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Tithing goes checkless

by: Rebecca Barnes, editor

Mario McGowan, president and CEO of Direct Tithing, said he is burdened to communicate the importance of stewardship to Christians, a message many have missed. According to a 2003 Barna Research study, tithing decreased 62 percent in one year, from 8 percent of churchgoers giving 10 percent of their income to the church in 2001, to just 3 percent during 2002.

McGowan said he was deeply disturbed when he heard those statistics. "I really wept, I cried, my heart was broken," he said.

McGowan is an ordained minister and a former businessman. He said Direct Tithing was a God-given mission that he undertook in August of 2002.

"I believe in my heart that God has commissioned Direct Tithing to reestablish the covenant. Tithing is all about a covenant. That was God’s system to fund the kingdom of God," he said. "The electronic piece of it brings it into the 21st Century."

With more than 60 percent of all workers in the United States receiving their paychecks through an automatic deposit and an increasing number of consumers paying their bills through electronic funds transfer, more and more churches are checking into checkless offerings.

McGowan said the EFT system, available online for both churches and church members, simply replaces 52 decisions to give a weekly offering with one decision to enroll in the process. Church members can sign up online to tithe automatically weekly, monthly or bi-monthly through an EFT from their bank account. And Direct Tithing provides cards for members to put into the offering plate that indicate their gift has been made electronically.

McGowan claims that electronic giving eliminates the lag in offerings most churches experience from May to September. With electronic giving, the money doesn’t go on vacation.

"I believe this is God’s way of saying, ‘I want my people to be consistent and faithful,’" McGowan said.

Other churches use envelopes and the post office for out-of-town offerings, but systems such as Direct Tithing are just as simple and cost-effective. The cost incurred by the churchgoer for service membership and transaction fees tops out around $20 a year.

Randy Tompkins, stewardship and cooperative program director for the Louisiana Baptist Convention, said his church, Calvary Baptist of Alexandria, La., offers EFT to church members, but only about two dozen of the 1,700 contributors opt to use it.

Other churches, such as the American Baptist Church USA, some Catholic parishes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, have adopted electronic giving more wholeheartedly.

While Southern Baptists have been more reticent to implement new giving technology, they are also concerned about tithing in their churches in general. Tompkins said that while they have seen an increase in giving over the past 12 years, that giving is coming from additional members giving less than 10 percent. “Under 3 percent of a family’s income is tithed on average,” Tompkins said.

But many families in churches generally don’t tithe at all. Church consultant Lyle Schaller recently reported about 15 percent of church members give 85 percent of the offering.

Direct Tithing’s McGowan uses a formula based on an average salary of $36,000 and an average church size of 100 to point out that even a smaller church would be making $360,000 annually if all its members were tithing.

Instead, the average donation by adults who attend U.S. Protestant churches is about $17 a week, according to Barna.

McGowan said the lack of giving contradicts Scripture. Second Corinthians 8:7 states, “But just as you excel in everything … see that you also excel in this grace of giving.”