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Are Christians not starting to get livid with these daily, and I mean daily, mishandling of funds? In this case, this friggin' church is not even pretending that they are doing anything else but keeping over $1.8 MILLION dollars of a total of $3.3 million raised. I have no words I can put on this forum; I might get banned.
YOU Christians need to stop this problem. YOU Christians are as much as fault on this incessant malfeasance in your communities as the Muslims are for not stopping their radicals. YOU Christians need to find a backbone, and get some real morals, not morals you think exists in that fairy tale book you keep preaching from, and then only partially, because you forget the part about owning slaves and how a rape victim gets stoned to death if the she didn't scream loud enough.
Why the bleep do the relatives of the white racist who shot the victims have to sue their own bleeping church? Man this makes me angry. And I bet their are some hypocrites on this very board who will see nothing wrong with this.
I'm sure tomorrow will bring a new outrage. It is just the way so many Christian churches and their leaders seem to work in today's USA.
We should be careful not to play into the hands of sensationalistic journalism such as what the Daily Mail regularly traffics in. Unfortunately, such innuendo and insinuation is all we may get because AME churches are, literally, episcopal, and therefore not answerable to the membership, and may use their protected status to hide where the money actually goes.
What is noticeably missing from the discussion, though, is discussion about what was said about the donations when they were made. That matters more than anything else. I'm wracking my brain but I don't remember what we told our congregants when we shared our collection plate with the church. I'm pretty sure we didn't say, "This is all going to the families of the victims," which we would have said if we were donating, specifically, to a victims fund. I recall comments about "standing in solidarity", which clearly would indicate that some of the money we donated was to go for fostering the church's mission and not just providing financial relief to the victims' families.
What is noticeably missing from the discussion, though, is discussion about what was said about the donations when they were made. That matters more than anything else.
I agree. I actually don't have an issue with the use the money is being put to, so long as donors were not either given to expect it to go to victim families, or specified that it should. According to the article, $280K was specified for victim families and they added $1 million to that.
Everything my community did with respect to that was a generalized solidarity stand with no strings attached.
Some of it is going to "scholarships" and I'm not sure what that means. Scholarships for children of the victims? My guess is, endowment of already-established scholarships.
But it really is their prerogative to do what they please with the money.
My only real criticism is the lack of detailed transparency ABOUT what they do with the money, and the simple fact that $1.5 million is not what I would exactly call generous. I don't recall the demographic provenance of the victims but the entire $1.5 million would only fully support, say, two families who lost a young wage-earning father, depending on details (size of family, lifetime value of lost wages, offsets by private life insurance payouts). In truth $1.5 million just isn't that much money anymore, period, in today's world.
I agree. I actually don't have an issue with the use the money is being put to, so long as donors were not either given to expect it to go to victim families, or specified that it should. According to the article, $280K was specified for victim families and they added $1 million to that.
Everything my community did with respect to that was a generalized solidarity stand with no strings attached.
Some of it is going to "scholarships" and I'm not sure what that means. Scholarships for children of the victims? My guess is, endowment of already-established scholarships.
But it really is their prerogative to do what they please with the money.
My only real criticism is the lack of detailed transparency ABOUT what they do with the money, and the simple fact that $1.5 million is not what I would exactly call generous. I don't recall the demographic provenance of the victims but the entire $1.5 million would only fully support, say, two families who lost a young wage-earning father, depending on details (size of family, lifetime value of lost wages, offsets by private life insurance payouts). In truth $1.5 million just isn't that much money anymore, period, in today's world.
Well, it may not be "that much" money, but for the average American, that is almost 29 years of working (Average income in the US is right at $52,000). So I would say that is a pretty substantial sum of money for most people.
That being said, if people were not told directly where the money was going, then the church can do what they please with it. Hopefully it is spent wisely.
Well, it may not be "that much" money, but for the average American, that is almost 29 years of working (Average income in the US is right at $52,000). So I would say that is a pretty substantial sum of money for most people.
Yeah but that's my point. If a 25 year old father was killed in the shooting then his family loses some 40 years of working income based on his normal life expectancy and expected retirement age. If you are really going to compensate those families for that loss then you need a substantial sum of money to do it. Sure, anyone reading this would be thrilled to be handed a million bucks, but you need that much in the bank just to retire and live modestly off the interest these days.
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