MABANK, Texas (BP) — Online giving presents challenges for Grace Community Church in the small town of Mabank, Texas, where many are accustomed to dropping checks in the offering basket or in a pinch, mailing them through the U.S. Postal Service.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forces the church to restructure worship and establish online giving, pastor Michael Cooper told Baptist Press most of his members are not accustomed to tithing and giving online.
“I don’t know exactly how the online giving will go, simply because it’s not necessarily our demographic,” Cooper told BP. “We have faithful tithers, faithful givers, but a lot of them don’t use the internet for giving or even paying bills. We’re still very traditional; pass the plate, things like that.
BP talked Tuesday (March 17) with Cooper and pastors of two other rural churches. Each expressed similar sentiments.
“Online giving is something I’ve wanted to do at the church for a while,” said Marc Ira Hooks, pastor of First Baptist Church of Branch in Princeton, Texas. “Just to make things easier for people who are technologically savvy and who do live their lives online. But (I) was reluctant to make that jump because not a lot of my congregation falls into that category.”
The church averages about 30 worshipers, according to the Annual Church Profile, which qualifies it as a “normative size” congregation in Southern Baptist life, according to Hooks. Noting the community, just south of Princeton, doesn’t even have its own zip code, he added “it’s too early to tell” how members will respond to online giving.
Pastor Allen Murray of Centerville Baptist Church in Kelly, N.C., said Tuesday (March 17) he expected to have online giving set up by day’s end. But he said the church’s location “in a very rural part” of eastern North Carolina could pose challenges.
“I think it could pose some great difficulty,” Murray said of online giving. “I know for a lot of our folks, they’re probably not going to use it because they just don’t have internet. They don’t have computers. They don’t have smartphones.”
More than 80 percent of Southern Baptist churches report a Sunday attendance of fewer than 125, according to the Bivocational & Small Church Leadership Network, and some are in rural communities. Many could have continued to hold church services without defying a recent recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against gatherings of more than 50 people, but the newest recommendation against gatherings of more than 10 people impacts even the smallest of congregations.
Source: Baptist Press
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