With Kansas City's urban poverty visible just across the river, some Northland believers bypass the offering plate to support food pantries and urban ministries directly. Traditionalists argue Scripture commands storehouse tithing through the local church regardless.
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Add your commentCan someone explain to me how a church in North KC with a $2 million facility budget and a coffee bar and a worship director who gets paid more than most schoolteachers is the same thing as the 'storehouse' in Malachi? Like I genuinely want someone local to walk me through that because I grew up at a little church on Armour Road that ran on nothing and actually served the neighborhood and I am having trouble connecting those two things in my head.
Malachi 3:10 settles it for me. 'Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse.' The storehouse is the local church. Period. God didn't say bring it to whichever nonprofit makes you feel warm and fuzzy that week. I've been a member at Northgate Chapel for 22 years and this conversation comes up every single stewardship season and every single time someone's trying to justify keeping control of their own money while calling it discipleship.
My grandmother used to volunteer at the Sheffield Place shelter down in KCMO every Saturday for like fifteen years. She tithed faithfully to her church AND gave extra to the shelter. She never once asked a theologian for permission. That woman fed more people than most church budgets I've ever seen. I think God was fine with it.
I chair our benevolence committee at our NKC church so I see both sides of this up close. Honestly some of the local nonprofits — reStart, Sheffield Place, Metro Lutheran Ministry — are doing work our individual congregations simply cannot replicate at scale. Accountability, professional staff, wrap-around services. My personal take is tithe to your church AND push your church leadership hard to increase its external giving percentage. Change the institution from inside rather than defunding it.
Both/and not either/or people. Tithe to your local church AND give offerings above the tithe to nonprofits. The real issue is most folks aren't even hitting 10% to begin with and now we're debating the fine print. Get the basics right first.
The storehouse tithing doctrine is actually a pretty modern American evangelical invention and it's not as airtight as your pastor probably told you. The New Testament doesn't prescribe a 10% tithe to a local institutional church at all — that structure didn't even exist in first-century Christianity. 2 Corinthians 9:7 says give what you've decided in your heart, not what fits a particular ecclesiastical pipeline.
Fun fact nobody mentions: the Levitical tithe system in the Old Testament was actually more like a 23% annual average across all three required tithes, not just 10%. So if we're going full storehouse theology we should probably talk about that too. I'll wait.
ok so I just moved here from Wichita like eight months ago and honestly the poverty right across the river on the KC side shocked me. you can literally see it from certain streets in North KC. our church gives maybe 3% of its budget to anything outside its own building fund. THREE PERCENT. so forgive me if I wonder whether the storehouse argument is just really convenient for keeping the lights on in a facility nobody's using Tuesday through Saturday
Nope. Hard disagree with the bypass-the-church crowd. Once you normalize redirecting tithes based on personal preference you erode the entire financial foundation that lets the church do ANYTHING — counseling, missions, youth programs, none of it happens without a stable budget. The nonprofits you love were mostly started BY churches that had stable giving bases. Don't saw off the branch you're sitting on.
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