how does your congregation raise money?

[cellio]

I'm interested in answers from all religions/denominations. (Please identify which you're talking about.)

I grew up going to a Roman Catholic church. Collection baskets were passed at Sunday services -- once for the church and, often, a second time for a special purpose (ranging from helping $disaster victims to buying a pipe organ). Members of the congregation were issued envelopes with an identifying number (not name) on the outside, so you could put cash in and still get a tax receipt at the end of the year. Children in religious school were also issued (small) envelopes; they were also numbered and I assume our coins were tallied with our parents' envelopes, but I never asked. Of course, some people (like visitors) just put cash directly into the basket, too.

This always struck me as dicey; how could an organization with regular expenses like heat and salaries and a building manage finances that way, other than by assuming that this year will be like last year? It occurs to me now that there might have also been a pledge system that I, as a child, never saw, but I'm just guessing here.

One of the things I found really refreshing about synagogues is that they have dues. When I found out about this I did a little happy-dance. Yay, no more guesswork! Join the congregation, get a bill, pay it, and everything's good. Right? (Aside: we couldn't pass a basket at Shabbat services even if we wanted to, because doing business and handling money are forbidden on Shabbat.)

Now that I've been part of congregational life for a while, though, I've realized that that's not the end of it by far. There are still special appeals, of course (we help $disaster victims too, after all), but there are also endowment campaigns, special appeals to supplement dues, fancy fund-raising dinners (with ad books, to draw contributions from non-members/businesses), and a myriad of other fund-raising activities. (I know that some congregations have a building fund with its own rules for member payments; we don't, so I don't really know how this works.) There are also fees for certain activities; the biggie here is religious school, which is a separate payment on top of dues.

My congregation -- and I assume this is true pretty much everywhere -- never turns anybody away for lack of ability to pay dues. We'll negotiate a reduced rate, sometimes quite nominal. Some of the other fund-raising is specifically to offset that. A draw from the endowment each year also offsets some expenses. I don't know if the proportion of our expenses paid for by dues is public information so I won't say, but we try to reduce that proportion by building the endowment -- through fund-raising, of course.

All of this makes me wonder when we risk hitting the point of "fund-raising fatigue" for members (I didn't grow up with this as normal so my perspective is unreliable), and what the mix of dues to fund-raising tends to be like elsewhere, and what other (fiscally-responsible) approaches are out there. What do others do? Are synagogues unique in having dues, or do churches have that too (perhaps packaged differently)? If you're a member of a church, does someone sit down with you and say "we expect you to donate $X this year"?

So, readers who belong to congregations of any sort, how do your congregations pay for expenses?

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

The property ownership situation is a bit more complex for the Diocese of Pittsburgh to meet various requirements in civil and canon law. Other dioceses probably have different arrangements based on local laws or administrative decisions. As best I can recall, there is a non-profit institute that owns all of the property. Parishes have at least one checking account at a bank of their choice for every day expenses. All savings must be deposited at a sort of credit union for the parishes. All borrowing also comes from there. One of the issues avoided by this arrangement would be if a parish couldn't pay it's mortgage, it would be a problem if a bank repossessed it before everything sacred was removed. Regarding ownership of money, it's the policy of the diocese that money stays with the parish. If a parish is merged, the surplus or debt of that parish goes to the new one.

The envelopes basically work as you recall, and believe it or not, the numbers are fairly stable week to week. There are fluctuations, of course. There are also seasonal differences (people often don't donate an envelope or make up the difference if they are away on vacation), and year to year trends. Each year, there is a campaign to assist each parish to pay it's part of the diocese's expenses, and it looks like there will be a multi-year capital campaign coming down the pike to help with more strategic goals of the diocese and the parishes (diocese coordinates, parishes raise money, certain percentage goes to diocese, rest goes to parish).

Fund raisers of various kinds are common depending on the parish. My current parishes do a lot of fund raising (bake sales, a huge festival, pierogi sales, fish fry, pancake breakfast, etc.), while my parish when I was a deacon did little. The fund raising is actually riskier than the weekly collections. Bad weather can severely impact the festival and we can lose a lot of money all at once. A local bridge is going to be closed for 9 months of construction, so we'll feel impact from that as far as fund raisers because people who might otherwise come to the various events now have to drive 20 minutes out of their way. Most of our parishioners already live on this side of the bridge so that doesn't affect collections the same way.

Many larger parishes are starting to have online giving programs where you can set up an automatic deduction from your checking account. Clearly, that stabilizes the numbers even more. Online giving hasn't (and in my opinion won't) completely replace passing the basket or equivalent.

[cellio]

Thanks for explaining that. I hadn't realized that I was seeing local variation. (I only ever had experience with the one diocese, which basically boils down to childhood memories + more-recent local news that talks about church closings and stuff like that.)

Do you have a sense of how much of the income tends to come from the collection/envelopes verses the fund-raising activities like pierogi sales and fish fries? (I'm not counting campaigns in the latter; they're a different sort of thing and presumably less frequent.)

I agree that replacing the baskets with online giving would be a bad idea. Online giving can supplement, but a physical collection does a few things: (1) gives you access to irregular contributions (visitors etc who won't go online), (2) makes the activity visible (particularly important for educating kids), and (3) acts as a "feeder" for kids (envelope with coins now, substantial recurring donation later when you grow up).

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

At the one parish, fund raising is probably around 20% of income, and we need it to cover expenses (which is a problem due to the uncertainty of fundraising). For the other parish, I only have anecdotal evidence. My mother, who lives on the other side of the state, encountered a lady whose mother used to belong to the parish. Her statement was, "That church was built on pierogi." I believe it. They've been selling pierogi for decades, and their pierogi is excellent.

Catholic schools are expected to raise a certain percentage of their funds through tuition, and a lesser percentage through fund raising (maybe 15%?), a parish that sponsors a school is only allowed to use about 35% of it's funds toward the school each year. The idea is that it is great and right for the parish to support the school, but the school shouldn't take so much money from the parish that the parish itself ends up in financial trouble.

Those are good reasons for continuing the collection basket. I would also add that there is a theological reason. The part of the Mass when the collection takes place is no accident. It is when the altar is prepared for the sacrifice, so the bread and wine is brought up. Each of us is really supposed to spiritually place our troubles and blessings on the altar also so as to offer them to God. Taking the the collection at that point adds a physical dimension that helps point to the spiritual reality. A thousand years ago (and more recently than that in various places I'm sure), people would bring up farm animals and products to give to the church for their use and for distribution to the poor. The new translation of the Mass that began this past Advent brings the individual aspect of the shared sacrifice out more clearly because the priest now says, "Brothers and sisters, pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father." (Before he said "our sacrifice".) You lose something from that if you donate online and aren't making some kind of sacrifice at that point. But in some areas, the losses due to vacations can be significant, and online giving catches that.