Small Church Gives 100 Percent of Tithe to Needy for a Year

Simply passing the collection plate during Sunday services in order to help meet the budget was not good enough for the leaders of a small church in Mississippi.

So two years ago, the pastor and leaders of Traceway Baptist Church in Clinton began to pray about how to better serve their community. After two months of praying and fasting, they decided they needed to take all of their congregation's tithes and offerings and give it to those in need for an entire year.

"At the end of 2009 our leadership was praying and trying to figure out how we could better represent Jesus Christ in our community," Pastor John Richardson told The Christian Post. "Essentially, our prayer was 'God, what can we do so that when people look at us they will see you?'

"The more we prayed the more we felt like God was saying, 'If you want to show me to the communities, then become generous because I am generous,'" Richardson explained. "The way that we interpreted that was that we were to give away all our tithes and offerings for an entire year."
Just 50 people, many of them transient in nature, regularly attend the six-year-old Traceway Baptist Church. Yet, from April 2010 to April 2011, the church was able to give away $60,000 to people in the community that were hurting in many ways, said Richardson, who has written a book on the story and subject of generosity called Giving Away the Collection Plate (June 2012).

"Everything that was given to our church in the offering plates was given away to abused mothers that got out of bad situations basically with the clothes on their backs, or people that were trying to break free from addiction, or people that had lost jobs or facing foreclosures, or had extreme medical bills, or anything like that," he said.

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