Red Neck Riviera Church

Posted by billman10 on 4/4/2009

I went through a lot of training and work with this Church, but ultimately found the leadership to down right arrogant and VERY focused on money. That's kind of odd since the lead Pastor, Buddy Tipton is a real estate multimillionaire. He owns 50 acres of land just across the street from the Vero Beach Mall. He further owns the Church building and lands completely debt free. There is no board controlling the Church, he is its sole controller. It should be noted that Tipton only teaches out of the Old Testament with a doom and Gloom message on Sundays. I truely believe he does this to create guilt to get bigger tithes. If you go to the Wednesday night service you get some preaching out of the New Testament, but then you pay into the basket twice. Nice revenue enhancing tactic, Buddy! In my experience, the leadership was just too harsh, judgemental, and money oriented to deal with. They clearly spent more time reading books about Biblical living rather than reading the Bible itself. For example, during the two years I attended the Church, there was NO adult Bible study group. Further, Tipton was extremely critical of his own parishoners who were generally very nice if somewhat superficial people. I remember him outright disparaging people who attended the 8AM service (which had no singing) as far less faithful then they should be. Of course it that's a problem, why offer the 8AM service? On one Sunday night servce Tipton bashed the people at the service so much, I walked out of Church feeling depressed for having gone to church! What a rotten and unnecessary experience- I had done my part in good faith to be a consciencious Christian, and got my teeth kicked in (verbally) for doing so. Totally unacceptable. (Note to Buddy Tipton: I hope the extra tithes are worth it. The guy just had negative criticism for everything but his $57,000 Cherry Red Chevy Race Truck and his 80 MPH bass boat. I realized there was a problem when the only time he remembered my name was the Sunday after I had written a check for my Tithe. (I usually tithe in cash since Christ commands us to "not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing when giving to the church", but that week I didn't have time to stop at the ATM.) When I left the church, they didn't ask me to stay, but they did ask me to keep sending money. Amazing! Also, the speakers they invited in were a split mix. About 50% were really serious missionaries doing Christ's work and the other half were hustlers trying to get money. I gave to the good ones. But sorry, I'm not a free pull slot machine- and I can tell really quickly when a preacher is operating out of greed! I seriously wonder if Tipton split the revenues from those speaker sessions. The small group meetings I attended were nice, but stuffy and kind of useless. The leader was another high school taught generally unedcated guy who thought he knew it all, but never read the Bible that I saw. Finally the leadership itself had a lot of apparent problems. Tipton (who wears a lot of jewelry to church so I think of him as the "Reverand Bling Bling") I've discussed, Jon Hamilton the number 2 preacher, often came off as very arrogant (especially for a man with only a highschool education), and was managing the Church's radio station music selection in some odd ways. And finally Larry Boan, who actually was a nice if distant guy, has family problems of a nature so sordid I won't go into them, but they are unfortunately out there on the web. Long story short: Find a main line Church that studies the Bible directly chapter and verse.