The End of the Offering Plate

One Sunday morning, while leading worship, I accidentally skipped over the offering in the order of service. As we were singing the final hymn, a deacon ran up to me and said, “Before you say the benediction, don’t you think we should pass the plates? You, of all people, should have an interest in not forgetting that.”

We both had a good laugh about it, but the incident reveals how strongly we have tied the financial well-being of the church to the vitality of the weekly worship service. Granted, there are sound theological reasons for this, but there might be even better reasons for us to decouple the two. Consider the new church development where I currently serve:

For our first five years, we are being funded by our regional governing body. Those funds progressively decrease each year, which means that our contributions from new members must continuously increase. 

In the past, this system worked well for new churches. In a Christendom culture, it was assumed that Sunday morning worship would be the primary vehicle through which new members and financial giving would be generated. 

That has all changed in the post-Christian reality of the 21st century. New faith communities emerge more slowly, through a “try and fail and learn” type of approach. 

In our first two years, with most of our funding not dependent on worship offerings, we have felt free to experiment with new and creative ways of being church - and we have learned that expecting folks under the age of 50 to come to a “sit and pay” worship service is unrealistic. But there are other ways to reach them if we have the freedom to innovate.

As we enter our third year, however, we can feel that freedom evaporating. Our decisions are increasingly based on how to preserve and increase our Sunday morning offerings - which means we are focusing more on building up our “sit and pay” service as our central and defining practice.

More established churches who also wish to innovate face a similar dilemma, as primary givers are most often those who value traditional worship forms. What is really needed to evolve beyond the notion of “sit and pay” worship has no chance of happening as long as our financial health is tied to this practice.

In future posts, I will explore some ways churches are beginning to decouple giving and worship, and how it is giving them more freedom to find new pathways for the church of the 21st century.