Every spring, as Passover approached, pilgrims came to the Temple in Jerusalem to obey God. The law required each Jewish man to give a half-shekel to the Temple (Exodus 30:13). It also required sacrifices without blemish (Leviticus 22:20), so the Temple courts had tables to serve them.

Money changers converted pilgrims’ money into the approved currency and added a surcharge to each exchange (Mishnah Shekalim 1:3, 1:6). Sellers offered approved animals in the approved place.

Jesus walked in, overturned the tables, and drove the sellers out.

“Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17, ESV).

In John’s account, he says,

“Do not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:16).

He called the Temple “my Father’s house.” He paid the Temple tax himself (Matthew 17:24–27). His anger fell on what had grown up around the worship: a market built on a religious obligation, run by men who controlled both the obligation and the market. The outer court was the only place in the Temple where people from various nations could pray. Trade filled the area built for another purpose.

The house of Annas

Annas, the man at the center of the Temple’s economy, was high priest from AD 6 to 15. Rome removed him from office, but he never lost control. Five of his sons became high priest after him, and so did his son-in-law, Caiaphas (Josephus, Antiquities 20.9.1; John 18:13). Luke dates John the Baptist’s ministry “during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas” (Luke 3:2), as if two high priests served at once. In practice, they did. When the soldiers arrested Jesus, they took him first to Annas, who held no office at all (John 18:13).

The Jewish people remembered those families bitterly. A lament preserved in the Talmud names each of them, including “the house of Hanin,” the Hebrew form of Annas, and states the complaint:

“For they are High Priests and their sons are treasurers and their sons-in-law are trustees and their servants beat the people with staves” (Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 57a).

High priests, treasurers, trustees. One family held the religious office, the money, and oversight.

A generation later, the historian Josephus wrote of the high priest Ananias, whose servants went to the threshing floors and seized the tithes owed to the ordinary priests,

“so that some of the priests, that of old were wont to be supported with those tithes, died for want of food” (Antiquities 20.9.2).

God provided the tithe to feed the priests who served. The men who controlled it took the provision, and God’s servants went hungry.

Good men inside

Some members of the ruling council were honest men. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and “a ruler of the Jews,” came to Jesus “by night” to ask him questions (John 3:1–2), and later insisted the council give Jesus a fair hearing (John 7:50–51). Joseph of Arimathea was “a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their decision and action” (Luke 23:50–51). Gamaliel urged the council to restrain itself (Acts 5:34–39).

They believed in the law and gave their lives to it. Most people who served in the Temple believed they were serving God, and many of them were. What they missed, until someone made them look, was what the system around them had become.

Rules that defeat the law

Jesus saved his sharpest words for the rules. The Pharisees and scribes kept an elaborate body of oral teaching, “the tradition of the elders,” meant to show people how to keep God’s law in daily life (Mark 7:3). Over time, the tradition grew until it could be turned against the law it was written to serve.

He gave an example. God commanded a man to honor his father and mother, which included supporting them in old age. The tradition let a man declare his money Corban, “given to God,” and once he said the word, his duty to his parents was gone.

“You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men,” Jesus told them, “thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:8–13).

The commandment stayed in the scroll. The rules made it impossible to keep.

He named the inverted priorities that come with such a system:

“You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23).

The small, countable things were counted with care, and the things that mattered were left undone. He named the cost, too. The scribes “devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers” (Mark 12:40). In the next verses, a poor widow puts her last two coins into the Temple treasury (Mark 12:41–44).

What the church was given to do

Jesus gave the church its mission in two parts.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20).

He also commanded them,

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).

The early church never separated the two. When the widows were overlooked in the daily food distribution, the apostles appointed seven men “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” to oversee it, so they could keep preaching (Acts 6:1–6). The food and the word came from the same people, in the same name. James put it plainly: a brother or sister in need who hears only “go in peace, be warmed and filled” has been given nothing (James 2:15–16). Jesus put it even more plainly:

“I was hungry and you gave me food” (Matthew 25:35).

The world noticed. In AD 362, the emperor Julian, who was trying to restore Rome’s pagan religion, complained in a letter to one of his priests that “the impious Galilaeans support not only their poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us” (Letter to Arsacius). The church fed people, cared for the sick, took in orphans, and told everyone why. Charity was its witness.

That is the birthright: the deed and the word, carried out by the church, in Christ’s name.

The market today

Over the past century, the church has handed piece after piece of that work to systems run on someone else’s money and someone else’s rules. Each handoff looked sensible. Each brought resources the church lacked. Each time, outside money brought outside rules with it.

Food. The church pantry began in the church basement, run by volunteers who knew the people they served by name. Today, a pantry that wants federal food under The Emergency Food Assistance Program, TEFAP, gets it through its regional food bank, signs the food bank’s partner agreement, follows its rules, and often pays its fees. In fiscal 2025, Northern Illinois Food Bank took in $6.1 million from its pantries for food it sold them and a “shared maintenance” charge on donated and purchased food (audited financial statements).

Federal rules forbid “explicitly religious activities,” defined as “worship, religious instruction, or proselytization,” as part of the distribution. The USDA’s own guidance says leading people in prayer at the start of a distribution is unacceptable, and so is putting a gospel tract in the bag (USDA policy memo FD-142).

Any religious activity must be offered “separately, in time or location,” from the distribution (IDHS TEFAP Distribution Site Manual, FY2027). The manual also requires USDA food to be “combined with donated and purchased food for each distribution,” so the church’s own food must go out under the same rules. The church may still feed people. The gospel waits upstairs.

Children. As I documented in Jacob’s Side of the Table, churches once housed a large share of the nation’s child care, and today someone else runs most of the programs left under a church roof. A church that leases its classrooms to a commercial chain turns over the curriculum, hiring, and almost all of a child’s day to the tenant, keeping only a few minutes for a Bible lesson.

Orphans. When Illinois recognized civil unions in 2011, Catholic Charities agencies in several dioceses that had placed foster children for decades under state contracts lost those contracts, because they would not place children with same-sex couples. The ministry had come to depend on state funding, and the state’s terms ended the ministry. In Philadelphia, Catholic Social Services had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep serving foster children on its own convictions. It won (Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 2021).

Strangers. For decades, six of the nine national agencies that resettle refugees in the United States were religious, and the federal government paid them per refugee placed. Ministries that began as welcome in Christ’s name became contractors measured by placements.

The structure. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Supreme Court set a test for government aid to religious institutions. Two years later, applying that test in Hunt v. McNair (1973), it held that aid is suspect when it flows to an institution “in which religion is so pervasive that a substantial portion of its functions are subsumed in the religious mission.” In Bowen v. Kendrick (1988), the Court carried the same caution into federal social-service grants.

Church agencies seeking government funding faced pressure to keep the faith out of the funded work, and many created separate affiliates to receive it.

In 2000, four justices wrote that the “pervasively sectarian” doctrine was “born of bigotry” and “should be buried now” (Mitchell v. Helms), and in 2022 the Court abandoned the Lemon test altogether (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District). By then the affiliates were built.

Many of the best-known Christian social service agencies in the country carry a church’s name and run largely on government contracts. The name stayed. The government set the terms.

None of these began as corruption. Each began with real need and good people. But the pattern repeats: outside money, outside rules, the gospel moved to another room, and success measured by what can be counted.

The modern Temple

The food system shows the whole pattern in one place.

The circle of seats. Kate Maehr is chief executive of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, Cook County’s regional food bank. She also leads Feeding Illinois, the state association of food banks, and serves on the national board of Feeding America, the network most regional food banks belong to.

She holds positions at the local, state, and national levels simultaneously.

Her total compensation for 2024 was $490,419, according to the Depository’s tax return. Feeding America’s national board has included executives from Cargill, Walmart, Conagra, and Target, companies whose donated food moves through the network.

Annas did not need to steal to grow powerful. He and his family held the high priesthood. His sons were the Temple’s treasurers. Pilgrims who needed approved coins and animals bought them from the Temple markets, which Annas’s family also controlled.

Corban. When Congress wrote TEFAP, it limited the food to households “comprised of needy persons” and “residing in the geographic location served,” and it paid the states to check eligibility (7 U.S.C. § 7503(b)(4)). Those words are still in the statute. But federal rules now allow a ceiling of 300 percent of the poverty line, and Illinois uses it: about $99,000 a year for a family of four. The USDA also bars states from requiring address or identification documents.

The Illinois manual says “verbal self-attestation is the approved method for documenting income eligibility” and that “distribution sites are strictly prohibited from requesting income verification.” The law still says needy and local. The rules leave no way to verify either one independently.

Mint, dill, and cumin. The Illinois manual tells soup kitchens that “second and third helpings should be counted as individual meals and added to the total number of meals reported.” Food banks report pounds and meals. No one is required to report whether a single life got better.

The trumpet. “When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do… that they may be praised by others” (Matthew 6:2). This fall the Depository mailed donors a letter headed “URGENT ALERT,” announcing “a hunger crisis in Chicago and Cook County” in which “more than 1 in 3 local households are food insecure.”

The figure came from a survey the Depository paid for, covering only the City of Chicago (The 2026 Hunger in Chicago Report). Nearly half of the households it counted fall in a category the USDA defines as showing “little or no indication of reduced food intake.” The USDA’s own website says,

“USDA does not have a measure of hunger or the number of hungry people in the United States” (USDA ERS).

The United Nations measures hunger by whether people’s usual diet supplies enough calories. It places the United States as a whole below 2.5 percent, the lowest figure it reports. Africa, the hungriest region on earth, is just over 20 percent. If one in three Chicago households faced hunger, as the Depository’s letter says, Chicago would be hungrier than Africa.

What Jesus did

Jesus cleared the Temple and left it standing. He drove out the trade and gave the house back to its purpose:

“My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

Feeding the hungry, caring for orphans, welcoming strangers, and teaching children are commands, and the need is real wherever it exists. The question is whether the church will carry out those commands itself, in Christ’s name, or hand them to systems that set the terms, take their share, count the activity, sound the trumpet, and ask the church to keep quiet about Christ while the work gets done.

Many good people work inside those systems, as Nicodemus and Joseph served on the council. Many pastors leading their churches into them want only to serve their neighbors in Jesus’ name. Few have read the partner agreement, the federal rules on religious activity, or the survey behind the fundraising letter. Nicodemus went to the source and asked. That is where this begins.

What to do

If you are a pastor or an elder, list every ministry your church runs and ask four questions of each one. Who pays for it? Who writes its rules? Where is the gospel: in the work itself, or in another room? And what does the church count as success: activity, or changed lives?

Before your church signs any partner agreement, grant, lease, or contract, read it. Find the clauses on religious activity, hiring, eligibility, fees, and reporting. Ask whether the rules reach the work your church pays for itself. If the answers to the four questions are “someone else,” “someone else,” “in another room,” and “activity,” the church is no longer running a ministry. It is renting out a room.

Keep the deed and the word together. A ministry the church funds and stocks itself, run apart from any TEFAP distribution, carries no federal restrictions. Money your members give carries no government terms. Use them where you want the freedom to pray with people and tell them why you are there.

Measure lives, not activity. Count the families who no longer need the pantry, and those whose continuing needs are actually being met. Count the children who know the Lord, the strangers who became neighbors and then brothers and sisters. A rising count of visits to the food pantry measures how busy it is, but says nothing about whether the ministry is working.

Emperor Julian knew who fed the poor of the Roman Empire seventeen hundred years ago, and he knew why. Do the people your church serves know that today?