Passing the Plate Twice

Satire, based on: AP News (via Religion News Service): Donor revives fraud claims against Christian worship leader Sean Feucht over a $250,000 donation

When I was a boy, our church took up the offering once. The ushers came down the aisle with two wooden plates, and if you had already put in your dollar, you let the plate go by and nobody thought less of you. The plate did not come around a second time. That would have looked like the church didn’t trust its own arithmetic, or didn’t trust the Lord’s.

I have been thinking about those wooden plates all week.

Here is the news, plain. The Associated Press reports that a California businessman and Christian philanthropist named Steve Bray has filed an amended federal lawsuit against worship leader Sean Feucht. Mr. Bray says that in 2023 Mr. Feucht asked him for $250,000 to help pay for a tour that would hold worship services at all fifty state capitols. Mr. Bray says he later learned the tour had already been fully paid for by Turning Point USA. A judge threw out the first version of the suit in September for lack of detail and gave Mr. Bray twenty days to try again, and he did. These are claims in a lawsuit, not a verdict, and a man is owed his day in court. I will give him that and more.

But the AP story told some other things that are not in dispute. A ministry watchdog called MinistryWatch says Mr. Feucht’s ministry stopped filing its public tax forms after 2020, the very year its income went from $243,000 to $5 million. Churches are not required to file those forms, and it is legal for a preacher to take a housing allowance. And critics have questioned how the ministry came to hold more than $7 million in real estate, from upscale houses in Southern California to hunting land in Montana to hundreds of acres in a part of Texas folks call “the Swiss Alps of Texas.”

Can I get a witness? The Swiss Alps of Texas.

Now, I have preached in tobacco barns, in a funeral home, and once in a laundromat while the dryers kept time. I have never once needed the Alps, Swiss or Texan. The Lord, as I read it, did His best preaching on a hillside that nobody owned, and when He needed a boat, He borrowed one.

So let us do a little sum, the way you’d figure seed corn. Mr. Feucht’s own 2022 papers, according to the court record, said his outdoor worship events cost about $21,786 apiece. Mr. Bray says he paid for five stops at $250,000. That comes to $50,000 a stop, better than twice the posted price. If a man sold me fertilizer at twice the price on his own sign, and then I found out the fellow down the road had already paid for my load, I would not call that a ministry. I would call that a good afternoon for the fertilizer man.

And this is the part that grieves me most. The money-changers in the temple did not sell anything wicked. They sold doves and changed coins, which folks needed in order to worship. Their sin was not the product. Their sin was standing between plain people and God with their hand out. Read the red letters: He did not reason with the tables. He turned them over.

I want to be careful here, because I love the church, and I love singing out loud in the open air as much as any man alive. There are thousands of worship leaders in this country who load their own guitar cases, sleep on church-member couches, and never own a single acre of anything Swiss. They are not the subject of this sermon. They are the reason for it. Every time a famous ministry turns out to have passed the plate twice, those faithful folks pay for it in suspicion, and the people in the pews learn to hold their dollar a little tighter on Sunday morning.

Here is my remedy, and it costs nothing. If you are giving to a ministry, ask to see its books. A ministry with nothing to hide will hand them over with a smile and a cup of coffee. One that tells you its finances are between it and the Lord has forgotten that the Lord is not the one being asked for the check.

The wooden plate goes by once, brother. If it is coming around a second time, it had better be coming back with the change.

Yours in the Word,
Brother Elijah Brimstone, Religion Correspondent