I grew up in a church where the motto seemed to be, 'Salvation, Tongues, and Tithing'. I even made up a little song over the years with that line as the main theme. So, to me, the Sunday offering(s) was a normal part of church. (And the Wednesday offering, and the Saturday offering when I was small, and, and, and)
When I was an early teenager, I was part of the church's choir. During that time, this choir was at the height of their popularity. We traveled around on the old church bus and sang at all sorts of churches. Sometimes there were thousands of people in attendance and sometimes there were only a handful. You just never knew what you were going to get when a 'freewill offering' was the only requirement.
I remember traveling two hours to get to a church where there were maybe 50 or so in the crowd, but 35 - 40 were from our own church. Small crowd, huge church. They also did not have air. They had those little fans next to the hymnals. It seemed that the dozen people from their congregation were all heavy cologne/perfume wearers. Pair this with sweat and fanning and swaying and jumping over pews and swinging from the chandeliers and you have quite a ruckus stirred up. Anyway, it was time for the pastor to take up the offering. He passed that plate around himself and looked at everyone as it passed. He looked at what they put in. Heck, I was even scared and put in money and the offering was for us! Everywhere we went, the offering was taken, sometimes several times in order to get enough! It was just something I grew up with.
Today, I asked my boys if Pastor Jim took an offering.
"A what?" Jack asked.
"An offering."
"What's an offering?"
After I explained it to him, he knew exactly what I was talking about. It was just the terminology I used. And I don't know why, but something in me felt sort of sneaky and excited that my kids go to church and yet did not know what an offering was. Maybe I'm just twisted like that. And maybe I should be worried that after we talked about what it was and what it was for, the boys asked for offering money (already) for next week. I gave Jack some money and then said, "Hey Jack! What if you're at the pool this week and a popsicle sounds really, really good. Are you going to use the money for the popsicle?"
And that little squirt looked at me and said, "I might".
Honesty is good, right?
Sunday, August 3, 2008
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3 comments:
Apparently the older kids don't do the "Offering Shuffle" that we do in Preschool. :)
But that is really cool. I love that we don't pass a hat/plate, etc at VWS...I much prefer the seed boxes (woo!)...We may suffer a bit financially for it, but still, I never do like the hat passing. I even read a very Scripturally based article that argues that the whole tithing thing is unscriptural. Not that we shouldn't give to the church, obviously, but the doctrine of tithing is not actually in the Bible as we understand it in churches today.
i love it that my kids don't really know what church is....:)
I think that was the churches motto. There may have been something in there about not smoking and watching R rated movies too but I can't remember.
Ps. I was in a wedding on Saturday also but I had fun. It was Zach Fox's wedding if your remember all the little Foxs.
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