I recently opened an email from a trusted source, only to find an advertisement from a company hawking en electronic giving technology for churches. The tagline is,
"Finally. A simple, easy and affordable giving solution for your church."
Which got me thinking.
“Finally”???
Have Presbyterians all over the country been flooding the GA with overtures demanding relief from the arduous task of putting cash or
a check in an offering plate??
Have parishioners been petitioning church treasurers
to please spend more of the church’s money to obtain the offerings that the
congregation has hitherto been giving the church for free?
Has the Goliath of Silicon Valley failed
time and again over the last twenty years to satisfy the raging consumer demand
for a “simple, easy and affordable giving solution” with regards to church gifts,
tithes and offerings, only now to be beaten by the David of this vendor?
Who in heaven’s name decided that the
church has a “giving problem” that requires the
marketplace to deliver a “giving solution”? Furthermore, who concluded that such a
solution was to be found not in any teaching, discussion or study about the
theology of giving (and more importantly, the theology of God’s generosity and
faithfulness), but rather in computer-based technology that dangles promises of
greater revenue in exchange for an open-ended commitment of parishioner’s offerings
to using this technology?
Any practice that
persuades and invites Christians to remove the spiritual discipline of tithing
from the act of worship in community, and relocate it somewhere else in the
building, away from worship – however financially profitable it may be in the
short term – will surely corrode and erode the church’s engagement with the profound
practices of tithing, offering, worshipping, and faith. One does not “encourage a culture of
generosity” by making the “experience” accessible and simple. If that were true, every streetcorner panhandler
would be a millionaire, since it is clearly simpler and quicker to pull money
out of one’s pocket than it is to stand in front of an electronic kiosk
(perhaps maybe even in line) and type in one’s identifying information, the amount
to be given, the “confirmation” button, etc.
No, one encourages a culture of generosity by bearing sustained and joyful
witness to a God Whose generosity and overwhelming love transforms people’s
lives. One encourages a culture of generosity
by having members of the community tell stories of how God has upheld them through
the direst of financial crises in their lives, and how 10% of what we receive
from God is barely a token to return to Him in gratitude for His unfailing love. People don’t want to give money because "it’s
easy." People want to give money when
they learn, through acts of faith, how utterly faithful God is, and are thereby
freed from their psychological and spiritual dependence upon Mammon.
How can a Christian possibly characterize
pressing buttons on an electronic screen as “user-friendly,” implicitly in
contrast to physically surrendering actual money to God in the midst of worship
as an act of trust and generosity? Maybe
next we should encourage members to stay home Sunday morning and watch the video
stream of the service, since that’s clearly much “simpler” and more “user-friendly”
than having to get dressed, load the kids into the car, find a parking spot, and
get everyone where they’re supposed to be – only to turn around a little more than
an hour later and “reverse” the whole sequence (but now with kids that are
whiny and/or pumped up on cookies and kool-aid).
I realize that churches are going to do
what churches are going to do, and I have no power to stop them. I also realize that publications need money, and advertisements can be a helpful and lucrative source. But that fact in itself does not thereby
bless a practice of inviting a wolf into the sheepfold, even when the wolf is
spouting promises of fatter sheep. Every
church that purchases a system like this chooses to assume a fixed expense
(of monthly subscription and transaction fees to this vendor) in the sole hope
- but
without any guarantee whatsoever - of increasing revenue. Put another way, such a church chooses to
surrender real, actual money ONLY because it hopes that, by doing so, it will receive
even more money in return - even though it has absolutely no control or influence
over the results.
Which, when I stop to think about it, is a pretty accurate definition of “gambling.”
