This three-part rumination on churches and giving had one beginning, but then evolved in a couple of directions. I’m going to try to whack away at these branchings into a single set of tentative conclusions here, before I launch back in on some new essays around these subjects at a later date.
It began with my own unease as I spent the last two years incorporating my father-in-law’s finances and bill paying into our own, and realizing just how inexorable the pressures are to go paperless and be on auto-pay for things like water and electric, let alone phone or internet. That was magnified by my parallel experience of sorting and sifting the mail for fundraising appeals, which he got in staggering stacks, along with having disconnected his landline once it was clear he could no longer use it in any way — but knowing full well the wall telephone had gone from being a life line for him to becoming an outright moral hazard, between outright scam solicitations and more subtle fundraising appeals that might as well be called the same. It was a relief to shut off the telephone, an odd feeling.
Those two braided issues, around how funds flow to pay bills and fulfill personal intentions, are themselves wound around another dually entwined set of questions around how congregations gather in their funding to pay bills, not the least to compensate preachers and such, and the advent of potential capital campaigns for non-profits I work with including church bodies I’m affiliated with, even as the congregations which would be the logical hubs for such an effort are — in my experience — still sorting out the whole question of how they collect offerings and keep their budget from complete collapse. I think that last phrase is, in many cases, not an exaggeration in using the word “collapse,” at least as a potential outcome on the immediate horizon. I’ll come back to this issue.
Four strands, anyhow, all connecting money to how we live and how we live in relationship to our financial assets, with faith a specific context but one among many factors in which it’s hard to separate faith and funding from personal practical decisions and our general fiscal options in today’s economy. Or to sum up in a single issue: if we are moving our payments for all our utilities and media consumption to automatic withdrawals through apps, it’s difficult to imagine such a person would keep a stack of checks (and a pen or two) just for the sole purpose of writing out their weekly offering by hand and ripping out checks to place in envelopes to take to church . . . one could, and some do, but in the wider arc of where things are trending, is that smart for churches to assume that model is going to stay viable for anyone, let alone our primary expectation on givers to support faith communities?
This article is almost five years old, and when it ran I was still in parish ministry:
I want to be mildly discreet here: years ago, before COVID, I was working to get my church to open up electronic giving options. The usual objections: no one is asking for it, they take a percentage (it ranged and still ranges from 2 to 3.5% with a fee for entry plus additional fees usually for the lower percentage, so it’s a wash in most cases for the net cost), and it adds complications to an often volunteer job few want to do in the first place. No matter how often I’d say “96.5% of something is more than 100% of nothing” the basic argument was that no one in our church wanted to do this.
Then COVID hit, and it was a mad scramble to pop up the app and text and online giving. It’s been improved since I left, but I have no idea of the numbers. That’s not my story to tell here, anyhow.
Why I tell it at all is to explain that the overwhelming majority of Disciples of Christ congregations, certainly almost all of the ones I knew well, were until 2020 highly resistant to online giving, and could defend that hesitation based on lack of internal demand. The case was simply not immediately apparent (pre-COVID) for why a church should add an option that to many old school church treasurers just meant 3% or more off the top to an outside company. The case for most churches to get into it was not compelling, until it was. Urban and more contemporary worship approach churches were doing more online, with streaming video and online services, let alone e-giving; that was maybe 5% of all our congregations, even if they were more visible, kind of the “look for the car keys under the lamppost effect” because if they were already online, it was easier to feature them and their activities in electronic media, and so on — meaning you could get the impression as a minister “everyone else” was already doing it, until you started talking to a bunch of local church leaders and found they had the same resistance and lack of participation.
Then everyone was doing worship online somehow, in some way, even if it was just the preacher’s phone and Facebook Live. The limits of that basic approach nudged quite a few teetering on the edge of streaming video to make investments in equipment, and the pressures of the COVID moment caused a number of well-timed donations to get that off the ground from church members who maybe wouldn’t have given (online or by check) for such tech before, but once they were isolating with COVID themselves, the checks, virtual or paper, got written. And adding the giving app along with other online donation tools rolled right along with those new developments.
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What hasn’t changed, though, is the general financial… well, illiteracy in many of our churches. The thinking is still very 1990s if not earlier for too many of our stewardship committees, and in many cases the fiscal team is a long-standing treasurer, an assistant treasurer if you’re very blessed, and often the rest of the ministry team or working group or committee is a collection of people who come once a year to tot up last year’s budget over and under, and make recommendations for next year, with the treasurer often driving that particular bus.
And usually the minister, if you aren’t a serving parish clergyperson, doesn’t know what’s going to be presented until that meeting happens, if indeed they are even invited. Yes, like the old days when in many of our churches the preacher was explicitly NOT at the table for communion (if that’s news to you, long story, but before 1968 or so it was common, and is still true in a few places), the minister is sometimes not part of the annual finance review and budget process. Or if they are, they come in at a disadvantage to say the very least.
Because not only do they usually not have a heads-up about what’s going to be presented, they don’t have a basic underlying understanding of the church income or outgo.
For instance, in the previous installments I walked through the various models at work in giver minds around how they give, and the kind of giving that model generates.
Loose offerings
Pledged giving/offering envelopes
Dues based
Tithe model
Membership model
Endowment model
Special offerings (including designated giving)
Retail model
and the Subscription model, which is my modest obsession and I’ll return to it in a bit.
A huge problem — in my opinion, mind you — in most churches is that there’s not a clear understanding of the distribution of giving. What do I mean by that? I’m talking about something like:
10% loose offerings
70% pledged giving and/or through offering envelopes (tithing & dues/membership giving usually within this one)
5% endowment income
5% special offerings (plus designated gifts)
10% retail (building rental, other income)
Now, that’s a relatively typical distribution, and how in many churches it’s assumed to be spread out. Except that may be how things used to be . . . and when you look more closely at current realities, it might look more like this:
15% loose offerings
45% pledged/envelopes
15% endowment
10% special offerings (plus designated)
15% retail income
And I’ve known a typical Disciples church to actually sort out more like:
25% loose offerings
35% pledges/envelopes
20% endowment
V5% special offerings
V20% retail income
BUT: our stewardship approach is often one that assumes the bulk of the giving is by way of set pledges and checks in weekly envelopes. Other forms of giving are treated as outliers, which are sometimes dealt with prudently, but in many churches anything not presented as pledged or designated offering becomes loose offering, with its own guidelines which can vary from church to church, and even from treasurer to the next treasurer.
[Side note: there is a general church “handbook for treasurers” which is c. 2016, but is a starting point - https://disciplesmissionfund.org/resources/ - and some regions have their own, as well. For non-Disciples folk reading this, a local church minister’s ability to direct a treasurer to guidelines like this falls in the category of “recommendation” only.]
If your current pledged income is a third to two-thirds of the general fund income, and you’re dealing with a shortfall of income versus outgo, you can see one big problem right up front if the “solutions” are all aimed at increasing pledged income. Granted, there’s usually not much variation year-over-year in what endowment income or rental (retail) income is: to improve the net with increases in those means a long-term strategy. But you also may need to take a more holistic view of your giving patterns to get any kind of effective grip on where you might be able to improve giving.
Many of you are thinking one of two things at this point: one is “where’s the discussion of your expenses?” I’m going to dismiss that subject by saying it’s a whole different conversation, and not part of this particular analysis. The other concern I entirely affirm is “you aren’t talking about WHY people give, about the true heart of philanthropy, about love and relationships and values being the real source of a giving heart?”
Guilty as charged. If I were talking in a specific context, or helping guide a local church in developing a new approach to covenant and stewardship and giving, that’s the correct starting point.
But I’m looking in a very broad sense at the overall landscape of church life, where giving is currently happening and for what reasons, and how we are making general changes in response to the last few years of dramatic shifts in culture and technology — and all of this out of a few dozen conversations I’ve had in the last four years with ministers, commissioned or ordained, of medium to small churches in my tradition. My interactions may be missing a whole bunch of realities out there which are going in a completely different direction than I’m describing here — or my non-random sample may actually define the bulk of our currently open and operating congregations. And as they are all of them, God bless ‘em, scrambling to find a path back to talking about first principles and basic understandings of what it means to be a steward of what God has given us, and how that works out in church offerings, the immediate challenges have driven a lot of choices around sheer practical necessity to keep lights on and maintain payroll (even if it’s a slashed payroll).
This is where I’ve found myself in dialogue with a variety of panicked pastors, some of whom are very new to congregational leadership, and a number of older & more experienced clergy, who are realizing they don’t know how the church finances worked but are learning now there’s not a clear path forward, and they’re scrambling to find some guidance on how to figure out how things are being done (often from a shockingly small amount of documentation), how fiscal matters should be handled, and what’s to be done short of closing the doors and selling the building.
Some buildings will have to be sold, or perhaps I should say the parcel on which the building sits, the building being a total loss held up by a mix of faith and habit. Some of those congregations still have a future of sorts. That’s a special ministry all its own. Some congregations are in sum past their close-by date. Those are hard conversations. Not a few are simply in a hot mess meltdown, but could conceivably move forward without disaster, especially if they can figure out how they’re paying bills and managing the gifts God has given them to date through their members and attenders.
But the most common crisis is simply that the pledged, offering envelope giving is not what it was, and the fiscal structures of the church, after a number of flails at the congregation (in newsletters or mailings, during announcements at board meetings and in worship), turn to the minister in dismay and despair saying “there’s no additional giving capacity here.” That may be true, and the next step is going to be an interim plan to live within what you can expect to receive, but often the bigger problem is, as I’ve already said, there’s leadership confusion over how the budget has changed, how giving has changed, and how the management of income versus expenses can solve a remarkable number of short term problems fairly quickly.
First, though, you have to know where your income is coming from, and how you’re spending it. And a surprising number of congregations don’t know this, and a new leader doesn’t know how to find it out. Does this sound familiar? Yeah, going back to my first attempt to talk about “Subscribing to Faith” and describing the sort of pastoral conversations I kept having over the years with people who needed some very basic assistance in just figuring out where they stood, and what to do next.
Then we have the ongoing challenge of the different mindsets our church folk bring to giving, and how that is expressed in how they give, which is what Part 2 tried to roughly outline.
All of which brings me to the fact that pretty much every church is doing offering time differently, and working with giving models from some new perspectives, which is good, except I’m not so sure it is — as I dodged just a few paragraphs ago but want to come back to, we need to be talking about WHY people give, about solidarity and unity as the true heart of philanthropy, about the reality of God’s love empowering all that we do, and developing relationships through our mutual experience of that divine impulse, then growing church life around our deeper shared values.
Yet even when we are having that conversation, and I pray that those sometimes challenging but open and honest talks continue among us, we’re also buying into some quick fixes without even realizing it. In large part because that’s the only option we see in front of us. By which I mean: the Subscription Model of electronic giving.
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The following is an illustration, not an ad (as in “NO, I’m not making any money by putting this here!”), but it’s a screen shot off of an ad on my phone sent by Christianity Today and aimed, as you can see, at “Pastors”:
Donors. Even when you call them “Church Donors” I feel a modest chill going up my spine. Donors, and donor management software, and donor technology. Is this where we’re going, as checkbooks become museum pieces, and e-giving after a long holding action is being accepted? — and again, I was fighting for years to GET my church to do electronic giving as church leadership adamantly resisted it. So I’m not trying to argue for a simplistic retreat back to a former model that is no longer within reach.
And just to complicate my own motives here even more (I trust I’m doing so only to reassure anyone reading this and thinking their own motives are complicated and confused), I’ve been part of discussions for many years in regional and general church life about the vexed concept of “donor intent” and whether we should be putting more emphasis on giving people an opportunity to give to what moves them, to the programs and causes that inspire them, or if the covenantal nature of wider church life should translate into an impulse to simply share of our selves out of our resources to a common fund, trusting the rightly designated leaders to make use of it for the good of Christ’s church? We’ve been doing more the latter since 1913 (“Men and Millions,” long story, but our first general fundraising effort, before “Unified Promotion” which was before “Basic Mission Finance” etc.), and the “share into a common fund” model is still what Disciples Mission Fund or DMF giving is built around.
Meanwhile, the one area where some growth and vitality in giving has been seen is where there’s a goodly measure of donor intent honored, or at least a clear picture is drawn of “give now, it goes to this” such as through much of our Week of Compassion benevolences, or as I discussed in Part 1 the targeted campaign in Ohio to pay down the mortgage taken out for Camp Christian. There’s both general fundraising wisdom and our own practical experience among Disciples to show that a specific cause, with radical transparency about how much is coming in and exactly what it goes for, is the easiest money to raise there is. Doing fundraising that way works. So should we be shifting our governance and funding structures in general in that direction?
For all kinds of perfectly understandable reasons, there’s some resistance out there to that. One really good reason is that to keep a general ministry or a local church going requires there be giving to relatively un-exciting aspects of owning a building or managing a space that’s being rented, which is to say maintenance. Or as Indianapolis icon Kurt Vonnegut famously and accurately said, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Anyone who has done capital campaign work with ANY non-profit knows this is true. People want to give to put names on buildings or halls, and the septic plant or loading dock is just not gonna get the same love. Hence the logic on common funds, single pot, preaching that giving is an act of covenantal relationship, and not about getting personal satisfaction let alone recognition. I lean in that direction.
Yet we are getting swept up with a general social tendency to do one of two things: one-shot giving for targeted causes, or subscription sign-ups. You know, the ol’ “just $19 a month.” It’s “Day of Giving” text jams for a special gift opportunity, or “set it and forget it” sustaining giving plans.
And it’s the “forget it” part that gives me deep, deep pause.
Forgetting it is key to the whole “Subscription Model” mentality that’s sweeping our economy right now. Subscribe to razors delivered to your home, subscribe to a bespoke box of fashion items in your size, set your bluetooth enabled fridge to subscribe to getting milk delivered regularly: subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. Set it to automatic giving and forget about it.
If there’s waste or unnecessary supplies building up out of subscription for consumer items, whether hard goods or consumables, that’s good for the seller, because you’re still paying. Let’s not even get too far into subscription models for streaming services, and how long you can go paying a monthly fee before you stop and assess how many months it has been since you watched that particular feed or channel or app? The point is that’s the IDEAL outcome for most people selling the subscription model of doing business: you keep paying, but don’t use their products.
Are you seeing where I see a problem for us as churches going to a subscription model? And YES, sustaining giving is in general a blessing for churches in a time where people aren’t carrying cash let alone checkbooks. You almost have to go to some form of pre-arranged, designated gifts, where they go quietly and smoothly from the donor account to your church treasury, no halts when someone misses church for a couple of Sundays on vacation, either. Set it, and forget iiiiiittttt… yikes.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that it’s a two-edged sword at best.
Meanwhile, we have some immediate needs around capital campaigns in more than a few regions, and I would not be surprised if the general church is at least thinking about it. Remember in Part 1: we haven’t really tried one since 1991-1993 on a wider church basis with “Embrace the Future.” If I were talking to anyone involved with non-profit fundraising or donor management, they’d be talking up the subscription model as a core with some targeted “Day of Giving” text-based immediate gift programming around the edges. It’s what everyone is doing these days.
Churches will inevitably do some of this, too. It’s what the technology demands. I’m not trying to write a covert tirade against designated giving as the new “offering envelopes” way to contribute pledged giving, and many churches that have been doing this successfully for some time share that it’s a net blessing for everyone concerned, the church folk who aren’t missing an offering time because they forgot their checkbook, and the congregation which has a new stability to the giving which is always attractive to a church treasurer.
But quite a few of our congregations still aren’t even there yet, and as we try to muster support for some regional and wider church efforts, I hope we don’t mistake the early adopter audience, if I can describe some of our more forward looking local churches that way, for the majority of our congregations. This is all still new and hard for many churches.
The biggest challenge I see right now is that the role of church treasurer has changed beyond the ability of a retired bookkeeper with a computer they have a spreadsheet program for to manage at home. Again, I say this not to rejoice and shout “it’s about time!” For a very long time, that worked, and blessing on those who did the work.
Today, the payroll and other compliance related issues around owning a property and employing people are just too complicated for most individuals to handle. The painful reality is that even relatively small churches have to now set aside $2,000 or more out of an already strained budget to pay an outside firm to do the basic fiscal work of congregational fund management. There are exceptions, but even there it’s often (again, in a smaller church which is to say most Disciples churches) just one person who has the full set of competencies needed, and if they depart for whatever reason, you’re left scrambling to find a CPA or similar service to whom you’ll be paying something, soon.
Getting past that issue can open up some space, though, for church leaders to step back, get real with themselves and each other, and look at where their income is coming from, how they’re spending it for the expenses of church life, and what a better way might be to talk about and interpret and communicate the value of sharing resources to do Christian mission in their setting.
When we do that, church by church, and even region by region, I think a couple of things will happen. One is that I sincerely believe we will agree that we don’t want to look at our attenders and guests and members and friends as “donors.” Not that there’s anything wrong with a non-profit having donors, but is that the model we want to utilize as Christian communities? And even “donor intent.” There’s some wisdom we can borrow from the world (the Bible doesn’t even tell us where to set the sanctuary thermostat, for pity’s sake), and how to “maximize giving strategies” may give us some starting points, but I don’t know that a donor management approach is how we want to handle our capital campaigns or annual church stewardship education.
Another thing that at least could happen, and that I hope and pray will happen, is we can talk about how giving is integrated into our worship and our overarching sense of community as churches of Christ. The Sunday offering plates were for very long a practical, and visual, and even a teaching model for how church attender resources became part of the mission of the church. I already miss them. But we will not get them back, not unless for some odd reason (EMP, maybe?) we go back into a cash economy.
The old UCMS “Birthday Bank” was a core funding mechanism for decades in the early 1900s, and for an assortment of practical and social reasons they worked well.
They aren’t coming back, though. They’re in church history display cases. That’s where offering plates are going.
What is coming next? And can we select how we want to invite and receive and affirm giving, with intentionality as we adopt these new means, using some discernment in how our opportunities to give themselves shape both the gifts and the givers, and so taking seriously the teaching function of giving in Christian community?
I appreciate anyone who has read this far, who has hung in there with me as I try to think this through on the page, and I pray for all the churches out there navigating these unfamiliar rapids — local churches and regional churches alike. It’s being put out through these means as my attempt to encourage us to think together about how we want to invite and receive giving, because I am convinced that if we just dive in to asking for resources first and foremost, we will find ourselves quite naturally herded into the “path of least resistance,” and that’s going to be the subscription model, or “set it and forget it” approach to getting people to initiate giving . . . and I fear it might work.
At first.
It’s the “forget it” part that keeps me thinking, though. We don’t want that. We are a people of the table, a fellowship built around communion, where we are called to remember. That’s the starting point we need to recover.