A Mecklenburg County church collected more than $250,000 to help the federal government decrease its budget deficit. But church members say they can't do it alone.
``We were not naive enough to think that we could do much by ourselves,' said Sam McGee, a leader at Shiloh True Light Church of Christ in Mint Hill.``It's got to go nationwide,' said Rommie Purser, the elder and minister of the church. The planned donation to the government is contingent upon other churches joining the effort.
The decision to chip away at the government's $3.12 trillion deficit came at the congregation's first-Monday business meeting this month, when members voted unanimously to set aside the next Sunday offering to be applied toward the federal deficit.
It has been a considerable turnaround for True Light believers to suddenly be giving money to save the government. For close to 120 years, ever since a man named Cunningham Boyle founded the first True Light church near Florence, S.C., True Light people tried to avoid the government.
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They paid their taxes and obeyed the laws - at least, the laws that didn't conflict with what they saw as God's law - but they didn't get involved with politics and they didn't vote.
That changed in the election two years ago.
Shiloh members registered, and close to 90 percent of them voted, McGee said.
That's quite a change for the church, which the Mecklenburg County government took to court almost 20 years ago to try to force it to send members' children to the public schools rather than educate them at home as the members wanted to do. The church won.
The U.S. Department of Labor took church members to court three years ago to make them stop a vocational-training program for their children, a program the government said violated child-labor laws. The government won.
And county police officers came to the church just last month and took a member away in handcuffs. The man was having mental problems, and church members were taking care of him themselves until county social-services officials decided that he should be committed to the mental-health center in Charlotte.
A judge later turned the man loose.
But the government has never interfered with Shiloh True Light Church's right to worship as it pleases, and that's what's important, Purser said.
Now, in this ambitious undertaking to create a movement among America's churches to help pay off the deficit, they recognize that the odds are against them. For one thing, Shiloh is a church by itself.
There are no other True Light churches to help spread the word.
If the movement fails to attract the billions of dollars necessary to make it successful, Shiloh will still have its quarter-million dollars, plus interest, Purser said.
