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Ever since I created this blog over four years ago, I’ve had numerous people tell me that I should sell merchandise or have a donate button or something. Basically, a way to make money from this ministry. But I have been heavily against it, because Paul says not to make a profit from the Bible. Here, here, and here. I’m sure that there are other instances, but I found those by literally searching “profit” on Bible Gateway and scrolling through the results.
But over the last few months, I’ve had a few people tell me that I misunderstood what Paul was talking about. I even submitted a question to Got Questions, which I’ve linked to several times on this site. This was their response:
There are some scriptural principles that may be helpful in making your decision. Obviously, people are paid to teach and preach. 1 Tim. 5:17 tells us that elders are worthy of double honor – respect and monetary compensation. 1 Peter 5:2 tells us that the same group of people, the elders, are not to minister for sorbid gain. Meaning they are not to be greedy for money. They are to minister eagerly for the purpose of helping people grow in Christ not for money. I hope these two verses help.
So I guess I misunderstood what Paul was talking about? Anyway, the thing I did that is the reason I’m making this post is that I started a Patreon for this ministry. For those who don’t know, Patreon is a site used by creators to receive support from their fans. It’s mostly used by YouTubers, but I’ve seen other people using it. It’s different from setting up a PayPal donate button in that you can set up recurring payments if you want. Plus, there are perks for the patrons.
I’ve set up three tiers of perks:
$1 – You get access to the Fig Tree Reborn Discord server (yeah, I made a new one, and I’ll discuss that below)
$5 – You get the Patreon flair on Reddit when on the Fig Tree Reborn subreddit. (plus access to the Fig Tree Reborn Discord server)
$10 – With this tier, you’ll be able to have a private conversation with me (the creator of Fig Tree Reborn) about anything biblical. I tend to get passionate when discussing the Bible, and my friend and church family tell me that I make them think about things they’d never noticed before. We can do this however you like (Skype, Facebook, phone call, smoke signal, etc….plus you still get the Patreon flair on Reddit and access to the Fig Tree Reborn Discord server)
About the Discord server…
If you read this post you’ll know that I had a Discord server for this site one, but if you read this post, you’ll know that I had to delete it because it had been overrun by nonbelievers as a base of operations to troll other Christian sites. Well, the only reason I made a new one is because of the Patreon page. It gives you the option to connect your Discord account and have a patron-only server. Meaning that you can only access it by being a patron. That should hopefully prevent what happened last time.
I’ll end this by stating that donating is entirely optional, and I’m only doing this to help cover the cost of running the site. I’m hoping to do more with this site, and in order to do that I’ll need the paid version of WordPress, which isn’t cheap. I might consider doing merchandise at a later date, but I’ll worry about that if anyone is interested.