Sunday, March 13, 2011

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Yeah, so....you may notice a certain lovely rose-bedecked logo has just been removed from my widgets list (or whatever you call the right-hand section of the page where various do-hickeys go).

I worked faithfully for a year and a half to get my local church's missions committee to partner with a certain outreach/mercy ministry in Bulgaria. For the last year and 3 months, we've been supporting the mission monthly. We found out last week that the US director (who lives about 20 minutes from our church) never wired them the thousands of dollars of support money which our church sent for the mission.

Want to hear the funniest part?

Apparently the Christian philanthropist who was sitting on the money was embarrassed at being caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, and accused me of a "violation of privacy". My offense? Giving his unlisted telephone number to the church treasurer, so he could find out where all the money disappeared.

I swear I am not making this up.

So if I don't blog much in the near future, you'll have to excuse me. The longer I live, the less edifying things I see in the weird, wild world of Christiandom.

6 comments:

Glenn E. Chatfield said...

Talk about your upside-down world!!!! You violated his privacy????? Isn't what he is doing with the money illegal? We are going down hill faster each day.

Marie said...

I would have to say unethical, immoral, and quite possibly illegal. Yet we would have settled for a simple apology -- which was not forthcoming.

Lots of excuses and justifications (personal tragedy 1 1/2 years ago + business in other areas = inability to make a wire transfer in 15 months, or reply to a single e-mail); but no apology.

Yep. And this unmitigated gall comes from a fellow Christian...can you imagine what a non-Christian might have pulled?

It seems lately I am literally being attacked from all sides! I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or not -- the fact that the Enemy seems to be working overtime on me. (Insert tongue firmly in cheek here). Fortunately, I'm just Irish enough that I will cling to God, in spite of these attacks. As the church treasurer just e-mailed me: "Shake it off, and keep looking upward/forward". Good advice!

laurie said...

You gotta watch it, many who claim to be Christian aren't what they say they are. I had a 'Christian' elderly lady who is a resident in the nursing home I work at scream at me, telling me I am not what I claim to be, calling me a hypocrite; why? Because I did not fix her blankets properly!
Maranatha!
Lyn

Anonymous said...

I am so sorry to hear that! Bad "religious" people are worse than bad regular people. I guess we shouldn't be surprised by the fake / worldly Christians who could do such a premeditated thing, but it is galling to hear it.

Glenn E. Chatfield said...

My wife says Christians can often be much more dangerous to you than unbelievers! There are things we expect from the pagans, yet shock us when it comes from believers. This should not be.

Marie said...

Jill is right...Christians are better at being passive aggressive and playing the martyr when they are exposed as frauds, as was the case here.

In retrospect, I suppose the fact that no receipts were sent for any of the 16 charitable donations should have been a tip-off that we were being scammed. Or perhaps the deafening silence each time I requested ministry updates. If it had occurred to me Sunday (when I went on the church's behalf to re-coup the money we sent him), I would have asked how long he expected us to keep sending him thousands of dollars, with absolutely no accountability.

How DARE we question him?!? The arrogance of this individual is simply staggering.

NEVER send money to a Christian ministry not registered with the ECFA.