By Oyewole Sarumi
The first article diagnosed a symptom while this second part must name the disease. The indiscriminate collection of money from the general public, from sinners, skeptics, scammers, and seekers, did not emerge in a vacuum. It has a genealogy, a theology, and a gallery of architects.
The Word of Faith movement and its prosperity preachers did not merely stumble into this practice; they built a doctrine around it, a doctrine that turns the altar of God into an investment desk and the gospel into a transaction. If the church is to recover a scriptural standard for giving, it must do more than close a few giving links. It must return to the Old Testament’s covenant logic, the New Testament’s grace logic, and the early church’s boundary logic, and it must be willing to name the wolves that have taught the flock to treat the Shepherd’s table as a marketplace.
THE OLD TESTAMENT ARCHITECTURE: TITHE, OFFERING, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE COVENANT PEOPLE
A common mistake among both prosperity preachers and their critics is to treat the Old Testament as a single, undifferentiated command to “give and get blessed.” The Hebrew Scriptures actually present a carefully ordered economy of giving, and its first mark is that it was addressed to Israel, the covenant people, not to the surrounding nations. The tithe was not a general religious fundraising appeal. It was a covenant obligation incumbent upon those who had been redeemed from Egypt and brought into the land of promise.
Deuteronomy 26 places the firstfruits and the tithe within a liturgy of covenant remembrance: the worshiper recites the story of God’s deliverance, acknowledges that the land itself belongs to Yahweh, and then presents the first yield as a tangible confession that “the LORD brought us out” and “gave us this land” (Deuteronomy 26:5–10). The offering was not a payment for services rendered; it was a response to a redemption already accomplished.
The Old Testament also distinguishes between the tithe, which was a structured covenant obligation, and the freewill offering, which was spontaneous, voluntary, and prompted by love rather than law. The freewill offerings of Exodus 35, when the people brought more than was needed for the tabernacle, were not extracted from them by threat or manipulation; they flowed from “a willing heart” (Exodus 35:5, 21, 29).
This distinction matters enormously for the present debate. The prosperity preacher who twists Malachi 3:10 into a universal law of “seed money” collapses the covenant particularity of the tithe, ignores the freewill character of true generosity, and turns the storehouse into a celestial vending machine. Malachi’s rebuke was addressed to a covenant people who had grown negligent in the support of the temple and its ministry; it was not a warrant for televangelists to solicit the silver of Babylon to fund private jets.
The third mark of the Old Testament economy is its boundary. The tithe and the offerings were brought by Israelites. The resident foreigner and the stranger were not commanded to fund the temple; indeed, the triennial tithe was partly for their relief, not their extraction (Deuteronomy 26:12–13). The temple was not a public charity collecting from the nations; it was the house of Yahweh, sustained by the obedience of the covenant community. When the church today opens its digital treasuries to the general public and markets its giving apps to anyone with a bank account, it is not reproducing the Old Testament pattern. It is inventing a new one, and that new one has no biblical warrant.
THE NEW TESTAMENT REVOLUTION: GRACE, NOT INVESTMENT
The New Testament does not simply repeat the Old Testament system; it transforms it. The coming of Christ has fulfilled the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system, and the giving of the new covenant people is now defined not by a percentage but by a Person. Paul’s great collection for the saints in Jerusalem, recorded in 2 Corinthians 8–9, is the fullest apostolic teaching on Christian giving, and it is striking how thoroughly it excludes the logic of the prosperity gospel. The Macedonians gave “out of their deep poverty” and “beyond their ability,” begging for the privilege of participating (2 Corinthians 8:1–5). Their giving was not a seed planted for a harvest of personal wealth; it was an act of grace responding to the grace of Christ, who “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Paul does not promise a financial return. He promises that God is able to make all grace abound toward the giver so that the giver may abound in every good work (2 Corinthians 9:8), the “return” is increased capacity for generosity, not increased cash flow.
The New Testament also insists that giving is voluntary, cheerful, and undirected by apostolic coercion. Paul explicitly says, “I do not say this as a command” (2 Corinthians 8:8), and he grounds the acceptance of the gift in the readiness of the will, not the pressure of the appeal: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). The prosperity preacher who threatens the congregation with the loss of blessing, the devouring of their finances, or the closing of heaven’s windows if they do not “sow a seed” is not operating in the apostolic register. He is operating in a different one altogether.
Most importantly, the New Testament collection was for the saints. Paul was not raising funds to build a monument to his own ministry or to sustain an apostolic lifestyle of luxury. He was collecting for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem (Romans 15:26; 2 Corinthians 8:4; 9:1). The early church’s giving was directed inward, toward the household of faith, and outward only in charity to the needy, not in solicitation from the world. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament, instructs believers to give to the prophets and the poor, and it warns against giving to every beggar without discernment (Didache 1:5–6; 13:3–7). Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians before the end of the first century, assumes a common fund administered by the church for the relief of the brethren. There is no trace of a general public appeal. The apostolic and sub-apostolic church understood that the treasury of the church was a sacred trust for the covenant community, not a collection agency for the world.
The PROSPERITY GOSPEL’S COUNTERFEIT: SEED FAITH, LUKE 6:38, AND THE SACRAMENTALIZATION OF MONEY
The Word of Faith movement, systematized by Kenneth Hagin in the 1960s and 1970s and propagated by Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Oral Roberts, and a host of televangelists, did not invent religious fundraising, but it did invent a theology that makes fundraising the central act of faith. The doctrine is often called “seed faith” or the “law of compensation.” The claim is simple and seductive: money given to God, which in practice means money given to the preacher or the ministry, is a seed that God is obligated to multiply back to the giver with interest. Oral Roberts stated it plainly: “Luke 6:38 says, ‘Give, and it will be given to you.’ We must first plant a seed of faith so that God can multiply it back to meet our need”. Robert Tilton called it the “Law of Compensation”; Kenneth Copeland calls it the “Law of Prosperity”. The giver is not a worshiper but an investor; the preacher is not a pastor but a fund manager; and God is not a Father but a cosmic paymaster bound by a contract.
This is a hermeneutical crime, and it must be named as such. Luke 6:38, in its context, is not about money at all. Jesus is speaking in the Sermon on the Plain about judgment, forgiveness, and generosity of spirit. The measure you use, whether mercy or condemnation, will be measured back to you. The verse is a call to be generous in forgiveness and non-judgmental love, not a guarantee of financial return on a donation. To wrench it from its context, attach it to an offering appeal, and use it to extract money from the poor is not exposition; it is manipulation dressed in a proof text. The same is true of Malachi 3:10, which was addressed to a covenant nation under the old administration and is now used to threaten New Covenant believers with a curse if they do not “tithe” to a particular ministry. The prosperity gospel’s doctrine of giving is built on a faulty motive—giving in order to get—whereas Jesus taught his disciples to give, hoping for nothing in return (Luke 6:35).
The theological error runs deeper than proof-texting. David W. Jones of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary outlines five errors of prosperity teaching: the Abrahamic covenant is treated as a means of material entitlement; the atonement is extended to include the removal of poverty; Christians are taught to give in order to gain material compensation from God; faith is redefined as a self-generated spiritual force; and prayer is turned into a tool to force God’s hand. At bottom, Jones argues, “the prosperity gospel is fundamentally flawed” because it turns the relationship between God and man into a quid pro quo transaction. If the prosperity gospel is true, grace is obsolete, God is irrelevant, and man is the measure of all things. This is not a minor theological disagreement. It is a different gospel, and the collection of money from sinners at crusades is its liturgical expression. The sinner is told that his money can purchase a blessing, and the church is told that the world’s money can fund the gospel. Both are lies.
THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES: WHAT THE SCANDALS SHOULD TEACH US
The user is right that the first article was too gentle with the historical record. The scandals of the televangelist era are not incidental embarrassments; they are the natural fruit of a theology that makes money the measure of faith. Jim Bakker’s PTL empire collapsed in the late 1980s amid charges of financial fraud and hush money. Jimmy Swaggart, who had publicly exposed Bakker’s sins, was himself exposed with a prostitute and later sued for defamation. Robert Tilton’s empire reaped an estimated eighty million dollars annually before an ABC investigation in 1991 alleged that prayer requests were tossed into the trash after the checks were deposited. Oral Roberts told his audience that God would “kill him” if he did not raise enough money. Kenneth Copeland’s personal net worth has been estimated in the hundreds of millions, with an eighteen-thousand-square-foot parsonage and a fleet of private jets. These are not isolated failures of character. They are the logical outcome of a system in which the giver is promised a return and the preacher is the broker of the transaction.
The early church faced its own temptations in this regard, and its instincts were the opposite of the prosperity gospel’s. When Simon the sorcerer tried to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit with money, Peter’s rebuke was severe: “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money” (Acts 8:20). The apostolic church would not sell the sacred for silver. The missionaries in 3 John refused to accept support from the Gentiles, “so that we may be fellow workers for the truth” (3 John 7–8). The refusal of pagan money was not a matter of pride; it was a matter of spiritual hygiene. To accept the world’s patronage is to enter into a relationship of obligation, and the church’s only obligation is to her Lord. The modern televangelist who displays his giving app on the screen at a crusade filled with unconverted people is doing the reverse of what the apostles did. He is not refusing the world’s money; he is courting it.
The Puritans understood this instinctively. Thomas Boston wrote that those to whom God has given substance are “his stewards, and have their orders from him to steward faithfully”. The steward does not own the estate; he manages it according to the master’s will. The master’s will is not that the household of faith be funded by the patronage of those who deny the master. Jonathan Edwards, preaching on the duty of charity, insisted that what is done to the poor is done to Christ, and that the rich are only stewards of what God has committed to them. The Puritan vision of giving was a vision of covenant community: the saints care for the saints, and the world is not asked to pay for the church’s mission. The prosperity gospel is a rejection of that vision, and the scandals are the evidence of what happens when the vision is abandoned.
RETRACTING THE PATH: A HERMENUTIC OF COVENANT BOUNDARIES FOR THE NEW COVENANT CHURCH
What would it look like to retrace the biblical path? The first step is to recover a hermeneutic of covenant boundaries. The church’s giving is an act of worship within the assembly of the redeemed, and its mechanisms should reflect that reality. This does not mean that a visitor who drops a bill into the plate should be interrogated. It does mean that the church’s public communication about giving should be directed to the saints, not marketed to the world. A giving link on a livestream should be accompanied by teaching that this is an opportunity for the church’s members to participate in the Lord’s work, not a general appeal for funds from anyone who happens to be watching. The pastor who preaches on stewardship should preach to the flock, not to the anonymous audience of the internet.
The second step is to recover the distinction between the church’s mission and the world’s patronage. The church’s mission is to make disciples, not to raise funds. If the church makes disciples, the funds will follow. If the church makes fundraisers, it may find that it has made neither disciples nor faithful stewards. The apostolic pattern is clear: the church is sustained by the voluntary, cheerful, faith-driven giving of God’s people. The church that trusts God will not be impoverished by refusing the world’s money. It may be smaller; it may be poorer by the world’s standards; but it will be pure. And purity, in the economy of God, is worth more than silver and gold.
The third step is to recover the courage to name false teaching. The prosperity gospel is not a harmless eccentricity on the margins of evangelicalism. It is a false gospel, and its giving doctrine is a false doctrine. It has captured the imaginations of millions, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and other regions where Pentecostalism is rapidly expanding. In Nigeria, where prosperity preaching has become a dominant influence on the mindset of many young people, the church must speak with clarity. The credibility of the gospel before other faiths is at stake. Muslims, skeptics, and secular observers watch the church’s money culture, and they draw conclusions about the God the church claims to serve. If the church’s God looks like a celestial ATM, the church has preached a different God.
THE ALTAR IS NOT A MARKETPLACE, AND THE GOSPEL IS NOT FOR SALE
As I round up this two-part series, I submit that the Old Testament storehouse was filled by the covenant people of God. The New Testament collection was gathered from the saints for the saints. The early church refused the patronage of the pagan world. The Puritans gave as stewards of a covenant community. The prosperity gospel has reversed all of this: it solicits the world’s money, promises the world’s blessings, and turns the pastor into a broker of blessings and the giver into an investor. The scandals are the fruit, and the shrinking credibility of the church is the cost.
The path back is not complicated, but it is costly. It requires pastors to trust God rather than the giving app. It requires churches to teach their members to give rather than to market giving to the world. It requires the courage to say to the televangelist and the prosperity preacher what Peter said to Simon: your money perish with you, for the gift of God is not purchased with silver. The Lord does not need the world’s money to build His church. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and He is not a fundraiser. Let the church give from hearts transformed by grace. Let the altar remain a place of worship. And let the world keep its money, for the church has something the world cannot buy and must never sell.
Prof. Sarumi, a disciple of Jesus Christ and teacher of the Word of God, writes from Lagos. Tel. 234 803 304 1421, Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com