Renumeration of pastors and making money off religion

[archer75]

I have seen it go farther than that. “THe church owns the house so we can come and go in it any time we please, even 3 am if we want to.”

So nosy congregants can go thru the refrigerator and shelves looking for whatever, walk in on the pastor and spouse when they are sleeping (or whatever) and then report back all they saw to the rest of the congregation.

Housing allowance (if the congregation owns the parsonage/manse) is deducted from the wages of the pastor, which makes finding alternate housing without the untimely intrusions, an economic impossiblibility.

This happens??

 

[Dave-W]

This happens??

Absolutely it does. Was rather common 50 years ago.

The first time I heard anything against it was in the 1970s.

 

[Tone]

The notion of wealth = blessing is usually traced back to figures such as E. W. Kenyon, Kenyon's view known as "Positive Confession" has been asserted by some to have been influenced by New Thought, or perhaps by some aspects of late 19th century Holiness Movement (it is, apparently, a matter of continued debate). That said, Kenyon's ideas were a major influence on Kenneth Hagin, with some of Hagin's works eerily seeming to mirror or even appear to plagiarize Kenyon's works. We also see some of this in Oral Roberts. As such these things predate the "Third Wave".

I think probably the safest way to put it is that this stuff has been a fringe current for a long time, but has only gained something of a more "mainstream" (if only by comparison to the past) over the last several decades. It's something that divides the Pentecostal/Charismatic world, and that divide is fairly major.

-CryptoLutheran

Go back further:

"The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise in the Western world of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state"
Max Weber - Wikipedia

 

[Tone]

Oh yeah, by the way, this thread should be merged with Renumeration of pastors and making money off religion as @Dave-W pointed out.