A miracle every Sunday

Ask and you shall receive, Jesus said.

IThis is probably not exactly what he had in mind, but I blogged yesterday about a dearth of news on Pentecostals and behold, in this morning's Chicago Tribune a story about a Pentecostal minister who allegedly stole $180,00 from his church by skimming $1,000 a week from the collection.

A local Catholic priest was indicted as well, but for only $32,000--he reportedly took only $100 a week.

Giving that it really is easy to embezzle from churches it really is a miracle that this doesn't happen more often.

Consider this. In US Catholic parishes, a little over a billion dollars on average is collected each week. I don't have statistics for Protestants, but let's say it's another billion. That's 2 billion collected every week, counted by volunteers, and put in the bank, and very little of it--$1,000 here, a $100 there--goes missing.

Now that's what I call a miracle.