In the past 50 years much about the Church has changed, but one thing has remained essentially the same: The collection. When my grandfather was my age and my father was my age, their parishes did the collection basically the same way we do now: passing a basket up and down the aisles. Which is fine on one hand, because it teaches us that we should bring the sacrifices of our first fruits, the blessings God gives us, to the altar, where we receive the Sacrifice of Our Lord as a gift in the Eucharist. On the other hand, passing the basket no longer meets the needs of either the parish or most parishioners.

That’s where online giving comes in. There are several reasons why we might want to take advantage of it.

For one thing, online giving makes it easy to be an intentional giver. My wife and I, when we’re making our monthly budget, can make decisions about how we divide up our financial pie among our obligations, including our charitable giving. We can say that our first fruits go to the Lord and this is how much we will give. The rest goes to pay our bills, to save for the future, and everything else. But we return to the Lord a portion of what he has given us first. In the old way of doing the collection, we often found ourselves giving whatever happened to be floating in our wallets or was left over in our checking account fter everybody else got paid.

Online giving also helps us to plan. Almost all of our bills are monthly and for us, the paychecks are bimonthly, while for other people they might be monthly. But for most people, our financial cycle, our bills that are due, goes from month to month, not week to week. When planning our budget it’s much easier to include online giving next to monthly bills like the cable bill and the mortgage because we are planning for it.

Another benefit would be no more checks or cash. Whoever wrote the song lyric “Easy like Sunday morning” never saw my house on Sunday morning. Getting out the door on to Mass with 5 kids is hard enough without remembering what I did with the offering envelopes last week and where the checkbook is. In fact, for me–and perhaps for many of you–the only check I wrote any more was the weekly offering. Almost every bill has moved online these days. Even our day-to-day purchases go on our debit card instead being paid by cash. Come Saturday evening or Sunday morning, why should that convenience stop?

Online giving gives you the control. Most online giving solutions, like the one we use at this parish, give you a website that you can logon to, where you can change your giving amount at any time and generate reports of your giving. (You can certainly also use your bank’s online bill-paying solution or another third-party electronic transfer service.)

Online giving also benefits the parish. Because online giving is automatic, even when you’re on vacation or if a big snowstorm hits on a Sunday or you’re just too sick to get out, you can still continue your support of the parish. A couple of years ago, it seemed every weekend was another big storm that prevented a lot of people from getting to Mass on Sunday and while weall mean to make up our missed gifts, inevitably what gets in the basket eventually just doesn’t make up for what was lost. That can create a serious financial hole for the parish.

Even when I’m not here on a Sunday, Fr. Chip still has to turn on the lights, heat or cool the church, pay the salaries of the employees, buy groceries for the rectory, plow snow from the parking lot, and all the other myriad items in the budget. According to national studies, the average Catholic gives to his parish 40 weeks per year, when you count all the times they’re on vacation, home sick, unable to travel due to weather, traveling for work and that sort of thing. Even if no one increased the amount they normally give per Sunday by a cent, but began to give intentionally through online offertory, Fr. Chip would have 30% more funds to pay those massive fuel bills we get each winter and for the days and days of snowplowing like we had last winter.

And when people are giving intentionally, Fr. Chip can plan better. Under the current system, Fr. Chip has to guess at how much money he will have to meet the parish’s obligations. If you’ve ever worked as a waiter or bartender or someone who lives off of tips, you know how difficult it can be to plan for the future when you don’t know how much money you’ll have week to week. But with online giving, he will be able to budget more accurately because he knows that from week to week, the offering will be about the same. (Again, with online giving you can change the amount you give at any time, but in general, the total from the whole parish will stay within a small ballpark.)

Now, rest assured, the traditional basket is not going away. No one is going to be forced to switch to online giving, although the benefit to the parish will increase as more of us participate. And there is a teaching aspect for our children to that basket going up and down the aisles, a visual reminder at every Mass that we return to God the first part of all the blessings he has given to us. To help with that, the parish provides cards at the entrances so that parishioners who give online can participate with a symbolic act of bringing their gifts to the altar during the offertory.

For more information about online giving, please visit our page about it on this web site or contact the Parish Office.

photo credit: St. Blaize via photopin cc