A reader posted: The local non Denominational church has stopped taking cash collection and has asked all members to set up a standing order (direct debit) with their bank. I mentioned this to a friend, and he told me his Uniting Church is electronic giving only. My own church offers both the standard collection bag for cash, and you can give online if you wish to. Would it not be consistent to not go to electronic giving if you preached sermons out of Revelation that concerned the whole new world order, pressure to conform and so on?
What would be a reasonable and respectful response to churches that wish to be electronic funds only?
The cash collection was quietly retired when my church returned to meetings in person after the Covid period. I can’t remember noticing it. My family had been giving electronically for many years. But clearly, many Christians do see when a church goes cashless.
There were hundreds of responses to this post.
Some were like this one: “I would leave. People should give anonymously. Electronic donations leaves you open to being judged or treated differently depending on how much you donate. $2 from someone struggling is equal to $50 from someone who is not.”
And others were like this: “It’s my understanding that you can talk to God anywhere, anytime so therefor you don’t need to go to church.”
With others implying that churches are not worth going to.
“Most Christian churches in Australia are dead and asleep at the wheel… And self interested in furthering themselves not the eternity of their brethren and really educating themselves to the bible and their members the relevance of what is predicted in the Bible that applies to today… Just look at how many bowed to the covid plandemic…. Deception is alive and prevalent, their tax concessions for leadership are important and so is ignorance of many.”
The number of Christians who don’t attend church is a great topic – but not today’s.
Tackling the main objection of our poster – that electronic giving may not be confidential: at the church level, if someone is going through the banking records of your church, clearly the church has a problem. Most churches are flat-out doing everything else – I can’t imagine being at a church where someone would be asked to check those records.
There are churches – typical in the US – where people make “pledges” of how much they will give each year. That is a written pledge to the church office, rather than simply in their own heart and mind determining what they will give.
If many of us don’t openly pledge a fixed amount to our church, it is undoubtedly common practice to promise to give to a missionary, church planter or trainee, someone who has to raise their own salary. Mission societies often require missionaries to raise a certain amount before they can set off.
So many Christian forms of giving have built systems in which the person being supported knows who their supporters are and how much they give.
But perhaps our poster’s concern is reflected in Scripture: James warns us about favouritism. “Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?” (James 2:2–4, NIV)
Surely the same principle applies to giving. Should someone who gives more be treated better? Of course not. There is a case to have anonymous giving at the local church to avoid this.
I say, “of course not”, but some churches have publically celebrated their top givers. Perhaps they should reflect on whether this is using worldly methods to support their ministry.
It would be possible to ask the local church if they safeguard the giving records so that the ministry staff are kept unaware of who gives what. Our poster should probably do that rather than assume that that info is available to the church staff if electronic banking is used.
But then there’s a second objection, the “new world order” argument. That might sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is not entirely without foundation. In the United Kingdom, Core Issues Trust, a conservative Christian charity, was targetted by supporters of the LGBTQ+ community who accused them of “conversion therapy – the large UK bank Barclay’s closed Core Issues Trust accounts. After court action the bank paid Core issues trust over £20,000 to settle the case. In Yorkshire, a minister had an account closed after criticising the Yorkshire Building Society’s promotion of LGBTQIA causes. The practice does not appear to be widespread. Other claimed cases of ‘de-banking’ have been found to be about banks enforcing money laundering laws.
The most high-profile case was Nigel Farage, a key pro-Brexit leader. He was “de-banked by Coutts, an up-market division of the big NatWest banking group. NatWest and the BBC have apologised to him for statements that he had been de-banked over how much money was in his account. In fact, his politics were being taken into account. The BBC reported that Farage was the subject of a “40-page document flagged concerns that he was “xenophobic and racist”, and also questioned the reputational risk of having Mr Farage as a client.” The BBC said they had been misled by the CEO of NatWest when reporting Farage had been de-banked for his deposit level falling too low for Coutts. The Farage situation is likely to lead to banks being more tightly regulated in the UK, to ensure there is less de-banking.
Technology might be developing fast in areas that leave concerns about banking behind. A surveillance society using facial recognition could tell who attended church or participated in political activities. There are legitimate concerns about the surveillance state that goes well beyond banking.
The concerns about a cashless society chime in with disappointment that churches failed to adopt the Covid policy of people’s choosing. This amounts to going to church or not based on a perceived political stance of a church.
Is choosing a church for political reasons a good idea? It is not a Biblical one – which makes following the commands of Christ and promoting the gospel the criteria for a faithful church. Most of us will have to cope with a church where people with different views on newsworthy political topics crop up occasionally. Finding the person sitting next to you disappointing in some manner is the topic of one of the Screwtape letters – C. S. Lewises’ depiction of a senior devil instructing a junior on how to weaken or disillusion Christians.
Should a church’s stance on covid, or whether it goes cashless, be something that leads you to stay home? No. Go elsewhere – but there may be better reasons to do that. Perhaps the poster’s concerns about a cashless church-giving system will lead to uncovering something they should be concerned about. Asking whether giving is kept confidential might reveal that the minister likes to know who the more prominent givers are or a cavalier approach to a church admin. Who knows? There are good questions to raise about church giving, and you have a right to ask – in a respectful manner.
Image credit: Karolina Grabowska/ Pexels
missionaries
As a treasurer of a congregation where some choose to make direct debits to the Church Account, I am not aware that such debits can be identified other than by the bank divulging this detail. Privacy would preclude that from occurring. I am certainly not able to see who has made a direct debit.
Bear in mind also that it is not too long ago that congregations used numbered envelopes where it WAS identifiable from records kept when such envelopes were opened and collated after a service.