Home » Live Report » Did Christ, Apostles pay or receive tithe? – Mideno Bayagbon
By Mideno Bayagbon
On Air Personality, Daddy Freeze, stoked the hornet’s nest recently with his half-baked, selective and attention seeking jibe at Christians and exploded bottled up grievances, amongst Nigerians, against the perceived exploitation of Christians by, mainly Pentecostal pastors, on the issue of tithe and tithing.
The debate has been fierce and expectedly emotion laden. It for once provided an avenue to bring into the public space the question of whether paying of tithe today is logical, biblical and indeed in tandem with the grace which God extended to mankind, when he sent his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to come into the world to give his life as a ransom for our sins, and thereby reconcile the world back to Himself.
The emotions have been fermenting, and it was only a matter of time, an opening of which Daddy Freeze calling all Christians who pay tithe to Nigerian pastors, as goats, provided, before it exploded. Poorly handled, it can also lead to an implosion in Christendom in pentecostal Nigeria.
What most Nigerians don’t know, however, is that Dr Femi Aribisala, the trenchant and very controversial TheNewsGuru.com columnist on Sundays, has been in the vanguard of the campaign against Christians paying tithes for almost a decade that i have known him. Educated, erudite and a former Pastor of one of the leading Pentecostal churches, Dr Aribisala, never known to shy away from confronting very controversial issues, was the first, to my knowledge, to call Nigerian pastors, some by name, as thieves for collecting tithes and appropriating them for their personal use. He accuses them of using the pulpit to steal from Nigerian Christians, to feed their mammon quest for personal wealth.
For those who have read him over the years in Vanguard newspapers, and now in TheNewsGuru.com, Dr Aribisala has produced tomes of scholarly and ecclesiastical treatises on one, Apostle Paul and secondly, tithes. He dismisses Apostle Paul, for example, as one trying to supplant the Lord Jesus Christ, as one who wrote things that are clearly not in tandem with the teachings of Christ. Christians, he argues, should be followers of Jesus Christ and not of Apostle Paul. Most Pentecostal pastors think he is mad to even have the effrontery to question the apostleship of Paul.
The tithe debate, interesting, controversial and emotional as it has been, can be said to be a part symptom of the general malaise and disquiet among Christians and non christians alike, who have continued to see the leading pastors wallow in unearned affluence while their congregants stew in agonising poverty. The superstar-like affluence exhibited by some of these pastors, their annoying flamboyance as seen in the state of the art cars, the private jets and the out of this world, at least by the poverty standard in Nigeria, school fees charged by the schools owned by them, have stoked bottled up anger in the general public. This, the argument goes, is clearly in sharp contrast to the life of abject poverty, of selfless service to humanity which Jesus Christ and the Apostles embody.
Easily, the Pentecostal pastors’ lifestyles, from the public view, are being fuelled by the tithes congregants pay to the churches, in seeming obedience to biblical injunctions especially the most popularly quoted Malachi 3: 8-10: “Will a man rob God? Yet you say, ‘in what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, For you have robbed Me, Even this whole nation. Bring all the tithes into the store house, that there may be food in My house, And try Me now in this,” says the Lord of hosts, “if l will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it.”
The raging controversy to which none of the known pastors of the big Pentecostal churches has contributed, indisputably is trying to exam a number of issues. First, is the old testament order to pay tithe, which is ten percent of a person’s income, to the levites still tenable? Are there still levites in the church today given that Christ asks all his followers to go all over the world and preach the gospel and all are now joint heirs with Christ? Even if tithing is still tenable, some ask, what was the original intention of God in ordering the Israelites to pay it? As many bible scholars have noticed, even though today’s pentecostal pastors conveniently only emphasise Malachi’s rendition of tithing, colouring it in such a way as to coerce the congregants into believing that not paying tithe is a one way, irredeemable passport to hell, while paying it is the sole passport to moving God to transform them from a life of poverty to wealth, there are indeed earlier prescribed ways by which tithe is to be used; and who it was meant to benefit.
For example, in several chapters of Deuteronomy, the tithe payer is supposed to bring his/her tithe to the house of God and provide a love feast for himself, his family, friends, the needy, the poor, while a part is separated for the Levites. Even in the Malachi angle, the tithe so paid is not meant for only the levites, but it is supposed to provide food for the poor, the strangers and the levites. It is supposed to be the progenitor of the current welfare system which the developed world administers for their citizens. Evidently, tithe is supposed to be for welfare of Christians, the poor, the fatherless, the widows. Churches are supposed to impact their communities for good using the money from tithe.
This is especially so, when it is seen that nowhere in the ministry of Christ, or the expanded one by his disciples, did they ask for or indeed collect tithes from their followers now called Christians. If Christians are to be Christ-like, should they then still continue the old testament tradition of paying tithe for the upkeep of the levites and the poor? Are they not supposed to pattern their lives after the messiah?