Comments on: 1976 UBF Reform Letter: Offering Money Abuses

By: briank

briank — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:54:05 +0000

This was a long time ago and I don’t recall all the facts correctly. But this was in the 1990’s, during the time when some single brothers were asked to write down all their daily schedule of activities and turn it in daily or weekly.

By: briank

briank — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:50:42 +0000

Hi CM, I remember generating the reports several times. During those times, I also remember students being given direction by their shepherds or chapter director about life situations, such as marriage, school choices, job choices, and even offering direction to increase offering if it had slipped. Sometimes the shepherd of the person whose offering had slipped was asked to find out why. Such direction was not really favoritism, but more like training for not being obedient enough. I wish I had paid more attention to things like this back then!

By: CM

CM — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 22:48:45 +0000

Hi Brian, what do you mean that “life direction was given”? and “new direction”? Was this some kind of favoritism? And in regards to what? What kind of life direction was given, and was it to a person or regarding a family situation? Thanks.

By: briank

briank — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:37:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing. It is interesting to see the extremes that offering abuse can take. Someone might think that transparency is a good thing (and normally it is indeed a good thing). But if offerings are SO transparent that individual offerings are published, the abuse is even worse.

I remember hearing that individual offerings used to be posted publicly on the walls of the Chicago UBF center. In Toledo UBF, we only posted Bible study and Sunday attendance numbers like that, on large billboards in the worship room (those have since been taken down and only the conference numbers are posted as such).

For many years, I was in charge of counting the offering and often produced offering reports. I was asked to create offering reports that listed every person’s offering in descending order on a regular basis. I would help analyze those reports and heard many discussions about who went up in their offering and who went down in their offering. Soon after those discussions, I would be in meetings where life direction was given. As I look back now, I think much of the new direction given to people was tied to their offering performance.

By: David Bychkov

David Bychkov — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 09:32:08 +0000

Hi Brian! I just want to say, that in Kiev we had pretty transparent offering accountability, for some people even extremely transparent. In fact everyone was given the list with detailed info about all incomes and outcomes. since 2007 detailed reports were not given to everyone, but everyone who gave offerings faithfully were able to see it anytime they wanted. I did it at least once. I could remember one time when we offered for some special needs and we didn’t use the money for that need for a while. I’m not sure what happened to them finally. That is not accusion – just one fact I can remember. But yes, other fact was that pretty often money were used in the way when it was mostly our director decision. Though for pretty long time missionaries offered pretty big part of all offerings.
One other thing which I can see regarding offerings, that often they were used for training purposes. That’s can be good or bad. When I mentioned above that someone didn’t like our transperent accounting – probably they did mostly b/c of using the size and faithfullness in offerings for honor/guilt/comparison etc. So it was easy to offer just before men with desire to escape guilt or to be honored.
And also we mostly offered for our UBF activities – conferences etc. The validity of this sacrifices also can be questioned. They could be God pleasing and could be not as well.