Holding
Something has been said on the point of churches playing the role of "sending" or "spending" the money of other churches. Some of them may be doing both, but some are doing neither with some of the money of other churches. They are holding it. Their reports show large accumulations of money, big bank accounts, held in reserve for emergency. Thus the church is made a holding company, a sort of a religious federal reserve bank. The money in this reserve bank account has been siphoned from many other churches. But it is controlled by the eldership of the one church. Is that centralized control? Also, something is said of a church forwarding the funds for another church, like the U.S. mails. Well, when is a church a forwarding company, and when is it a holding company?
The effort of elders of these churches to defend their practice is about all the evidence needed that their programs are infringements on the divine system of the New Testament. Just read their ads and pick out their weaknesses. For instance, distinction between churches and individuals doing the giving to the foreign college is all on the ledger. The ad placed the church and the college in Japan side by side, and called on all the churches to give; to take their choice; either or both. Even if churches are informed that they "may" send direct, or mark their funds for forwarding, it remains that they also "may" not do so, but may put their money into the big religious bank of one church, controlled and administered by a central eldership, at their own will, the thing some are trying to make-believe is not being done. But it is. The Don Carlos Janes Agency of not many years ago did the same thing, and said the same thing about it, using the same language. Churches were told that they "may" mark their checks for forwarding, or "may" simply put it into the Janes Missionary Fund. Churches did both. But Janes left a huge missionary account in his will and specified the missionaries he wanted to be the beneficiaries of certain amounts, and in the same will specified that approximately $40,000.00 should be used exclusively to promote the tenets of premillennialism. That is how that "may" and "may not" terminated. The churches that are pouring 'money now into these brotherhood reserve banks of centralized elderships have no more control, administration and identity in their funds, as local churches, than these churches did who were victims of the Don Carlos Janes missionary schemes. The principles involved are the same. If the missionary societies should announce that henceforth the churches "may" mark their funds for certain places, and the society would simply function as a forwarding agency — that would not make a missionary society a scriptural thing. Nor does it make it scriptural when an eldership of one church becomes a "board of foreign missions" for all the churches and does the same thing under the name of a local eldership. When elders become general, they cease to be local.