A fellow minister posted on Facebook last week that their church was experiencing financial shortages due to the pandemic. He had asked the church for permission to begin seeking part-time employment to supplement his salary. He did not say if the church had reduced his salary due to their financial situation or not. The church allowed him to seek that employment. He lives in an area with a lot of jobs available so he should not have a problem finding one. The challenge will be whether the church can make the shift to being led by a bivocational pastor.
Most of the church pastors I speak with tell me their churches are doing OK financially during the pandemic. Although their giving is down a little, their expenses are also down. I suppose the ones who are struggling the most are those churches whose budgets consist mostly of pastoral salaries and benefits. If 80 percent of a church's budget goes to the pastor and/or staff there is not a lot of room to cut expenses without impacting the minister. Denominational leaders may want to study how many of their churches were forced to allow their ministers to become bivocational due to financial giving issues related to Covid. It might serve as a predictor of the future for those churches.
Unless a church has a number of people unemployed due to Covid there really is not a good reason there should be a significant decrease in giving. Those members of the congregation who are not attending services due to the pandemic are not prevented from mailing their giving to the church. The giving of our tithes and offerings should not be limited to just when we attend services in person. Every church with a web presence should offer online giving options to make it even easier for people to give. When the pandemic started many churches found how easy it was to begin offering their worship service online, and they will find that it is just as easy to make online giving available.
As I wrote last week in this blog, things are not going to return to "normal" any time soon, if ever. That includes the way we receive the offering. Many churches, rather than passing the offering plate, now place them in the back of the sanctuary. That's a different way of doing this for many people, and new things are easily forgotten. There is nothing wrong with reminding people occasionally of those offering plates. Just this past Sunday I realized I still had my offering in my shirt pocket when the treasurer came to collect the money from the plate near where I was standing. People start talking with one another, as I was doing, and simply forget the offering plate is there.
If providing online giving options and reminding people of the offering plates in the back of the church doesn't improve the giving in your church, then it's probably past time to preach on stewardship. This should be part of your annual sermon planning anyway. Despite what some people believe, there is nothing wrong or improper about sermons on stewardship.
Giving our tithes and offerings is part of our worship the same as our prayers, singing and other things we might do in our worship service. We should never be embarrassed about inviting people to worship God through their giving.
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