It looks like it is happening again.
Recently, Eric Sapp wrote an article entitled Rick Perry's Church Giving Hypocrisy.
Here's a great excerpt:
What we should be saying is that it doesn't matter whether the Church could do a better job caring for the poor or not because the Church isn't doing it. We wouldn't need Section 8 housing if we had enough Habitat homes. We wouldn't need food stamps or school lunches if we had enough soup kitchens. The way to ensure better care for the poor than government can provide is not to hobble government programs but for the Church to make those programs unnecessary. The problem is not that government is doing too much but that the Church is doing too little.He goes on to share that Rick Perry didn't even give a hundred dollars to the church the year that he made a million. Here is an article, Perry has not overburdened the collection plate, that goes in depth about his giving.
Wow. Actions like Perry's are not going to empower the church to step up and fill the hole caused by the disappearance of the government programs that many Christians, including Perry, are clamoring for. The moral thing for Christians and the church to do would be to actually provide the programs on a scale that the government would no longer need to do them. Until we step up and put our money and lives where our rhetoric is, we have no place, if we claim to be Christians, to ask for the government to stop the programs many poor people need. If we were already taking care of their needs, then we could be justified in asking the government to stop taking care of them.
If we think that the church can do it better than the state, then let's start doing it!
