April 19, 2021
I’ve written before about how the Church significantly damages your financial life. In fact, I think it’s one of the most underestimated forms of harm sustained by people who spend too much time caught up in religion.
It goes far beyond collecting tithes. The Church regularly teaches warped ideas about money and wealth that just aren’t true, and if these teachings are blindly accepted without much questioning (as is usually the case) then it can leave people with a very bad relationship with money and struggling financially for years to come.
Besides these damaging teachings, some churches get up to some very naughty practices when it comes to prying as much money as possible from the hands of their members.
Since the Church refuses to be honest about being a business, that means it can’t make money from its members in a transparent way. The Church is stuck in this weird in-between of being a charitable place where all services are free, but at the same time, it needs money in order to stay open.
What results are churches that financially abuse their members in some insidiously clever ways. Here are three examples.
-
Paid Discipleship Programs or Schools
I’ve noticed this trend in churches that eventually grow large or achieve megachurch status. They’ll open their own discipleship school.
What does one get after graduation from the church’s discipleship school? Well, nothing. The church isn’t a school, so it isn’t accredited and can’t give out any real credentials. A friend of mine who got caught up in this scam told me he did so because he wanted to eventually work for that church and he was told going through the school would improve his chances of being hired.
But this particular megachurch only filled their full-time positions with people who’d graduated from seminary. Therefore, any job my friend could feasibly be hired to do after completing the program would hardly be meaningful or well-paying.
Not only are these schools taking people’s money and giving them nothing in return, they’re also quite… weird. This same friend told me that while he was in the program, his girlfriend—who went to the same church but wasn’t in the program—had to regularly meet with the program leaders to make sure their relationship wasn’t sinful.
And from what I hear, these programs aren’t easy. They require time, commitment, and studying. It’s just like being in real school.
If I’m remembering correctly, I think my friend failed out of his church’s discipleship school. It wasn’t a surprise because he barely slid by in college. In my mind that’s a blessing in disguise because at least he didn’t waste all the time the church-school planned for him to waste.
-
Making Employees Raise Support
You know how Christians who want to go on mission trips ask church members to donate money to them so they can essentially go for free?
Some churches do the same thing with their own employees!
These people are considered staff. They have set hours and specific job roles. They are expected to attend meetings. They are expected to arrive early and stay late.
But the church has decided not to pay them a salary (or benefits). Instead, they tell these staff members to “raise support” by asking other members of the congregation to donate to them.
I couldn’t fathom why anyone would take this deal—even when I was still in the Church. My best guess is that there was a similar motivation as paying to go through a discipleship program—working for the church in this capacity was perceived to be a “half step” on the way to full employment with an actual salary paid by the church, plus benefits.
-
Preaching the Prosperity Gospel
And perhaps the worst of them all is the Prosperity Gospel. If you aren’t familiar, the Prosperity Gospel is a blanket term for teachings that claim if you believe in and obey God, then he’ll bless you with money (usually lots of it).
For a church, preaching the Prosperity Gospel is probably the simplest way to make bank. All you have to do is inject the promise of financial blessings into your sermons that you were going to give anyway. No need to develop a curriculum for a discipleship program and no need to regularly replace your hybrid volunteer/staff members whenever their donations run dry.
What makes the Prosperity Gospel so insidious is something I don’t often see mentioned: in order for it to work, the pastor already has to be super wealthy.
Think about it. If a pastor is broke, he can’t go up on stage and convince a bunch of people that following God will make them rich. The problem is apparent. Either the pastor isn’t following God or God doesn’t actually give huge amounts of wealth to people just for following him.
So what you end up with is a guy who already has more money than he’ll ever need for the rest of his life going out of his way to convince other people to give him even more money. It’s hard for me to think of a bigger cycle of greed than this.
Did your church engage in any of these shady practices? Was it something else that I didn’t mention here? Let me know in the comments!