FBC Jax Watchdog series on FBC Dallas building program

The church watch weblog FBC (for First Baptist Church) Jax (for Jacksonville) Watchdog is doing a series on the building program at First Baptist Church Dallas, home of Robert Jeffress. The first installment is here. For those of you who don't follow the goings-on at other churches, FBC Dallas has embarked on a building program in downtown Dallas, and is asking churchgoers to give $140 million.

chairman Ronnie Floyd is telling us that to fund this GCR the money is in the "pockets and portfolios" of the church members - we see that one of the SBC's most historic churches is asking for its members to not dig into their "pockets and portfolios" to fund more missions, but to give 10% or more of all "personal assets" to build a $140 million dollar campus downtown

This of course gives us one piece of a puzzle that arose when religion reporter Frank Lockwood noted that this breaks down to $40,625 per worshiper: the executive management of FBC Dallas don't think of the rank and file as being you know, ordinary middle-class Americans making four to five hundred thousand dollars a year. They instead see the people in their church as the sort of people who have a spare forty thousand dollars stashed in their retirement funds, or mattresses, or what-have-you.

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