Grassley Investigation Update: When Is a Parsonage Not a Parsonage?

[DeSwiss]

Grassley Investigation Update: When Is a Parsonage Not a Parsonage?


Sarah Posner | The American Prospect - The FundamentaList | July 9, 2008


Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who is spearheading the Senate Finance Committee probe into the finances of six televangelists, released some preliminary results of the investigation Monday. All six of the television ministries he investigated, which all have church tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, maintain a complex web of financial transactions at home and overseas.

Grassley's statement didn't draw any conclusions about whether any of the ministries violated their tax-exempt status, but the committee's preliminary findings show how a complete lack of transparency or accountability requirements for churches has allowed these television ministries to mushroom into massive and profitable business operations -- tax free.

According to a statement from Grassley's office, there are almost 100 for-profit and not-for-profit entities related to the six churches, and the committee has not determined whether the churches violated tax laws by enriching themselves or their ministers through these companies. The committee is also looking into whether the churches are giving employees minister status so they can claim tax-free parsonage allowances and whether the televangelists are claiming parsonage allowances for multiple residences.

Also at issue: allegations that some of the ministries are intimidating whistleblowers -- especially troubling since ministry finances are legally shielded from public disclosure and so whistleblowers are a principal source of information about what goes on inside them.

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- All churches should be taxed. Period.
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DeSwiss


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[The_Casual_Observer]

1. This was one of the first scams that the evangelical church movement

took advantage of when they got the ball rolling in the early 80's. Everybody remotely connected was a minister of some kind or another.

[DeSwiss]

2. Hell....

...the whole she-bang is just a scam within a scam.

[Critters2]

3. Personally, I don't think anyone with less than an M.Div. should be considered a minister.

Real academic standards and third-party oversight. Anything less is religious quackery.

[Igel]

4. That may be, but lots of smaller denominations have

no seminary and would feel about as happy at going to a regular seminary as Wright (Obama's former pastor) would have been at going to Bob Jones University. So they train their ministers in-house, whatever that may entail.

The church I was in consisted of 500 people, and had two full-time ministers, a choir director, and two staffers. The ministers would each spend maybe 6 weeks a year visiting outlaying congregations, and otherwise pretty much put in 40-50 hour weeks most of the rest of the year.

I think they both had BAs from an unaccredited school--one that's now defunct, from a denomination that spawned a hundred splinter groups before finally dying. The denomination's doctrines are fairly non-standard--Xian, but they keep Passover and Pentecost, Day of Atonement and Feast of Tabernacles. No Xmas. And Pentecost is on a Monday, obligatorily. Adult baptism, and no eating pork or shellfish. When I left the church one minister was in his 60s, the other pushing 60. One's dead now, the other is in his mid 70s, and each of the ministers selected a replacement in his late 20s. I don't think either finished college, yet they do what they do full time.

That's good enough for me. It may be religious quackery, but it's what their congregation expects at this point. Two ministers isn't excessive, and they make their living being ministers.