S4 E43 - TikTok, Baby Formula, and the Truth About Church Charity

A viral TikTok video accused Texas churches of ignoring a mother who “needed baby formula,” and the media ran with it. But almost nothing in that story holds up under basic scrutiny.

In this episode, The Tenth Man unpacks:

• Why calling megachurches only proves nothing
• How internet critics smear all Christians with a sample size of one
• The biblical difference between personal generosity and institutional obligation
• Why Jesus addressed individual hearts rather than creating a charity bureaucracy
• Luke 3:14, Matthew 19:16–22, Matthew 25:14–30, Matthew 6:19–21, Luke 12:16–21, and other key passages
• Why Judas and the money box warn us about centralized charity
• How churches handle fraud every week—and why her story raised red flags
• The massive, unreported charitable footprint of ordinary congregations
• My own parish’s Thanksgiving and Christmas outreach, told only because “let not your good be evil spoken of”
• Why SNAP dollars don’t magically “add to the economy”
• And how attacks on Christianity will ultimately strengthen the Church, not weaken it

A careful look at Scripture and common sense shows what the media refused to report:
 Jesus never commanded churches to give out whatever a stranger demands—but He does call every person to examine his own heart.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

0:11

A TikTok or shames churches for not giving her a baby formula. But this real story is not child hunger, but misunderstanding the Bible. And misrepresenting Christians today. On the 10th man, there's a story making the rounds fed to the public through TikTok,/ then laundered through newsrooms that already know which side they're on. A woman in Texas claimed she called a list of megachurches asking for baby formula. And they didn't give her what she demanded, and from that, the internet reached the entirely predictable conclusion. Christians don't help the poor. Churches are greedy. Tax the churches. The media never miss their chance to attack Christianity, even if they have to smear millions of believers based on a non-scientific stunt from a single creator. The data don't matter. What matters is the narrative. And the narrative is always the same Christians, bad institutions of faith, selfish, and the Bible, of course, is outdated. Well, today we're gonna walk through the actual story, the actual Bible and the actual responsibilities Christians hold. And along the way we'll discover the obvious truth, the media missed, and that is Jesus actually preached individual responsibility, not institutional guilt. And misunderstanding that as our TikTok friend did, will lead you to blame every church for her very flawed experiment. So what really happened? The woman targeted megachurches, but people then criticized every church. The entire viral event began with her making call to big churches. So not small congregations, and most churches in America are small. Fewer than a hundred people. So not these rural fellowships, but mega churches, institutions with layers of staff, policies, gatekeepers, and very real responsibilities to avoid fraud. Now, those differences are important, but not for the reasons you might think so. Sure enough, she pulled her stunt, she got exactly what you'd expect. People answering the phone. Who might be volunteers? People who had other responsibilities. A woman who's trying to get the bulletin done and, and make the new Sunday school teacher schedule people with limited hours. And they might have referred her to some other, some other number. They might have referred her to the food bank and they might have asked for verification of her identity and of her need, because every food pantry knows fraud is constant. But the internet took her footage and declared, well, all Christians are heartless and they don't care about hungry babies. And remember there was no hungry baby. So there her statistical sample size of only a few when there are thousands and thousands of churches, and especially her, including Joel Osteen, who has become a target. Now that became a moral indictment of millions of people, and that's just how the media operate. One megachurch declines to hand out formula over the phone. Suddenly your neighborhood church, your little congregation with sometimes with a few retirees only in attendance and no staff is accused of neglect. And a little bit of irony here. Uh, personally, I also disagree with the megachurch model. I think some other methods miss the point of the gospel and their budgets might raise an eyebrow. However, unlike our TikTok sleuth, I'm not in the business of judging how private citizens spend their private funds. It's their money. Those churches answer to their members and to God, not to TikTok. Now, if you're enjoying today's episode, take a moment to subscribe and tell a friend about the 10th Man word of mouth grows this show theoretically, and your support keeps these conversations alive. Now then, you know, Jesus never told anyone to build a church building. Man actually created the institution. Jesus never commanded us to build a food bank and hire staff members and operate a warehouse. Jesus preached to individuals. He called people to repentance. Jesus urged generosity of the heart, not committees of compliance and the formal church as a building. As an institution. That came much later, and because it is manmade, it is free to exist in many forms, and Christians debate which form it might take. And there are some churches who feed hundreds every week, and there are some that are just small fellowships, basically just a Bible study. Basically, they're just a book club where the book is the Bible. And the church building, if they even have one, it sits empty most of the week. Just open for Sunday services and maybe a Wednesday prayer meeting and know where does scripture command that any church must operate a food bank. And if anything, Jesus' own ministry suggests caution about institutionalizing charity. Remember the one disciple who demanded centralized control of the money box. That was Judas and John tells us bluntly that Judas kept, the person helped himself to what was put into it. Jesus trusted individual generosity far more than bureaucratic systems because systems attract people who love the purse more than the poor. His model was personal responsibility, not handing everything to a treasurer with sticky fingers. And the TikTok fraudster and she was a fraudster, just proves it. Here's another part that the media always miss. Christians also pay taxes that support food stamps because food stamps is what brought this whole story to light. And the same Christians being accused of not helping the poor pay the taxes that fund Snap wic. Free school lunches and subsidized groceries, and probably half of the Christians being blamed, sometimes more. They're voting for the very programs that the left, that the progressives, the Democrats demand. So you can't blame believers for poverty programs that they already support and they're already financing instead of criticizing. They should be happy that there's an entire community of people, Christians, people of faith who stand on their own two feet, and they help each other out rather than becoming a burden to outsiders as a group or as individuals. Now, as I said, the TikTok woman was a fraudster and she was treated as a fraud rightly so. Every food pantry knows this. The fraud is endless. People lie about need people hoard, people resell goods that were given to them. And this isn't an indictment of the, of the true poor, but this woman was responded to exactly how anyone would handle the call for the hundredth time. I'm a poor single mother. Please give me money. Well, churches are required both legally and morally to verify the need. Yeah, and she didn't comply. So that's not cruelty. That's just good stewardship. That's just good management. And Jesus himself taught that resources should never be idle or wasted. And we'll have more on that in a moment. Now, the thing about this woman's survey is it wasn't even scientific. It was engineered. She didn't do a random sample. She didn't do multiple denominations. She didn't use repeatable procedures and a side by side comparison with secular charities. A real woman in need would've gone to local food banks, to the diaper ministries, pregnancy centers. The WIC offices should've had us had enrollment in Snap and gone to the United Way. And how about checking with BLM or MAD or Lache? Those are all the things a real mother might do, and she didn't, so that just made her behaviors suspicious. Instead, she called megachurches, ignored the actual charitable infrastructure and generated exactly the video footage she intended to. Let's provide a little analogy. Imagine a driver whose gas tank ran dry at the edge of town. He walks to a farmhouse hat in hand explaining My car is a quarter mile down the road. Here's my driver's license. If I could borrow a gallon of gas, I'll return this evening with a full can. So. Everything aligns in this story. The location is specific. The need is verifiable. The request is a modest one, and the man volunteers proof. So most people, whether a farmer, a clerk, a church volunteer would help without hesitation. It's a real need, and I can relate this one to this one. I live on a main road and I have given people gas. Many times, probably five or six times over the years. Now contrast that with a man who knocks on the same door claiming he ran outta gas somewhere. Refuses to say where offers no identification and becomes defensive. The moment he is asked a basic question, then threatens to expose the farmer online for not helping someone in need. Well, he has not really provided a need. He has provided a performance and a responsible adult treats a performance differently from a genuine emergency. A loaded experiment produces a loaded outcome, and that's what all these social experiments have in common now about what Jesus actually taught. Jesus addresses individuals, not institutions. When people ask him how to live, he didn't say, form a nonprofit, build a distribution center, set up a social department. Instead, he said, for example, to the soldiers, be content with your wages. Earn your pay. They were told not to give away their belongings or start a charity or feel guilty about their profession. He said, do not extort money and be content with your wages. So work honestly, do your job. Don't abuse power. And that's practical morality, not institutional redistribution. Another example is what we call the rich young ruler who appears in Matthew 19 and also in Mark and Luke. And the synopsis of the story is that a wealthy young man asks Jesus how he could obtain eternal life. And Jesus says, obey the commandments. And. He says he already does this and in a boastful way, at least my interpretation. And he says, then what must I do to be perfect? Then Jesus gives him personally an additional challenge. Sell all that you have and give it to the poor and follow me. Now, people often cite this as instruction, as if it's for all of us ignoring the gist of the story. The young man did not do it. He walked away in sorrow. Now, Jesus didn't chase him down demanding compliance. Because this was a lesson as much as an instruction, because faith is voluntary, as is generosity. Enforce charity like food stamps is not charity at all. Now, Jesus does criticize wealth, but he criticizes idleness, not ownership. Let's just walk through a few. There's the Parable of the Talents. Now, Bible readers know this by the phrase, the Parable of the Talents, but we will just give you a summary. It's a parable, a story Jesus made up to tell us to, uh, to, to teach. And a master is going on a trip and he gives his three servants each a different sum of money to manage, and we call it talents because the talent was a measure of money in those days. And he gave one five talents, one, two talents and one, one talent. So they're, they're all given different sums of money. Two of them invest and double their funds. The third buries the money in the ground, and when the master returns, he condemns the one who hid it, and he praises the two who put theirs to productive use. They were praised or condemned based on what they did with their resources, whether the resources were small, medium, or large. It was the idleness that the was the villain, not the wealth itself. He did not criticize the one who doubled his five talents and made 10. He criticized the man who started with one and left with one. Another example is where Jesus warns do not lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt. Now I'm reading into this that Jesus warns about hoarding earthly possessions that decay over time. Now he's urging them to ev to invest into, in eternal purposes. Well, you do that by putting those resources to work the things that rust and our moth eaten are the things that are not being used. So again, it's not an attack on having possessions, it's an attack on stockpiling wealth, pointlessly, letting it rot without purpose or generosity. Now, people nowadays are attacking Elon Musk now, which is he doing? Is he stockpiling wealth pointlessly, or is he putting it to work? I think the answer to that is obvious. Another one is one we call the rich fool. This is in Luke chapter 12. Jesus tells a story about a rich farmer with a bumper crop, and instead of using his abundance wisely, he says, I'm gonna sit back and do nothing he says to himself, Soul, take thine ease, but the Lord appears from and says. Tonight, your soul shall be required of thee, and then whose shall these things be? I can still hear the voice of our old minister quoting that verse, but again, the issue is idleness and self-indulgence, not the mere fact. Of having wealth, the man was gonna build bigger barns just to admire them. He had no plan, no purpose, and no generosity, no productivity. His sin was stagnation. There is no biblical mandate that every congregation operates a food pantry. There is a mandate that individuals act responsibly and faithfully with what they have. And you know what? That Bible lesson applies to everybody, Christian or not. It's common sense and it's righteousness, and it's the gospel, and it applies to everyone, whether you believe it or not. Jesus made it unmistakably clear that his message begins with the individual heart and not with condemning others. In the Sermon on the Mount, he warns first, take the log out of your own eye. Then you can see clearly to remove the little speck from your brother's eye. And just one verse earlier, he says, judge, not that you be not judged, and Christians we're always being accused of judging. Well, we judge ourselves first, but who is judged more by the outside world than the Christian? The Christian being judged by the non-believer. And the point here is not moral blindness. It's moral priority. Every person must examine himself before indicting anyone else, and that's just common sense. Another battle cry is tax. The churches really, what are you gonna tax? There's no income to speak of many small churches. Most churches, they have no staff. If they do have staff, the staff gets a salary and that is taxed just like anyone else. But there's no business operations, just a building and a weekly meeting, are you gonna tax that? And people are always talking about the European example in Europe, the government taxes everyone and then funds the churches directly. That's the money going the opposite direction. Is that what the critics want? Somehow? I doubt it. And the, I give the example of the small churches, but the big churches, it's just the same thing. On a larger scale, they have a bigger meeting hall to meet in, and the preachers might get paid more. Well, okay. But that's their business, I suppose, if their job is saving souls and gathering them into the church, they're doing that. And another part that the TikTok stunt left out. And I offer this point reluctantly because Jesus taught that when we give our left hand should not know what our right hand is doing. And he praised the widow, the story of the widow's M. She slipped two small coins into the temple treasury without drawing a bit of attention to herself. And quiet generosity is the Christian. But scripture also says, let not your good be evil spoken of. And there comes a moment when silence allows a false picture to harden into truth. So without boasting, and clearly if we or I, any of us need to do more, then tell us where. But just to set the record straight, lemme tell you what was happening in my own parish the very day this TikTok story crossed my screen. As I was leaving from our daily services, I passed the fellowship hall where there were 20 or 30 bags of Thanksgiving groceries, Thanksgiving meal materials that we had gathered, packed, labeled, and they were STD in the fellowship hall for the needy of the neighborhood to come and and collect. Now, at the same time, that day, our clients were arriving in a completely separate ministry. For their weekly allotment of groceries from the town Food bank, that food bank, it's run by all the churches in town together, not just mine. It just happens to be operated out of a building on our grounds. But that building was remodeled, updated, and it's maintained by our men's group the same men's group, which is right now gathering winter clothing to give to the poor. This week, the fellowship hall is busting again this time with our local Christmas toys program and these activities. We're not boasting about'em. We're just saying that that is what we're doing, and if we need to do more, we will, but they're not unique. This is just ordinary American Christianity. This is what's happening all the time, every week, and it rarely goes viral, and I'm not sure all the people getting this stuff deserve it, but I support my church. And this is in addition to all the dollars we contribute just to keep the doors open and the lights on and our religious people clothed and fed. But the media can't monetize quiet generosity. So this talker just wasn't gathering information. She just wanted a result and she got it. Now one more economic truth. This came about when SNAP dollars were threatened. It's funny that the government shut down and the only thing people were worried about was whether the parasites were gonna get their money. But when that happened, people were starting to claim that SNAP adds to the economy. Snap creates economic growth, a dollar of SNAP funds. Creates a dollar 80 in economic activity. Well, we reject that. It's actually mathematically impossible because the dollar was taken outta the economy before it was put back in. A dollar spent by the original owner, puts money into the economy just as well as a dollar taken away and given to someone else, and there's no gain in GDP. There's a loss. Yeah, every hand that touched that dollar to hand it to the deadbeat could have been actually producing goods and services instead of providing money to somebody who doesn't work. But churches on the other hand, churches contribute billions annually to the economy through direct aid volunteer hours. The local economic activity, use of facilities for scouting groups and AA participating in community programs, supporting the youth, senior care, Economists have measured this repeatedly, and the footprint is enormous. The impact is real, but none of that fits into a 62nd narrative to accusing Christians of hypocrisy. These attacks on Christianity, they're nothing new. The attacks come in waves, usually from people who misunderstand scripture and misrepresent believers, and yet here's the miracle. Every attack has only made the church stronger from the Roman Coliseum to TikTok. Hostility has refined us, not destroyed us. It's clarified the message and purified the mission, and it has reminded believers that faith is not a trend. Christian faith is the backbone of Western civilization because Christians are feeding the poor. That's a Christian value. It comes from Jesus, not from the Democrats. So if TikTok wants to take a swing at Christians, let them swing. History shows who wins, and that is the real message today. The power of Christianity is not in its buildings or its budgets, but in its truth.