DebbieAnn:
Aronold Murray does not disclose the finances of his church through an annually published budget, which details all salaries, compensation and expenses paid out from church funds.
So you, and other contributors, really don't with any certainty how the church monies are handled.
Please don't cite Wikipedia as a source as it isn't that reliable and at times misleading. And per its disclaimer information there has not "necessarily been reviewed by professionals with the expertise necessary to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information". Wikipedia therefore makes "no guarantee of validity." If you follow the linked discussion section you can see that this popular place on the Worldwide Web can become a venue for cranks and cultists who want to rant about someone or something they don't like.
Arnold Murray has been described as a racist, white supremacist and anti-Semite.
See [
www.splcenter.org]
Here are some expcerpts from the Southern Poverty Law Center Report about Arnold Murray.
Murray's 1958 minister's license was signed by the late white supremacists Roy Gillaspie and Kenneth Goff, two early ideologues of Christian Identity, a racist theology that's been popular among Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white nationalists for several decades. Most Identity adherents believe the Bible is the history of the white race, who are seen as the real "chosen people."
Despite these ties to the roots of the Christian Identity movement, Murray today publicly disavows racism, and his followers include a tiny minority of non-whites. Even so, Murray preaches often about a race of evil people, descended from Cain, borne out of "the Serpent Seed" of Eve's sexual union with Satan in the Garden of Eden. He calls them the "Kenites" and identifies them in his 1979 Shepherd's Bible as people "who slipped in among the Jewish people in Jerusalem and claim to be God's chosen people, when in fact they are of Lucifer." He also mentions that "in 1967 … Jerusalem fell to the Kenites during the 6 day war"; the Israelis, in fact, won the Six-Day War. In one sermon, Dennis Murray speaks of "the Kenites, who are responsible for the slaying of Christ." (In most Judeo-Christian traditions, the Kenites are a nomadic clan of Midianites and a tribe into which Moses married.)
The Serpent Seed is a belief ripped straight from the pages of "seedline" or "two-seed" Christian Identity theology, the hard-line version of the theology that holds that Eve was impregnated by Satan and gave birth to his son, Cain, described as the first Jew. That is, Jews are seen as biologically descended from Satan, and are allegedly hard at work preparing the earth for his rule. Identity adherents also argue that whites, not Jews, are the real Hebrews of the Bible, and that non-whites are sub-human "beasts of the field" created without souls.
Rarely does a month go by without the elder Murray warning his followers about the Kenites. "Bless your heart if you have ever been deceived by the Kenite, and I am speaking now on the spiritual level, if you have ever really believed that group was the chosen of God, you were deceived by Satan," Murray says in one popular audio tape sermon. "Repent of that even more so than your personal sins in the personal sense."
For their part, longtime Shepherd's Chapel students, seeking to avoid what they feel is Satanic deceit, believe they must learn how to "identify" a Kenite. On Internet forums where Shepherd's Chapel followers congregate, there is much debate over the racial identity of the Kenites. On a Shepherd's Chapel MySpace group, some ask whether the Kenites might be of Asian ancestry. But over on TheSeason.org, a long-running forum for Shepherd's Chapel students, there's little ambivalence. Numerous essays, citing the anti-Semitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, claim that the Kenites and the Jews have long plotted world domination.
Paul Stringini, a former Shepherd's Chapel student, told the Intelligence Report that Murray "promotes what I would call soft resentment against Jews." "He'll say he loves the Jews, it's the Kenites he doesn't like," say Stringini. "Just try and nail him down on it. There's a semantic game that goes on. Frankly, the only real 'benefit' which I have ever seen of knowing ‘who the Kenites are' is that knowledge makes many people prejudiced against Jews … assuming they are 'Kenites.' I know that is not explicitly what Pastor Murray teaches but that is what it does to many Shepherd's Chapel students I have known."
1997 complaint filed with the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcast media, argued otherwise. Shepherd's Chapel's broadcasts were one of the subjects of a complaint by former media company MediaOne (now part of AT&T) against Georgia's WNGM-TV in a dispute over market access. MediaOne alleged that "Shepherd's Chapel," then carried on WNGM-TV, "has purveyed racist dogma," citing claims by the program on Nov. 13 and 15, 1996, that "not all races can come from Adam and Eve," that "God created different races … and that's the way he wanted us to stay," and that the Biblical flood "was to destroy those [of different races] who had intermixed."