To do otherwise is, as Ellen White pointed out, to ignore “.

I don’t regret that Adventists teach stewardship. It was one more thing we had in common, and when you are as outnumbered as we were, that’s a pretty special thing to discover. I didn’t ask because it was enough for me at the time to enjoy the fact that here, in this secular environment, was somebody who got me on a really personal level.

I’m just going to have to live with not knowing the answer to how tithing became a way of life for him. How did he end up with the same attitude I had, in which robbing God was as unthinkable as living on Saturn? But his church, which has never been shy to impress upon its members their sacred duties, did not require tithing. I had seen the blessings in my family growing up and had experienced them firsthand since establishing my own household. In his mind, obviously, they were.īut why was tithe beyond question for him? I had a lifetime of exposure to cheerful givers who taught by word and deed that tithing is an expression of trust that brings peace and security. But he spoke of those reductions in income as if they were beyond question. The other, tithe, was entirely within his power to ignore. One of them, taxes, was something over which he had no control. He mentioned two things that took a bite out of his income. Both of us were struggling, but that didn’t keep either of us from tithing.īut digging deeper into the three sentences that I have here reported from the larger conversation, there is something else that strikes me about his faithfulness. It was one of those moments when you know that someone else gets you. “Tithe? I didn’t know that Catholics tithed.” I realize now that there was very little tact in my observation, but in my defense, he had caught me completely off guard. So, when my friend used the word, it caught my attention. Most churches, despite the fact they depend on giving from their members for the overwhelming majority of their financial support, don’t talk about, let alone practice, true tithing. I knew all about tithe, including the fact that Seventh-day Adventists are a minority among churches not just because we understand what it means, but because we even use the word at all. It’s not just what my family did it’s what most active members did, what we heard in sermons and read about in church publication (yes, like this one), and learned about in Bible class at church school. Now, with my upbringing, tithing was normal. We were talking over an assignment one day and fell into a common topic namely, how can you live on the $400 a month without either a working spouse, extra job, or trust fund? He told me how much he typically brought in waiting tables for an evening, then, almost as an afterthought, added, “Of course, that’s before tithe and taxes.” One of the students I got along with best was a fellow Christian who worked as a waiter to help make ends meet.

It just wasn’t a great way to pay the rent, which meant many grad students had side jobs. The fellowship had minimal work requirements, so it was a great way to pay for your education. Some had full-time jobs and only took a class or two at a time, but most of us were full-time students, mostly on graduate fellowships. Of course, one thing we all shared was relative poverty. We shared mutual academic interests with partyers, so we got along well with them, but we didn’t spend much extracurricular time with them. We who were serious about our faith recognized that same quality in others around us. I am happy that I went to an Adventist college during a more formative period of my life, and I recognize that my deep involvement in the local church while in graduate school kept me grounded, but spending time with people of other faiths, as well as people of no faith, was a learning opportunity. Many were active in their churches, and overwhelmingly, they respected my beliefs. That may describe a subsection of both students and professors I knew there, but far from all of them. By Doug Inglish - I went to a public university for my graduate degree, which is not to say that I was surrounded by a crowd of atheistic, evolution-spewing hedonists whose every thought, word, and action was bent toward evil.

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