What This Church Did With $160,000 Was So 'Crazy' It Left Congregants Crying — and the Pastor Nervously Sweating

What one church recently did with $160,000 during a Sunday morning service absolutely stunned parishioners: 320 members were each given a $500 check to spend as they wish.

Pastor Laura Truax of LaSalle Street Church, a non-denominational house of worship in Chicago, Illinois, said that she hopes the $160,000 lump sum that was handed out will go to good and charitable causes — but she admitted that doling the cash out made her extremely nervous.

"Some people started to cry and I started to sweat because it sounded so crazy ... I was worried that people were going to think, 'this is stupid and silly," the faith leader told WGN-TV. "You're squandering away $160,000.' I was nervous about that but I felt this was a place of faith."

Traux, who said that the money came from a decades-old real estate deal, first told her congregation September 7 that active members would be receiving the sizable checks.

She instructed parishioners to do with the money what they felt called to do, but expressed her hope that the funds would go toward good and beneficial causes.

"I was just in disbelief," Valency Hastings, a member of the church, told the Chicago Tribune. "The enormity of the responsibility of it has begun to sink in."

The move came after Traux and church elders decided to give back 10 percent of the $1.6 million LaSalle Street Church reportedly made from the real estate deal — a sum that adds up to the $160,000 figure members collectively received.

Parishioners will have nine weeks to cash the checks, according to WGN-TV.

"My real hope is that other churches will swallow and jump," Traux said of the impact she hopes the effort has. "Find some way in some place and jump with their people."

This isn't the first time a church has reverse tithed in an effort to do good in the community through its congregants. What do you think?

(H/T: Christian Post)