God DOES NOT NEED YOUR MONEY and in full transparency neither does connected church. Your investments are welcome, but if what we are doing is truly God's work, provision will be made available for us to continue to do this work.
Why giving is such a challenging and controversial issue in the church:
1. We are accustomed to giving money to causes where we believe our financial support can do some real good and if we were to remove the "Godly obligation" to give from many of our churches they would not be places we would necessarily support financially
2. What does it mean to be a church member and what benefit do I derive from being a member
3. Many leaders don't want to have to maintain a separate full time job in addition to ministry
4. The love of money

Where did tithing come from?
The modern church has only been teaching tithing in America for 100 years or so, however in all our teaching, Christians are no more generous toward the church today than they were 100 years ago. During the great depression Christians gave about 2.6% of their income in 2006 when Christian were more than twice as wealthy are we were in the 1940's guess how much we gave to church…2.6% Christians are getting the message of giving because it is being taught wrong. So let's with the origin of tithing. To be clear this is not a teaching where I am making the case that giving is not necessary. In fact the opposite we when get finished I am going to make the case that tithing doesn’t go far enough.