Hamba Tuhan]

53 minutes ago, filovirus said:

I read this as a promise that there will always be enough, and that others will see Israel as blessed. I don’t see anything about promised riches.

Agreed, but 'there will always be enough' has a very temporal feel to me, and in fact, it has been repeatedly realised in my life -- and in the lives of those whom I know best -- in very material ways.

I will never forget the Sunday when I fed literally all the food I had in my house (which was everything I had financial capacity to purchase that week) to my Young Men and then wondered what I would eat for the rest of the week. I got through Monday on water, but then the Lord provided.

I was prepared for Him not to, but the fact that He did has very much shaped who I am and what I know ... and provided me with confidence to encourage others to do things like pay tithing first.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Hamba Tuhan

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, Chum said:

You aren't wrong but to be fair even Job's ordeals didn't go for a generation.

I was speaking of the lesson to be learned from Job’s friends.

Those who told Job all the reasons that it was his fault that he was suffering, and then were told by God to repent in the end because they were full of crap. 

[Chum]

1 hour ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

And it's at this point that one would like to see some evidence that the promises of tithing are real.

It has repeatedly been my experience that they are; consequently, I have no idea how to address someone whose experiences have been different.

Yeah that's why I led with 'I know no one on the forum can help me with this. Instead here's a letter..'  I wouldn't have known how to help me either. Still don't but I'm optimistic.

[Chum]

2 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I was speaking of the lesson to be learned from Job’s friends.

Those who told Job all the reasons that it was his fault that he was suffering, and then were told by God to repent in the end because they were full of crap. 

Again - you aren't wrong. I don't have Job's mettle, though.

I mean, God set his sheep on fire. If God set my cats on fire, I'd have a fair struggle with that.

[Chum]

12 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I will never forget the Sunday when I fed literally all the food I had in my house (which was everything I had financial capacity to purchase that week) to my Young Men and then wondered what I would eat for the rest of the week. I got through Monday on water, but then the Lord provided.

I was prepared for Him not to, but the fact that He did has very much shaped who I am and what I know ... and provided me with confidence to encourage others to do things like pay tithing first.

This might be the crux of the biscuit. I fear HF will answer my letter and it will be full of small instances I wasn't able to see. The fear is that those those unnoticed blessings existed along side of us spiraling into financial outer darkness - that we had sporadic blessings to make sure our increasing days of hunger weren't lonely. Like I said, it's a fear and fears are bleak by nature.

[bluebell]

Just now, Chum said:

Again - you aren't wrong. I don't have Job's mettle, though.

I mean, God set his sheep on fire. If God set my cats on fire, I'd have a fair struggle with that.

I love how Job did struggle, a lot. And was angry. And had a lot of questions and accused God of being wrong even. And that when God showed up to deal with everything Job had accused him of, God didn’t answer any of the questions or explain Himself at all. 😂

But in the end He still managed to make Job feel better, told Job’s friends to get over themselves, and said that Job’s way of dealing with the heartache and suffering was good with Him.

That makes me feel better. Knowing that God is good with our honesty in our suffering and good with questions. That He even prefers it.  I don’t have Job’s mettle either, but I’ve got that part down. 

[InCognitus]

24 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I love how Job did struggle, a lot. And was angry. And had a lot of questions and accused God of being wrong even. And that when God showed up to deal with everything Job had accused him of, God didn’t answer any of the questions or explain Himself at all. 😂

But in the end He still managed to make Job feel better, told Job’s friends to get over themselves, and said that Job’s way of dealing with the heartache and suffering was good with Him.

That makes me feel better. Knowing that God is good with our honesty in our suffering and good with questions. That He even prefers it.  I don’t have Job’s mettle either, but I’ve got that part down. 

I love the book of Job.  I think God's non-answer to Job's question in the end was: "It's complicated.  Everything is interdependent in the complex world you live in, and for now please be content and know that I am here for you.  And by the way:  Your friends are idiots, and you were right!".   

[2BizE]

So now the sign up sheet on the office door will start in September….this will certainly ease the burden on the bishop. /s

[2BizE]

10 hours ago, Duncan said:

I hadn't been in years, always pay and when you go to the TR interviews you say you pay or you don't anyways. To me it seems like a redundant mtg and the Bishop could be busy elsewhere. Their isn't a penalty for not going so what's the point of it I don't know. In my Mom's former ward the Bishop never had them and nobody seemed to care anyways. 

I agree with you Duncan.  It is a redundant process that needs to be fully eliminated.

[SteveO]

6 hours ago, Calm said:

Chum has been posting about his personal experiences for awhile now. If anyone has been paying attention, they would have known much of the background and even if they had missed that, they would have know Chum is not a church critic and didn’t mean it in a bad way.

And if they had not been paying attention, maybe they should have been willing to ask a few questions before jumping to criticizing Chum for talking about his confusion. 

I haven’t read enough to know Chum’s history.  I haven’t been active recently on the board. I didn’t know that was a prerequisite to responding.  There was an open letter.  The information was volunteered.  I responded.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I went back and re read the letter.  And I still maintain there was no basis for how it was presented.

This isn’t Job.  He is not Job.  I am not Job’s friends. Job’s friends said he must have sinned to suffer the deaths of his children, his complete loss of property, and the loss of his health.  I’m not saying Chum must have sinned.

What I am saying, is there’s more to the story than the original letter stated.  The following pages bear that out.  From the letter:

“I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.”  

Maybe a better way of helping him understand is asking if the “math” formula he was using was wrong.  It wasn’t just tithing.  This isn’t some mystery.  I’m not trying to explain a child’s death.  There was a mismanagement of money.  People do it all the time.  It’s not a satisfactory answer.  People don’t like to hear it.  But there’s a reason the church asks people to take financial planning classes…because there’s mismanagement of money.

I am not going to accept “tithing destroys lives” as the sole reason for someone’s misery. 

Maybe that’s not what he meant.  But again, there was no basis for how he presented that letter.

 

[Amulek]

7 hours ago, Chum said:

I mean, God set his sheep on fire. If God set my cats on fire, I'd have a fair struggle with that.

On the bright side, you would have had something to go with your rice.

 

[Chum]

1 hour ago, Amulek said:

On the bright side, you would have had something to go with your rice.

 

If you'd said that to Job, you'd have woken up married to his last unmarried daughter*.

*edit: The one with narcissistic borderline personality disorder and a blackbelt.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Chum

[Chum]

3 hours ago, SteveO said:

I haven’t read enough to know Chum’s history.  I haven’t been active recently on the board. I didn’t know that was a prerequisite to responding.

Prerequisite implies some rule was broken. We're saying wisdom wasn't followed.

3 hours ago, SteveO said:

There was an open letter.  The information was volunteered.  I responded.

True. But harshly responding to a single data point risks getting that response wrong.

And FWIW, most of us have done that but we've been reasonably bit for it too.

[CA Steve]

9 hours ago, Chum said:

I hope I'm not being pedantic but I think I disagree with this. I think obedience has a purpose, to carry us between cause and effect. That is, for us to invest a bit of our own, to contribute to the spiritual vehicle that carries us to the intended blessings. I suspect HF's perspective is that obedience for obedience's sake is ultimately empty - that all his goals are tightly tied to happiness.

Obedience for obedience's sake sounds a lot like a plan that was rejected in the pre-existence.

[CA Steve]

9 hours ago, Chum said:

Again - you aren't wrong. I don't have Job's mettle, though.

I mean, God set his sheep on fire. If God set my cats on fire, I'd have a fair struggle with that.

I don't know about you, but I have never taken much comfort in the knowledge that some mythological character suffered more than I have.

[Chum]

3 hours ago, SteveO said:

At the risk of belaboring the point, I went back and re read the letter.  And I still maintain there was no basis for how it was presented.

Was my presentation flawed? Perhaps but that wouldn't make it worthy of hostility.

Could my presentation be reasonably construed to be damning and critical of the Church? I believe not - as long as one doesn't load it with meaning that isn't there.

3 hours ago, SteveO said:

What I am saying, is there’s more to the story than the original letter stated.  The following pages bear that out.  From the letter:

“I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.”  

Maybe a better way of helping him understand is asking if the “math” formula he was using was wrong.  It wasn’t just tithing.  This isn’t some mystery.  I’m not trying to explain a child’s death.  There was a mismanagement of money.  People do it all the time.  It’s not a satisfactory answer.  People don’t like to hear it.  But there’s a reason the church asks people to take financial planning classes…because there’s mismanagement of money.

Could my math be wrong? Sure. That's why I put it out there for scrutiny.

3 hours ago, SteveO said:

“I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.”  

...

I am not going to accept “tithing destroys lives” as the sole reason for someone’s misery.

I never suggested you should - and presenting this line without the following sentence isn't helping here. In context, I said.

16 hours ago, Chum said:

I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.

Any insight or clarity you could give would be tremendously appreciated.

It's self-evident that 'tithing destroys lives' is a terrible conclusion. I said I genuinely don't know how to come to a different conclusion and I asked for knowledge to help me. It's prayer 101.

[ttribe]

4 hours ago, SteveO said:

I haven’t read enough to know Chum’s history.  I haven’t been active recently on the board. I didn’t know that was a prerequisite to responding.  There was an open letter.  The information was volunteered.  I responded.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I went back and re read the letter.  And I still maintain there was no basis for how it was presented.

This isn’t Job.  He is not Job.  I am not Job’s friends. Job’s friends said he must have sinned to suffer the deaths of his children, his complete loss of property, and the loss of his health.  I’m not saying Chum must have sinned.

What I am saying, is there’s more to the story than the original letter stated.  The following pages bear that out.  From the letter:

“I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.”  

Maybe a better way of helping him understand is asking if the “math” formula he was using was wrong.  It wasn’t just tithing.  This isn’t some mystery.  I’m not trying to explain a child’s death.  There was a mismanagement of money.  People do it all the time.  It’s not a satisfactory answer.  People don’t like to hear it.  But there’s a reason the church asks people to take financial planning classes…because there’s mismanagement of money.

I am not going to accept “tithing destroys lives” as the sole reason for someone’s misery. 

Maybe that’s not what he meant.  But again, there was no basis for how he presented that letter.

 

You filled in blanks, jumped to conclusions, attacked without trying to understand, and now you're doubling down on your conclusion. Stop digging your hole. Seriously.

Edited August 12, 2022 by ttribe

[bluebell]

18 minutes ago, SteveO said:

Ok, but is that a church culture thing, or the principle of tithing?

I figured you were referring to me in your previous post.

Are we not allowed to question possible reasons for why bad things happen?  In Raingirl’s instance, a misunderstanding of the principle that was wrongfully perpetuated?

I don't think that Chum was saying that paying tithing destroyed his life.  I think he was simply sharing his experience, one that he doesn't understand and very much wants to.   

And I think we can question other people's experiences to a point, but that when should question with charity, and avoid making up our own answers to those questions, and then not judge someone negatively based on the answers that we created.

Quote

 

Is no one at fault for why bad things happen to them?  Just an act of God, and nothing more?

Why do we have to sympathize without question someone who claims tithing destroyed his life for 30 years?  

Sound financial advice advocates 10-15% set aside for emergency and retirement.  You could say, after 30 years, you don’t have those luxuries because of tithing.  But to say, “I paid 10% of my income to the church, and it made me miserable, and my family suffered financially for 30 years because of it”?  Not a penny, after 30 years of tithing payment, from the church financial aid?  Nothing?  No help? Zilch? It doesn’t make sense.  And I’m not wrong for questioning it.

 

The way that he explained it made sense to me.

But, questioning someone's experience is one thing.  Thinking that we have the answers they lack, or that we know why something happened, or why the story doesn't make sense to us, or that we can explain why it all turned out like it did, is a horse of a much worse color.

I loved the Follow Him podcast on Job last week, where Adam Miller (the scholar for that week), John Bytheway, and Hank Smith talked about how Christians are often very quick to offer answers of "why" something bad or hard happened or horrible happened to another Christian, or they want to 'fix' the problem by assigning the suffering meaning (and often that comes with assigning the person suffering some level of blame for it, like Job's friends did).

Here is an excerpt from that conversation--

Dr. Adam Miller:   Yeah. It's tempting to think that religion is about always making sure we know what everything means. Always being able to assign meaning to everything that happens. But the older I've gotten, the more it seems to me that I would prefer to describe religion as the ongoing business of grappling with some things that simply lack meaning.

John Bytheway:   I think there's something that some theologians have called it, the doctrine of retribution. And we see it in scriptures. If you do this, you will get this. There's "if/then" statements in the scriptures, and they work sometimes, and sometimes they don't.

There's the law of the harvest. And we want to say, if I sow this, I will get this. And Hank, you brought up the example in John nine, because I think that's where the 12 were at. "Hey, well, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?" because they had that mindset of the doctrine of retribution. There's got to be an explanation for this. And Jesus brought up, hey, you think that that tower in Siloam that fell, do you think those people were sinners above all? And he would bring up these examples to try to say no, that's not always the case. 

John Bytheway:  I Called [Dr. Robert L. Millet] one time and I said, "I've had this school that wants me to do some presentations on Job," a private Christian school. And I said, "What's our best book on Job?" Thinking there's one of our colleagues or something. And he said, "We don't have one." Now, I don't know if that's still true. But he said, "Go get a book by Philip Yancey called The Bible Jesus Read. He was an editor of Christianity Today Magazine or something. And I read this and I thought this to me was such a great application of how do I apply this story of Job in not wanting to do what Job's friends did?

So this Philip Yancey used to write for the Reader's Digest. Now that's a magazine that my grandma used to read, right? And you remember the series called Drama in Real Life. Somebody's jogging and they get attacked by a bear or somebody gets caught in a natural disaster or something. Well, he used to write for that. And he said, he went to hospitals a lot. This is what Philip Yancey said:

"Every single person I interviewed told me that the tragedy they had undergone pushed them to the wall with God. Sadly, each person also gave a devastating indictment of the [Christian] church. Christians, they said, made matters worse. One by one, Christians visited their hospital rooms with pet theories. God is punishing you. No, not God. It's Satan. No it's God who hand picked you to give him glory. It's neither God, nor Satan. You just happen to get in the way of an angry mother bear. As one survivor told me the theories about pain confused me and none of them helped. Mainly I wanted assurance and comfort from God and from God's people. And almost every case, the Christians brought more pain and little comfort."...

That's an excerpt from The Bible Jesus Read.

And I thought this is a wonderful way for me to apply this is be careful that we're not like Job's friends in trying to explain. Be the one who comes and not trying to say, "Okay, I'm going to make sense of this for you, why this is happening." But the one who...just comes and spends time with people, but can be totally silent. And I just thought that was, "Oh, I don't want to be that person that actually comes and make things worse by trying to explain what God is doing."

Hank Smith:  I think that's excellent because that's something that Latter-day Saints, I don't know if other faiths struggle with this, but I think it's something that Latter-day Saints struggle with is we want to come in and fix.

I think that sometimes we want to come in and fix it because we care about the person that is suffering and we want to help but I think other times we want to fix it because we want to make ourselves feel better about our own chances of ever going through something similar, by assigning causes for the suffering that we can then avoid.

 

 

[SteveO]

1 hour ago, Chum said:

Prerequisite implies some rule was broken. We're saying wisdom wasn't followed.

True. But harshly responding to a single data point risks getting that response wrong.

And FWIW, most of us have done that but we've been reasonably bit for it too.

 

“I finally stopped paying tithing and about that same minute our lives finally turned around. Dramatically.”

“I am baffled why the blessings we enjoyed from tithing were so indistinguishable from Hell.”

”I genuinely don't know how to math our particular 30 years into something other than tithing destroys lives.”

What am I supposed to take away here?  How am I to understand you in any other way except that tithing is the sole author and finisher of your past 30 years of hardship?

If it’s not, what are we even talking about?  

How do we have members upvote this, and then turn around and try and teach the law of tithing to new converts, or even fellow members?

 

[Calm]

4 hours ago, SteveO said:

I haven’t read enough to know Chum’s history.  I haven’t been active recently on the board. I didn’t know that was a prerequisite to responding.

It should be if you are going to assume the worse.