On Tithing and Giving Obligations

      I don't usually talk about tithing and the obligations of giving within the churches, but this has come up in my own life recently, and I wanted to share my thoughts and perspective.
     The practice of tithing, giving ten percent of your income to the church, isn't as Biblical as many churches teach. In fact, it's not a part of the New Covenant at all. Tithing in the Bible was really a part of the Torah, the Mosaic Covenant, and it was essentially a tax upon the people of Israel levied for the support of the priests and Levites who had no land inheritance and thus no way of supporting themselves otherwise. In reality, when the complete tithe was added up, it was something like 30% of one's income throughout the year or so for the support of the Levites, the priests, and the Tabernacle/Temple as described in the Torah.
      The New Testament is clear that the New Covenant supersedes and nullifies the Mosaic Covenant. There is a large portion of text in the New Testament dedicated to explaining this fact in no uncertain terms.  It is clear that those who are "walking in the Spirit" are not subject to the Torah. And when the Apostles met in Jerusalem to figure out what the Gentile Christians should be practicing in order to get along with their Jewish brothers, the only things they told them was to keep away from eating blood and things strangled, and to keep away from prostitution and illicit sexual activity more broadly. That was it. The tithe never came up.
     What did Jesus say about it? When asked about whether He and His disciples paid the temple tax he responded, "What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth receive custom or tribute? From their sons or from strangers?" Peter said to Him, "From strangers." Jesus said to him, "Then truly the sons are free." The only reason why He then paid the temple tax was so that He and His disciples didn't cause offense. But it was clear that He didn't teach they were required to.
     So then what does the New Testament teach about giving to the church? What Jesus taught, and what was even a condition of discipleship, was that His disciples were to let go of everything they started off with. As He sent them out first twelve, and then seventy, He was explicit when He said "take nothing with you." In the book of Acts, the disciples of the first Church held everything in common. There was no need to tithe anything, because everything went into a common pool and distributed to everyone so that no one was in need of anything, not the Apostles, not the Deacons, and not the "laypersons." This practice continued throughout the first century among all of the churches which were established, and was one of the reasons why Paul wrote to Titus about the Cretans that if they didn't work, they didn't eat. That is, if they didn't contribute to the common pool of resources one way or the other, they weren't going to eat from it either. This was practiced both locally among the members of the local gathering, and it was practiced as much as possible between churches when they knew a famine would occur and Paul took up collecting a common purse for those churches which would be impacted the most.
     Furthermore, while Paul himself chose to support himself with his own hands and not draw from the common pool of the churches he started or visited, he argued repeatedly that the Apostles and pastors of churches had every right to share in those common resources because of the work they were putting in overseeing and ministering to the other disciples within the churches. As Paul recalled the analogy from the Torah, "Don't muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain," summing it up as "the worker is worthy of his wages."
     Our problem and misunderstanding about tithing in this day and age is that our modern churches don't work along the same economies that the churches described in the New Testament did. Like with much else, our modern congregations are far removed in both teaching and practice from our ancient spiritual forefathers so as to be completely unrecognizable one to the other as Christian, and I don't see this situation as changing any time soon.