John Alexander Dowie's Tithing Scheme

Though the tithing system was part of the Old Covenant Law and was not part of the early Christian communities, many Pentecostal churches teach their members that they must give ten percent of their earnings to the church. Some of them teach that tithe should be given to the pastor, not the church, giving Pentecostal ministers a very appealing salary. For every ten members in the congregation with a job, the minister has a full salary for giving one to three speeches a week. A hundred people mean that the “shepherd” gets ten times the salary of the “sheep” he is fleecing.

This has become so commonplace today that even ministers with good intentions will defend the ten percent tithe doctrine — ignoring the fact that the system is in no way similar to the Old Covenant tithe that was replaced in the New Covenant. It was not, however, always commonplace. Before the Azusa Street revival, the most notable churches practicing the ten percent scheme were religious cults and other groups that did not accept or understand the New Covenant.

In 1899, newspapers in Los Angeles were made aware that John Alexander Dowie had implemented the scheme in his church. One reporter noted that Dowie had copied the “Mormon tithing fund”. Under the headline “Dowie the Faith Healer: How He Makes Thousands of Dollars from His Dupes”, reporters exposed the scheme as the work of a con artist.

Dowie’s deep influence on modern Pentecostalism caused the doctrine to quickly spread throughout the United States, Africa, and other countries around the world in Pentecostal churches. The con was spread even further when Branham spread the doctrine through the Healing Revival under the mentoring of Dowie cut elder F. F. Bosworth and swindler Roy E. Davis.

You can learn this and more on william-branham.org.

John Alexander Dowie:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/john_alexander_dowie
https://www.amazon.com/dp/173516092X

Newspaper quote:
Dowie the “Faith Healer”: How He Makes Thousands of Dollars from His Dupes. 1899, Aug 18. Los Angeles Times. “While Dowie was tramping across the country in 1889 he stopped long enough in Salt Lake City to pick up a few ides of the Mormons, one of them being that every Mormon must, to be sinless and in good standing with his church, contribute one-tenth of his income to the church. This was called the tithing fund. When Dowie launched his Zion scheme and became the inspiration of his large tabernacle in Michigan avenue he Laso established the tithing fund. He said it was worth 10 per cent.”