Give God __, and __ will bless you

The WSJ has an interesting longer reported piece about tithing.

I grew up in an evangelical context, in which tithing was taken literally. The "give God what's rightfully God's his, and he will bless you with even more" line was used liberally--an argument that's manipulative at the least and can easily lead to the nightmare of the prosperity gospel world (though, thankfully and to my home church's credit, this hasn't happened there).

The thing that makes me mad is when a church combines this sort of God-will-bless-you line w/ an insistence that God's blessing and care is purely a spiritual and/or miraculous thing, and not the role of the church itself (aka "Christ's feet and hands"). Individual congregations' handling of this seems to be all over the map.