Potentially, yes there can be some conflict of interest. But in a healthy congregation, the pastor should not be the central decision maker about budget and spending and a healthy church should be a giving church. I do know churches that were unhealthy and the pastor controlled the money, knew what everyone gave and abused the information.

I like my pastor’s standard line “I don’t care where you give, I care that you give.”

that was a powerful story in the video.

Romanian video. If you had any desire to watch it today, go to the bookstore and buy Robert D. Kaplan’s ” Balkan Ghosts” and “Eastward to Tartary.” They are both required reading to understand the region. You will have to go deeper than your normal daily Facebook and Twitter reading. Oh yes: It may surprise you that the culture that fomented Communism was directly related to that created by the Eastern Orthodox Church. No current books will dare touch this truth. Only those written during and right after the Bolsheviks came to power do - from Russian and Balkan authors.

“Does anyone else see the potential conflict of interests when pastors teach that their church should give (to their church)?”

There’s a huge danger there. But it didn’t stop the apostles. I guess that’s just another reason why pastors need to be unassailable in their integrity, per scripture.

What a powerful video. The man in the blue shirt and suspenders sitting in front of the piano I believe is Nicolae Moldoveanu. He wrote thousands of hymns for the Romanian church including several hundred while in prison where he had no writing utensils or paper. I wish they identified the others. Thanks for posting!

http://trevinwax.com/2011/04/25/break-my-plans-a-tribute-to-nicolae-mold…

“Although the article doesn’t mention wagons, I assume (from documentaries/news reports) that they use them. I wonder if they own them, and if they do, how is a philosophical difference from owning a car maintained? After all, wagons were once high-technology; how far back do they go to define technology?”

I think you need to reread the article and try to understand the Amish on their own terms, rather than trying to figure out why every one of their choices is or isn’t objectionable to you. In reference to your specific question, wagons don’t travel fast, aren’t practical for the kinds of distances people commonly travel with cars (i.e. hundreds of miles in a day) and don’t let you run hither and thither at the drop of a hat, but do facilitate the movement of cargo over short distances when necessary.

As for the “works” thing, yes, sadly, their religion is frequently works-oriented. But if you try to look at things from their perspective, their attempts to fit things into a community-based, nurturing lifestyle are not *necessarily* any more works-oriented than your, or my, choices to operate our lives and our families in certain ways rather than others. They are just coming from a different starting point.

There are many reasons to criticize Amish theology and the lifestyle assumptions that flow out of it. But we don’t need to “pile” on by imposing assumptions about why they do what they do, or operating from a “legalistic and hypocritical until proven guilty” stance when observing them. “You people are funny-looking legalistic hypocrites” really isn’t the way to think about people if we’re ever to have a chance to reach them with the gospel of grace — especially when we could learn a thing or two about not letting technology rule our lives from them.