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Originally Posted by Jaymoss
where does your church get its money for its upkeep ?
all the money as I have said on numerous occasions is voluntary and it funds everything. Bare in mine there are 8 million baptised publishers and most of the buildings are built by witnesses cutting a lot of costs.
You are just grabbing out at anything with your agenda to discredit us while I am more than happy to try to be a good Christian and not come back at you like for like. Your example does enough in itself
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Oh, I make no secret of it, our church building is maintained by our members. The mission societies are all paid for from donations. The hymn books, well those we had to pay for, as is the case with the vast majority of the resources we use. Not being a cult, we are free to buy resources from a wide range of different organisations. All Christian, of course; all in accordance with the basic creed that all down the ages has been a simple way of telling the difference between orthodox, historical Christian belief and cultic error.
I’m not criticising you for your voluntary funding - a whole lot of voluntary organisations are funded that way. I am simply pointing out that an organisation that only allows you to spend that money with a single network of approved suppliers, all of whom publish material asserting that organisation’s unique ability to interpret the Bible and correctly explain the end times, is at it.
Despite training for Baptist ministry I have had teachers from various denominations who gave out reading lists including authors who are Lutheran, Anglican, various shades of Pentecostal and even a couple of Catholics. One of the most useful books of my Trinity module was written by the former Pope Benedict; I was free to draw usefully from some of his work on the subject while disagreeing with some of his ideas about how churches are locally constituted by bishops (as a Baptist, I don’t have a bishop overseer as a Catholic priest would). No single organisation has had the benefit of supplying me with all my learning material. My learning is far more well rounded and solidly grounded as a result. My pet ideas and all of my denomination’s particular convictions have been challenged, and my understand of my faith strengthened.
The actual Christian church, in all its different denominations and despite its famous and sometimes highly unedifying disagreements about patterns of worship and governance, doesn’t need an approved suppliers network because no single denomination owns orthodoxy, yet all of them know what it looks like.
The Watchtower Society, on the other hand, claims it alone knows the truth and only allows you to acquire it from its own approved outlets. That, my friend, smells fishier than a fisherman in a fishmarket.
---------- Post added at 21:36 ---------- Previous post was at 21:31 ----------
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Originally Posted by Jaymoss
hahahaha ok I wonder how many homes were built by other religions in the same circumstances . And bare in mind this is going on all the time
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Actually it’s fairly typical for Christian missions to do disaster relief work without faith-based preconditions. Here’s one example:
https://www.bmsworldmission.org/ministries/relief/
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Through BMS relief ministries, every day, you are ensuring that desperate people get the help they need, no matter what their caste, gender or religion.
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BMS is the Baptist Mission Society.