I am going to shock you by telling you why you don’t want people giving cash to your church!
WHAT?! 50% of people when asked what method of giving they prefer to use said, “giving cash AT church.”
The question above came from the recent LifeWay study on tithing entitled, “Churchgoers Say They Tithe, But Not Always to the Church.” LifeWay Study on tithing In addition to asking questions about tithing they asked HOW people liked to give and 50% said, cash AT church.
SO, THAT IS BAD, HOW???
How much cash do you have on you right now? The younger you are the more likely it is you carry little to no cash upon your person. More and more even in public our transactions are electronic rather than cash. Are you with me? Good.
Now let’s take all those folks who are walking around with little to no cash in their pockets and deposit them into your weekend services. Let’s plug in the survey results…
- First, let’s make a guess on how many of them will even give. Let’s be generous and say 50% decide to give. Here is what we now know for a fact.
- 50% of those that are going to give at church will do so by cash. Therefore,
- Their gifts will be small and their cumulative overall giving as a group will be small. Here is how I can project that…
- 76 % of people say they keep less than $50 on hand and nearly half say they keep less than $20. That is according to a CNBC study done in 2017.
- LifeWay’s study found that about half of those that attend church regularly tithe. I suppose you could give a $50 dollar bill weekly and it might for some equate to 10%. Yet my point here is that the majority of cash gifts, if not nearly all of them, are NOT based upon tithe giving BUT by how much cash I have on me.
- So, if those people have little to no cash on their person, and what cash they do have is in small denominations, it stands to reason that cash givers give less than others. So…
Smart churches offer multiple ways by which people can give AND they teach the value of generosity to life changing churches!
Practically what this means is…
- Having a robust online site that gives multiple ways by which people can give.
- Consistently pointing people to that site AND encouraging them to set up automated giving.
- Setting up text giving as an easy option for giving. Want to gain Millennial donors? Then be where they are and they are rarely without a smartphone with them!
- Making each and every offering time worshipful and meaningful by helping people understand that a gift given to your church changes the world for good. If you don’t believe that then why are you there?
That is just a good start of many things you need to do to get people further down the generosity path at your church. Why?
Because God gave you a vision and mission and its worth giving to support it.
Mark Brooks – The Stewardship Coach