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Keeping Congregations Connected: When You Can’t Pass the Offering Plate…

By Ken Howard
Offering Plate

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Winston Churchill

What do you do when you can’t pass the offering plate?

How does congregational giving happen when a pandemic has shut our doors?

Our traditional ways of congregational giving are just one more of our paradigms of how to be faith communities crushed by the COVID crisis. And like our other congregational paradigms that have fallen before COVID19, they are probably gone for good. At least I hope so, because when paradigms collapse in the face of crisis, that means that they are either based on false assumptions or did not adequately address the full reality of human experience.

I believe the new paradigm is going to involve some form of online giving, a virtual offering plate.

There are a lot of online giving solutions that are on offer. Faith-based platforms, such as EasyTithe, Givelify, PushPay, LifeWay Generosity, and Tithely. Fundraising platforms, like Fundly, Network for Good – DonateNow, and QGiv. Generic platforms, such as Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, and online bill pay through your bank. Lately, even Facebook has gotten into the fundraising act.  And there are plenty of evaluations of each (just Google “Best Giving Platforms”).

So rather than discuss the platforms and how to use them, I want to dispel a few myths that may be holding us back from experimenting with online giving through virtual offering plates by sharing insights I’ve gained from talking to several online giving researchers (come back later for a list of links to giving research).

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Acting Outside the Box: Stewardship – Part 2

We are trying out a new occasional blog series in which people doing ministry can talk about outside the box wild ideas for ministry that they have tried and what they learned from them (whether or not the ideas work). We are calling this new series Acting Outside The Box, because just thinking about what’s outside the box is waaaay too passive. Ken Howard kicks off this series with some counter-intuitively productive stewardship strategies he’s run into (stumbled into, really) over the years.

The Power of Paradox
(part 2 in a series)

In last week’s post I talked about the awkwardness of stewardship season and how the use of religiously-loaded language sometimes backfires. I told the story of a formerly unchurched member family taking out a second mortgage to fulfill their pledge after the husband lost his job in the recession because they took the language of “pledge” so seriously.

Speaking of recessions, two of the largest increases in pledging (or should I say “Estimated Giving”) in two different churches I served took place during two rather large recessions.

What accounts for the difference? 

On both occasions, realizing that if we were in their shoes, we would have a lot of hesitation in making financial commitments in uncertain times, we decided that we would talk about the reasons for their potential hesitancy.  

We figured, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. And so we put all of our cards on the table. 

[Read more…]

Acting Outside The Box: Stewardship – Part 1

We are trying out a new occasional blog series in which people doing ministry can talk about outside the box wild ideas for ministry that they have tried and what they learned from them (whether or not the ideas work). We are calling this new series Acting Outside The Box, because just thinking about what’s outside the box is waaaay too passive. Ken Howard kicks off this series with some counter-intuitive stewardship strategies he’s run into (stumbled into, really) over the years.

Changing Language Changes Behavior

For the first decade of my ordained ministry, I always hated stewardship season. I never felt like I was being entirely transparent with my congregation. I always seemed to be starting out the season preaching about stewardship as a spiritual practice, when what we really wanted them to do was to give us money to support the work of the church. But by the end of the season, I was increasingly talking about how much more money we needed to meet our budget (while still cloaking the need in spiritual terms). 

Using words like “pledging” and “tithing” seemed less and less helpful as more and more newcomers to the church had smaller and smaller religious vocabularies. They sounded more remote and archaic, like the way the rite of Holy Matrimony used to require the bride and groom to “plight their troth”). I was always telling people that a “pledge” was really only a “best estimate” of what they desired – and more importantly, what they could afford – to give.

It all came to a head for me one year when I got a distressing call early in our pledge drive from the wife of a young couple with two small children. They were starting their fourth year in the congregation, experiencing the third pledge drive, the second in which they were making a pledge. I heard a hint of tearfulness in her voice as she said, “Father Ken, I’m calling to say we are so, so sorry that we will not be able to pledge as much this year as last. My husband lost his job this year and we had to take out a second mortgage to fulfill the pledge we already made.”

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