[The following is an essay I was working on piecemeal through late October & early November of 2023, so it makes some reference to my father-in-law then still living. It also ranges widely around matters both personal and professional which I was and still am dealing with around church finances, congregational and more generally, which I’ve gone back and “redacted” as issues continue to develop. Some people have asked me my counsel on particular issues which I’ve given, others I told (especially later in November) I’d get back to them later, and in many cases I just said “I plan to make a more comprehensive statement on all this when I get my thoughts together.” This may or may not be it; the further I got into it, the more complex it became and I thought it was pretty complicated to start with. But as redacted, I’m going to just put this much out there, as these questions aren’t getting any easier, and Fall 2024 is going to get here sooner than you might think.]
For four years of my motley college career (which took six and a half), I played a game called “Beat the Reaper.”
No one else called it “Beat the Reaper,” it was just a mental contest between me and the Bursar’s office, to stay each semester at Purdue. You might call it paying bills, but “Beat the Reaper” included my personal expenditures versus the demands of residence life and later rent, alongside the tuition & fees — the last of which were so small relative to today’s realities I can’t really complain at all. Let’s just say it was tight. I learned to parse out my shampoo and toothpaste in ways I still follow today, when a surprise $4 expenditure in a month is really no crisis, and not an obstacle to going out to eat with my friends after church at the campus ministry, or to a movie that month. But I had a clear picture of my income and my expenses; the paychecks of my various employments through those years went in cash into envelopes that guided me through the brutal expedient of “how much is left in that envelope?” If the “entertainment” envelope had a buck fifty in it, that was it for that month, unless I took it out of the “food” envelope which I did occasionally because my primary employment for two and a half years was at the Union Grill where I could eat my fill working closing shifts three nights a week.
Was I hungry? Occasionally, but usually because of poor planning on my part. Food was there, but I needed to plan out which meals under which settings I’d eat when, so if I had a one or two meal day, it was a timing issue as well as a money problem. I could always go home, too, and that was part of “Beat the Reaper.” The potential end of the game, because “Game Over” would have been returning home, likely never to come back to campus. My life would have worked out, but the goal of “Beat the Reaper” was to stay, survive, and graduate . . . which, on Dec. 22, 1984, I did. Yay me.
In May of 1985 Joyce chose to marry me, a decision for which I will be always grateful. She walked alongside me playing “Beat the Reaper” for a couple of those years, and that’s not a game that always brings out the best in a person. But a cautious and careful fiscal person herself, I think she respected how I met my own challenges, and we were ready to join our affairs together even if she refused to accept my 1973 Ford station wagon (something about a rusted out gas tank that couldn’t be filled, and holes in the floorboards). What we did, on getting our married life started, was to carefully monitor our expenditures, in a way I’ve commended to many more people than who’ve chosen to follow that counsel.
To sum up, we wrote every last expenditure down. I carried a slip of light cardboard in my wallet and whether a coffee or candy bar, pair of shoes or new carburetor, it got recorded. We had a budget, and each month we’d compare notes. How was our cash flow, where were our savings, what would we give. It was a daily and monthly as well as an annual thing. We wrote everything down for at least four years, each of us, and our patterns were set by that discipline. We held off getting credit cards (yes, this is the Eighties) as long as we could, but by the Nineties we realized if we still wanted to stay in hotels or rent cars, we’d need credit cards. We didn’t use them for everyday expenses, honestly, until very recently.
This story is relevant (I hope) alongside something that started happening to me in ministry from the late 1980s through 2019. People would contact me as a minister, asking for a private meeting. This could, of course, be anything. But four or five times a year, every year, these would be meetings to discuss finances, and an impending crisis.
Sometimes, it was a young couple. Much more often, it would be an elderly couple or individual. Occasionally, a family closer to my age. Always, it was an awkward slowly revealed conversation which I might think at first was about domestic stress or personal issues, but would slide over step by step into the reality of fiscal crisis, coming soon in terms of utility shut offs or sheriff’s sales or foreclosure (and once a loan shark’s goons with baseball bats was a very real pending outcome).
What I’m saying is, not as an expert, but as a port of refuge, I became fairly used to helping people sort through where they were financially, and what could be done, across thirty years of parish ministry, over a hundred some times.
A few common points of reference. Almost invariably, they didn’t know, not in an “off the top of their head” way, what their monthly or weekly income was. Usually if they had any sense of their income, it was annual. Okay. But all the bills, you see, were monthly. Okay, so I did basic math with them. If you have $24,000 a year coming in, you have $2,000 a month income, right? That basic maneuver made me a magician right there.
And — you saw this coming, didn’t you? — there was rarely a summative monthly expenses number in mind. They knew it was bad, they knew they were behind, but rarely did they know the essential (to me) reality: what’s your basic monthly income, and what’s your monthly expenses, in general?
Here’s where it always got ugly. If you have $24,000 a year coming in, and your basic known expenses were $29,000, you have two options. Figure out how to increase income $5,000 a year, or cut your expenses by that much. Often the basic costs of their housing, whether rent or mortgage or net utility etc. costs were the big rock in the middle of the stream . . . but that was the one non-negotiable. It was family property, it was the children’s home, we’d be moving out of the school district, we’ve always lived here, whatever. But let’s say you have a household with $24,000 coming in, and your current residence costs $19,5000. Usually the other expenses, think food and sundries like shampoo and toothpaste and new socks, let alone cable and eating out and auto insurance, was around $10,000 and very hard to cut if at all.
“You’re telling me to move?” Sigh. Well, that’s one way. Anyhow, let me just leave it all at this picture of unresolved ugliness, by saying it really rarely ended well. I could encourage a conscious monitoring of sundries and incidental expenses, but that usually couldn’t fix the basic problem of too much being spent versus how much was coming in.
A startling number of seniors had a plan, of sorts. They were running up credit card debt which their plan, I use the word advisedly, was to die out from under. And yes, it is true: if adult children of older people are challenged to pay the five digit credit card debt of their parents, they are not obligated to do so, though if there’s a house or other assets the credit card company can go after it. Otherwise, they are left holding the bag (which is to say all the rest of us do). Credit card companies cannot force survivors in most cases to pay off the debt racked up by parents or grandparents, not that they won’t try, the little dears.
However, as a generally ethical parson, I would sit with people, young or old, and help them sort out the key questions: what’s coming in, what’s going out, and what’s to be done. There were some spectacular outliers, but most were simple situations of years of delaying payments in the face of $24,000 income versus $29,000 non-negotiable obligations, so usually by the time I’m helping assess the situation there’s $10,000 to $60,000 owed on top of the immediate deficit position. At that point, it’s really a question of triage, and I think I did people more service in that area than any other advice I could give. A cold clear eye to what had to be paid soon, and counsel born of experience as to where to get assistance or intervention to fend off what could be held over a while.
Let me add this in: I’ve met with over 100 couples intending marriage, and in most cases, we’d talk at one point about how they planned to handle finances. Sometimes, hard realities came out about single fiscal circumstances, and we had to talk about the future in hard, cold, cash terms. (I have never dealt with a pre-nup, blessed be.) I have dealt with couples who revealed only at the very last stages their personal debt. We did talk about writing down expenditures, about close, hard, fiscal discipline, and how that can build a marriage, and bring people closer. I don’t know that it was a welcome message, or a plan that was often followed.
And in all my ministerial experience, I’ve had two couples in the course of our conversations preparing for a wedding choose not to move forward, and both were because of insoluble, unresolvable differences of opinion that came up in our conversations between the three of us about who would control what about their finances. Not about number and timing of children, not over religion or how the holidays would be observed, but over the checkbook and credit cards, and who saw what, and how that would be managed.
As I indicated earlier, I last had one of these conversations in late 2019. Early 2020 was a torrent of funerals, and from my father’s passing March 12th to my resignation from pulpit ministry in August, between COVID and general circumstances, I didn’t have any of these meetings, so my data is necessarily three years old or more.
What I have been doing in the last three years is sorting out my father-in-law’s finances, as his major cognitive decline began in 2020, and since 2021 he really hasn’t been able to comprehend bills and payments and balances, so that’s on me now.
I mentioned we resisted going with credit cards early in our marriage, and in general, we’ve held back until very recently on the increasing norm of paying most bills by credit card. We used credit cards, but sparingly; we didn’t still have envelopes and cash in certain categories, but we were effectively still in that concrete, specific mindset into the late 2010s. And I’ve commended that course to people starting out many times, in life or in marriage, to set figures based on practical realities, and to monitor closely because it’s easy to lose track or avoid unpleasant realities by just not thinking about them. Envelopes, in form if not in practice.
Today, I’m putting as much as I can of my father-in-law’s billing into autopay, online billing, and routing it through our credit card. I’ve been getting a perhaps belated close-up perspective on the totally online bill pay environment this past year. And in the process, trying to sort out how to understand on a monthly basis what we’ve paid, and then writing a check out of his accounts to reimburse us for his bills we’ve paid. In a word, it’s hard. Very hard. In fact, I think it’s intentionally hard. A subject for another day.
Meanwhile, I’m on a bunch of online accounts which themselves are the result of the odd life we’re leading in two places, but since my father-in-law is still a creature of broadcast and antenna based TV, I’m signed up for a number of streaming options which are paid and managed entirely online, so up in my room after the elderly occupant here is “asleep” I have some options. What am I paying, and for what, I ask, as I end up watching a remarkable amount of MeTV or COZI anyhow, since that’s what’s on and what my father-in-law needs me to help him find more and more often. Meanwhile, the monthly fees quietly increase, and float silently away unless I take the time to look at them.
All of which is to say: if I were still meeting with people or couples who stated one issue up front, but came around to the point which is their spending is so far out of line with their income a crisis is just around the next corner, as has happened to me so many times in the past — how would I sort out what’s actually going on? Could I figure it out? Should I even try? And Lord, I am ruefully thankful I don’t have to worry about it these days.
Which swivels around to the problem of churches.
Most of the churches I have served as a minister had treasurers who held the details of the church finances rather closely. Preachers are not supposed to be interested in, let alone know, who gives how much. Where is that written down? Hah. But it’s a classic “everybody knows” situation.
However, asking even general questions about the distribution of who gives what has always, in my experience, tended to provoke serious discomfort in the congregational system. Are we an 80/20 church, I’ve asked, where 20% of the membership gives 80% of the budget? Just asking that question has gotten me testy reactions in many places I’ve served.
An aside: helping sort out some practical issues in an Ohio congregation with a commissioned minister, I found that for many years in the 1920s & 1930s, the list of who gave how much was posted in the back of the church. Right next to a stern engraving of Alexander Campbell which was a version I’d never seen before.
In other words, one hundred years ago, in our tradition, the “secrecy” around who gave how much was literally a non-issue. Today, I’m still not sure where or why this issue flipped around to where we are today, with ministers explicitly and vehemently kept from knowing in any way who gives how much. I have my suspicions, which will have to wait to be fleshed out in a separate post, but it’s a question to which I’ve given a fair amount of thought.
And I’ve seen, up close and personal, church-based capital campaigns fail rather spectacularly. I still vividly recall attending a ground breaking ceremony in 1989 for a new Disciples of Christ HQ building along Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis that never saw activity beyond the symbolic shovelfuls turned that windy afternoon on a vacant lot, now a parking lot, part of an “Embrace the Future” campaign that went disastrously astray after a launch in 1991 perhaps overshadowed by the failure of the nomination of Michael Kinnamon for General Minister and President.
We’ve had a checkered at best history on capital campaigns (look up “Men and Millions” sometime if you want a Disciples history rabbit hole, but that’s going back to 1913, before World War I, and continuing until slightly after), but this too is not something we’re supposed to talk about. I found myself in the unenviable position of having dealing with regional finances through two years in 2017 & 2018, and…
[section of 250+ words discreetly redacted for constructive purposes & perhaps future posting]
Nota bene: “Keep the Bell Ringing” was a resounding success for Ohio. You might say “well, Jeff, that’s because it was all about Camp Christian (true) and it was to pay off the mortgage which had teetered on the edge of default (also true).” But I think it worth noting that “Keep the Bell Ringing” was successful in large part because it had a very specific goal, and the movement of money was as transparent as anything we’d done in Ohio since Alexander Campbell last preached in the neighborhood. What was coming in was shared essentially in real time, and how it was used was laid out in detail from beginning to end. It was a fundraising drive, not a capital campaign — those are two different creatures, but they are related. In any case, for what may be the first time in over a century, we set a financial goal of a substantial nature, solicited giving, and completed the amount within the planned timeframe. That’s interesting to me. That’s encouraging. I’m still nervous, but encouraged.
What makes me nervous is a long-standing tendency among my Disciples family to set a goal and a timeframe, run a campaign, fall short (sometimes as little as half the initial goal), extend the campaign another year (or longer), then announce success and agree to not talk about it anymore. This is something that certainly does happen among non-profits; it IS, sad to say, a fairly common issue for church groups. I’ve had occasion to do a deep dive into the roots of Denison University and the (now) American Baptist Church which founded it; their effective separation began with a 1920s churchwide capital campaign where the college was asked (ordered, really) to not run their own, but to share in a percent of the national church capital campaign: it fell drastically short, and the share the school got was even less than a percentage initially promised would have been, and that was it for Denison being a “Baptist institution.” In Ohio, Herald Monroe watched a post-war national capital campaign by the UCMS in his opinion be poorly run and hamstring his own expectations in the state society (today: region) he was in charge of, and “Ohio World Budget” was born the same year Camp Christian was in 1949.
In other words, this is not a new problem.
I’ve been on perhaps too many non-profit boards, helped found a few, sat on executive and audit committes many times. Non-profits are generally expected to file Form 990s. There are GAAP or “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” that are formal and to some extent legal guidelines that require our compliance, and transparency is not optional on a 990. For a variety of reasons, faith-based organizations are usually exempt from these — which does not mean they can’t follow the same guidelines, just that there’s no penalty if they don’t. Except for the practical penalties that accrue over time when transparency is not front-and-center, and your constituencies and funders and donors start to hesitate, or back away.
To use the Licking County Coalition for Housing as my most immediate example: we have to be audited each year, and we better pass the audit according to GAAP, or HUD isn’t going to release further grant funding, or award future grants to us. That’s called a huge motivation. That’s 70% or so of the budget that is entirely and immediately dependent on our having our books in order, and willing to share them with outside parties. In many other non-profit settings, major donors or foundations or grant-awarding programs will want to see the 990 and a clean audit before any money comes your way.
The flip side is that I’ve been in too many church meetings where someone would pop up (or I’ve been contacted by ministry colleagues who had it happen in their church board meetings) saying “federal law demands we must immediately pass new policies on conflict of interest by board officers, a whistleblower policy, and records retention policies!” Honestly, there’s nothing WRONG with having them, but those are the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley guidelines Congress passed for public corporations, and it’s incorrect to say we have to have them as churches or associations of churches. Misinformation is misinformation even if I like the effect.
In reality, churches are protected from most of the legal issues businesses or non-profits have to follow. We can debate at length the why and whether of those faith-based exclusions, but that’s the reality. So we have to CHOOSE to be transparent, and compliant with best practices, and do smart development work . . . which may make it work even better when we do so, even as it leaves the door open for us to choose not to.
Whether we’re talking about household finances, regional accounting, or the wider church, here’s the immediate import of what I’m worried about, and how my own new role in bill paying and household finances is making me think deep and dismal thoughts. So much of what we are doing these days fiscally is what’s called “frictionless.” The exhortation “Go paperless!” is getting larger and more insistent on what bills I still receive by mail, with the growing suspicion that it’s not going to be an option much longer, or one I’ll pay extra for. They all want us to sign up for the app, to authorize the auto-pay, and there we are.
It’s the same with my father-in-law’s preferred benevolences. Don’t send a year-end check, but sign up for $19.99 a month automatic withdrawal, and you’re a sustaining member or honored contributor, or whatever it is for a particular group. You get a plush throw, or a name on a brick, or some other undying emblem of our appreciation, and the $19.99 is withdrawn from your account until death do us part, or some other near-death experience of carefully extricating one’s self from the online obligation.
Should we be going there in church giving, in what’s commonly called stewardship? I think this is a theological question, a spiritual discipline question, a big-D Discipleship question. And it’s one I don’t have a good answer to. Is e-giving, on whatever platform or app, the primary way to raise funds now, both for congregational budgets or for regional capital campaigns? Is “sustaining giving” or the direct deposit route what churches should be looking towards?
In these last few years, I’ve done a very modest amount of supply preaching; I’ve been inside for Sunday services about a dozen churches, including a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and a UCC congregation along with a “united church” of multiple denominations including the Disciples. Without exception, they’ve all dropped the collection plates being passed during worship. All twelve. There’s a nod to plates on tables or plinths near the entrance-exit doors, a statement around offering, sometimes the Doxology, but the passing of the plates in the pews — and for communion — is gone. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I am not seeing them. In congregations where there had been some pre-existing tradition for coming forward for communion, that is still in place with modifications, but for the most part communion “kits” are picked up as you enter, and communion is conducted without a distribution.
There’s a whole discussion we could have about this that I’m going to acknowledge, and pass over. Squeamishness more than infectious concerns has steadily pressed on former customs around communion; talk of “fomites” or “contact contagion” issues around the early COVID response pushed buttons (spraying our grocery bags at home, being told people were getting COVID from gas pump handles), and while the science as it developed said pretty clearly that this was not how it was spread, a hyper-sensitivity around hand sanitizer extends to where it’s on almost every communion table I’ve seen in the last three years — even though there’s no distribution. I worry and wonder about this reaction, and how it’s settling into standard practice.
Honestly, I think had even more to do with the fact that many churches I know had been, well before 2020, sweating their ability to get enough deacons or ushers or whomever to pass the plates, offering or communion, around the pews. Arrangements that needed eight were being adjusted to work with six or even four, and those who could handle the work were getting weary of doing it every Sunday. The COVID reset opened up the option of dropping it altogether, and largely, that’s what we’ve done. The rows of the diaconate at work, a part of my memory of worship in general and communion in particular, is rarely to be seen.
I raise this very complex and important issue to shove it to one side except for a single aspect: the offering plates.
If we do not get our primary flow of giving to the church through the weekly offering, how will that change our self-understanding as a church? If the act of placing our gifts in a common container of sorts, and seeing them placed on the communion table, often as we sing a traditional hymn of praise giving thanks to God for all good gifts (the Doxology), what is lost without that, and how will our understandings shift in a new model?
Because make no mistake: I think communion plates are largely gone, and the historian in me would note we haven’t always used them, so it’s not like we’re throwing out some essential necessary element of worship. (It was previous to the trays a passing of a common cup, and a loaf on a plate, and everyone sipped from one cup and ripped a bit of bread off one loaf: this ended after the Civil War, when most men came back with beards and kept them, and the women began to protest the mustache hairs floating in the common cup. I am not making this up!)
Once the primary income for most American churches was through pew rents, collected by a committee, and incidentally why Americans tend to fill churches from the back, where the free pews were, leaving the empty front pews which wealthy donors would pick up but rarely occupy. No joke, you can look it up. The Free Methodist Church split from The Methodist Church over a double sense of “free,” being against slavery and pew rents. They tend to lift up the Free Methodist history of free from bondage, but in fact having open or “free” seating in worship was equally behind the division and the new name.
Checks? Mostly gone. Rarely used. Paper money, even. From just a few weeks ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/15/paper-checks-who-uses/
As the story notes, in 2000 “…6 out of every 10 noncash purchases, gifts and paid bills were handled with checks. A mere two decades later, just 1 in 20 are.” That’s not a trend, that’s a settled change.
A sudden call for a special offering? I recall them happening at times of great crisis or unique opportunity; today, we know that’s very hard to pull off. People just don’t come to church with excess cash in their pockets, and checkbooks are rarely if ever carried. COVID simply forced something that was coming for some time.
But there’s a great deal of resistance still out there around “business as usual” assumptions for church giving patterns — think boxes of giving envelopes. And in the same vein, as pew rents are almost entirely vanished, for most churches more than 150 years past, their cultural impact is still with us, like the reflex to sit towards the back. And our assumptions about church life and giving may have some lasting effects contorting our approach to financing congregational life; those contorting effects include some we don’t want to have hanging around like the impulse to sit in the back.
I mentioned the 80/20 “model.” It’s a truism that in many churches, 20% of the members support 80% of the budget. Having been out of the thick of parish ministry since September 2020, I can’t answer this with any confidence, but my general impression is that this has changed somewhat. Because with the overall decline in attendance, I think in many churches we lost quite a chunk of the 80%, and the ones who stayed are more likely to be among the 20%.
The total church giving may have gone down 20 or 30%, but the income many congregations still have coming is a bit more evenly spread across the donors. This actually opens up an opportunity of sorts. Many church and wider giving campaigns have had to contend with the awkwardness of doing essentially the same campaign materials to everyone, even though some are giving nothing or very little, and others are shouldering a substantial portion of the budget relative to their household. Handing the same letter, presenting the same appeal, offering the same options, to a potential donor and a major giver: this is not how most development models work. It’s not about discriminating against or dismissing small gifts and their givers, just that you’re looking at different starting points, and completely different next steps, between such audiences. Any college or foundation or community campaign understands there’s a major gifts category, the sustaining givers group, and the initial or first-step audiences (and many development programs slice the bologna into plenty more sectors than three). You have different campaign materials for each group.
Churches have, in general, hated this, because it smacks to many of elitism, and the temptation to cater to the big donors. Yeah, because that doesn’t already . . . okay, let me start again. Congregations — not all, but most, including some big enough to know better — tend to react negatively to the idea that there’s anything but a total group approach to getting pledges or estimates of giving or whatever you call that. In fact, I’ve served two churches in my time where the word “pledge” itself was anathema, as in “never say that word, NEVER,” and there was a widespread sense that fall stewardship campaigns weren’t necessary, because all that needed to be done was to let the people know of the need, and the money would come in, “because it always has.” Pointing out examples from recent history in that very congregation of how it hadn’t always worked doesn’t automatically sweep that culture of “we don’t do pledging” away. The roots of this, at least in my parts of the Midwest, I think go back to the sea change I mentioned earlier when in the 1920s the list of families and how much they gave was posted in the back of the church. Again, a conversation for another day, but just keep in mind. Think retail.
On top of that, you can’t sort out who is what kind of giver, and offer adjusted or “targeted” materials unless someone knows who gives how much, and can route such case statements or campaign presentations to the right households. Before you say “that can probably be guessed at” I would note I have twice been commissioned to do specific work in a congregation which required I end up seeing who was giving what — and I learned something that’s stuck with me, from the first time which was now over 40 years ago, and more recently. You cannot guess who is a major donor and who is, as a minister friend of mine likes to say, “a tipper, not a tither.” The realities will surprise you, delight you, even. My more general impressions, occasionally confirmed, have continued to support that, on through years of serving churches where I barely saw as much as the board did on church finances. The people who talk about their giving usually are blustering; it is often the most unexpected people who turn out to be proportional givers of real substance.
But in any case, with our post-COVID attendance shifts, the loss of a significant number of low commitment members may mean we are more often looking out across congregations where there’s a little more equality across the member support profile. Today, it may no longer be the case that 80% of those attending on a random Sunday are only giving 20% of the budget between them. A nearer-equal distribution of giving opens up some possibilities. There will always be struggling single moms and elderly fixed income folk who give small amounts, and Jesus talked eloquently about how God sees proportional giving — may the widow’s mite be blessed. But in terms of the range of giving percentages, these days may be a little different. And I’m talking about this in terms of what it means to take on major projects, and consider shared responsibility, as well as new ways to give.
When I say “new ways to give,” let me trot briskly through the old ways. Obviously, there’s the offering plate. But don’t let that fool you: so-called “loose offering” is in most churches a relatively small percentage of the total giving. So for most Protestant traditional not-to-say mainline/oldline churches, it has been for a few generations “giving envelopes into the offering plate” along with “loose offering.” And those giving envelopes tended to come along with a fall stewardship campaign with pledges for the coming year, or “estimates of giving” for the churches where the word “pledge” is anathema. So this giving model is really tied closely to people setting for themselves a giving goal, sharing it with church leadership, then being incentivized with a box with 53 envelopes in it (the 53rd an opportunity to give a modest sum to defray the offering envelope program, which has a cost to it, akin to the 2.5% or 3% taken out when giving by credit card — more on that in a moment).
So let me call, for the hazards inherent in the term, the first and largest former way to give the “pledged giving” approach. There’s a variety of ways congregations have reminded people of that giving target, whether semi-annual or quarterly updates of giving with the pledge amount discreetly listed below, but in sum the idea is the congregation has a general sense of what’s coming in before the year begins, and can plan accordingly. Also if someone pledges $1000 and has given nothing by mid-year or so, in some churches the treasurer may quietly note to the minister or might themselves check and see if all is well, so there’s a potential pastoral care side to this model. But there’s rarely if ever a hint of condemnation or exclusion if you miss your pledge; contrariwise if you exceed your pledge, that’s usually not known by all but a few, or one . . . but my general impression is that this is the one big downside to the pledged giving approach — it almost discourages over-and-above giving.
There is a “dues based” model, which in most churches I’m familiar with no one wants to promote, but is often how members look at their pledge, because they are in other organizations (fraternal organizations, country clubs, various professional associations) where that’s exactly how it works — and this is a regular problem because when people hit a financial challenge and they can’t give to their church, too often they fade away and vanish because in their minds they aren’t keeping up their dues. Again, almost never is this the intended model, but it’s worth keeping in mind that many organizations, parallel to the church in member thinking, are on that model entirely so the mindset leaks over. Plus there are faith-based communities that DO use a fairly explicit “dues based” model. That’s also in our history, as the effective basis of the old “pew rents” approach, which allowed non-contributors to attend, but further back, and had a sort of incentive structure around increasing giving to get a better seat — and also didn’t incentivize further giving once you’d paid your pew rent for the year.
I am not sure whether you all will let me call this next one the “tithe model” as some will too quickly say that’s what all Christians should do, and I’m running long and can’t get into that question just now. Let me specify that the “tithing model” I have in mind is a more directive one, whether for all members in good standing or just for leaders, but where you have a congregational methodology for calculating what a tithe should be, and with fairly tight guidelines of pastoral or prudential exceptions, you must give that tithe in order to maintain your status. Granted, this isn’t a norm in any mainline/oldine Protestant church tradition I can think of, but the interesting thing to me is that the idea of this model tends to hover in the wings of discussions about giving and congregational finances, as if it’s something we could deploy or once did. In general, we’ve had more of an honor system as far back as I can tell, with room for (again) pastoral or prudential exceptions, but it’s quite rare in our tradition that any leader, let alone member, has ever been called to account for not giving, certainly not for failing to tithe. But such a model does exist in other Christian bodies, for what it’s worth. And for many non-profits, a seat on the board in governance usually comes with a pretty clearly stated expectation of a certain level of giving to the institution — including some of our Disciples-related higher education programs. If you stop giving, or give too little, you won’t be continued in leadership. Anyhow, it’s one way to do things.
A “membership model” is also a tricky term, but I need to call it something: in this case, I’m talking about a more annual, once a year approach. Remember, I’m trying to describe the range of ways we’ve had in the past to give, before I get into the new ways that are problematically coming into view. “Membership model” is what I’m calling a once a year contribution, just to distinguish it from the “dues model.” You might lump in here the quarterly approach, and I will note that, with all the caveats I noted previously, I’ve been made aware over the last two decades that this kind of giving has been growing more common. It’s incentivized by some aspects of having a larger segment of your giving coming from retirees, who themselves in some cases get an annual, biannual, or quarterly annuity or dividend, so they give when their income arrives.
Do you see where all of this is going? How you give may, I repeat MAY influence how you see the church. If you think “dues” or “membership” you might also start to think, consciously or not, about the congregation and pastor in terms of “member services.” This is one of many reasons why most ministers and church treasurers and Bruce Barkhauer all want us to look at giving and stewardship and benevolences differently . . . but the financial instruments involved have an influence which we ignore or wish away at our peril.
And I think the one coming at us hard and fast is perilous itself: the subscription model. I’ll leave you with this pair of links, and pick up again in part 2 before I cross the email limit for Substack.
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/24/membership-subscription-economy-business-model
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31547
[see part 2 of “Subscribing to faith” coming shortly; link to be added when posted]