Christmas Joy versus the Kirkenstoyer.

Kirkenstoyer is a German word for church tax.

Noel and I spent the years Church Tax.

Noel and I spent the years 1971 to 1974 studying in Munich, Germany, and one of the controversies that I got caught up in in a very minor way was the controversy over the church tax in Germany.

There are two state churches in Germany, the Lutheran Church and the Catholic Church, and each is supported

by a church tax.

Everyone who is baptized as a Lutheran or a Catholic, and that's almost everybody because the free churches are very small,

pays automatically out of their income a tax which the government collects for the churches unless they are underage, disabled, or retire.

In 1970, the amount of that money that each of these people paid was 8% of their income tax.

In addition to this, they collect free will offerings as well. But the free will offerings in Bavaria, the southern state of Germany in which we resided in 1970 amounted to about 60 cents per person per year.

So most of the expenses for the churches in Germany, the two large churches, are covered by the church tax.

Now the leaders in the Lutheran church

with which I was studying at the time

are very much aware of the problems with this system.

But they believe that there are more problems created by a free-wheel system than by their own.

Here's a quote from an official publication from 1970 that explains

the position. But when the church is financed through free will gifts, the danger is much greater that the

proverb will come true the one who gives the pay has the say.

The church would be in danger as for example in the USA of doing and

saying what would please the wealthy and that would limit the freedom of the church

and weaken its ability to reprove and correct the state and society."

Now that's a good warning to us people in the United States, I think, because it is true that in every volunteer organization, the leadership is constantly tempted to compromise principle in order to kowtow to the wealthy contributors, isn't it?

...