Pastors from several counties attended a church legal and tax issues workshop on Thursday in The Woodlands hosted by the Montgomery County Pastor Council and supported by HAPC as well as TXPC communications.  It was outstanding information that covered critical IRS standards of pastoral employment and compensation planning, changes in those standards, how to protect both pastor and church in regards to employment policies and also property tax issues impacting both churches and individuals.

Christian attorneys Mike Riddle (husband of State Rep. Debbie Riddle) and Karen Akiens of the Riddle, Butts & Akiens law firm provided two sessions covering the pastor/church compensation arrangements and former Harris County Tax Assessor/Collector Paul Bettencourt covered extensive information on specific examples of churches vulnerability to taxing jurisdictions without sound planning. Paul is now founder and President of Bettencourt Tax Advisors.  North Central Assembly of God, (Larry Emerson, Senior Pastor) also helped sponsor the workshop.

   
                           Paul Bettencourt                                                           Mike Riddle

I believe it necessary to continue the commentary from last week titled "When the wicked rule," because there are vital essentials that pastors and the church in general must "own" if we are to change the spiritual, moral, cultural and political direction of our nation. The key is not focusing solely on the wicked rulers, but rather the fact that they have collectively been granted authority by the people.

To clarify, the Hebrew word used in Proverbs 29:2 ("when the wicked beareth rule …") is "rasha" (pronounced "raw-shaw") and is used 260 times in the Old Testament, describing legal wrongdoing according to God's standards, not man's. Another key illustration using this word is:

They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. (Prov. 28:4)

Going back to biblical commentator Matthew Henry, he explains this passage in relation to how the "righteous" are to respond when evil deeds, wicked behavior and related consequences are elevated:

Those that do indeed make conscience of the law of God themselves will, in their places, vigorously oppose sin, and bear their testimony against it, and do what they can to shame and suppress it. They will reprove the works of darkness, and silence the excuses which are made for those works, and do what they can to bring gross offenders to punishment, that others may hear and fear...

If you want to know where the future is headed, look where the people are going. And if you want to know where the people are going, check with U-Haul. Here’s an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900.

Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There’s a reason for this.

“Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance?” asks Laffer, who studied the issue for a detailed economic report, Rich States, Poor States. “What seems obvious to us appears as right-wing science fiction to many California legislators and pundits.

They claim that serious reform of the tax code is unrealistic, that a large state has many duties to fulfill, and that it is irresponsible to call for a return to a 19th century view of the role of government. . . . Not only does Texas lack a highly progressive income tax — it doesn’t have one at all! We hasten to add that the last time we checked, Texas still had literate kids, navigable roads and functioning hospitals, which one would think impossible given the hysterical rhetoric coming from defenders of California’s punitive tax system. In fact, the Texas success story illustrates everything we have been recommending for California all these years. How do they do that?”

How, indeed?

Texas was among the last states to enter the recession. California is expected to be the last state to leave it. Texas has lots of jobs and not much in the way of taxes. California, the other way around. California has Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood Republican who presided over enormous expansions of spending and debt. Texas has Rick Perry, a classic conservative hard case who just vetoed a pre-kindergarten spending bill, adding to the record number of vetoes he’s handed down as governor. And it’s not just Perry — the story of Texas politics is full of Democrats who would have been too right-wing to be elected as Republicans in Connecticut or Pennsylvania. Things are a little different down south of the Red River...

In 1996, Samuel Huntington's highly influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order appeared. The old lines of conflict between Marxist ideology and Western, democratic capitalism, he argued, were receding. They were being replaced by a new and different set of tension points. These would not be ideological any longer but, rather, civilizational. Central to these conflicts would be religion.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Huntington's words seemed to have been eerily prescient. Islamic fanatics did indeed declare war on the "Christian" West, taking aim at its symbolic sources of power. But while his thesis seemed to be prescient from one angle, it was strangely out of touch from another. The West is "Christian"? That is hardly the case, regardless of how elastically we understand the word Christian. Today, most of Europe has been denuded of any Christian presence. It is only the empty churches and cathedrals that remind us of what was once there. Much the same is true of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In all of these countries, church attendance of any kind, on any given Sunday, hovers only between 2 percent and 5 percent of the population. It is, in fact, outside the West that Christian faith is growing, at least numerically, not inside the West. It is burgeoning in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia.

In the United States, attendance at church is better than in other Western countries. It is not in the 40 percent to 50 percent range that Gallup and other pollsters have routinely reported over the years, but somewhere closer to 20 percent when we find out who actually attended rather than how many told the pollsters that they attend. But even if, in this respect, Christian faith is doing a little better in the United States than in Europe, it is still struggling to sustain itself in the midst of this highly complex, modernized culture, one which is technological and affluent in its form and postmodern in its mood...