I tend to get WMDs and
RMDs confused. Not the realities, but the initials. I try to keep them straight
by remembering that RMDs are only in January, while WMDs seem to threaten all
the time.
Because of RMDs, churches
are going to have an increasingly hard time working out a way for people to
respond to God’s call during the worship service. Most preachers settled for
putting the offering at the end and claiming that we are putting ourselves into
the plate via the symbols of our dollars or pledge envelopes.
Helen and I sit about ¾ of
the way back at St. Mark’s, yet when the plate gets to us, it has only a couple
of envelopes and a stray tenner or two. We pass it on without putting anything
in it, ourselves, except for the first Sunday, when Helen puts our month’s
pledge in. Not many people are committing themselves via their plate
contributions.
It gets even worse as more
and more people make their contributions online, and now when old people like
we make contributions for the while year by having our pensional Required
Minimum Distributions given directly to the church, and various charities, for
tax reasons.
It also makes it tough on
someone like the man in Hoopeston, IL, where I once pastored. He rarely came to
church. Maybe twice a year, when he was between wives. I don’t know if he came
to church to ask God to forgive him for the last wife, or to look for a new
one. I tried to be welcoming to him, but he didn’t show much interest. Until
tax time.
He came to ask me to
verify to the tax people for him that he had given $2,000 in loose offerings to
the church in the previous year. I always avoided knowing anything about who
gave how much in a church, but it sounded a bit farfetched. I was aware just by
taking the offering plates from the ushers on Sunday morning and placing them
on what we called the altar table that they were filled mostly with pledge
envelopes and checks—not many loose offering bills.
But I, like almost all
people, have a “truth bias.” We assume people are telling the truth unless
there is evidence to prove them wrong. [1] So I asked the secretary for the
financial record book—not the one with individual giving, but the totals by
categories. It turned out that in the previous year, the entire congregation
had not come close to giving $2000 in loose offerings. It was closer to $1,000…
for everybody combined!
“Well,” he said, “it was
worth a try.” He walked out, and I never saw him again. He knew that at least
for him, I no longer had a truth bias.
John Robert McFarland
1] Take a look at Malcolm
Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers for an excellent exposition of the truth
bias, and why it is a good thing, even though we sometimes get scammed because
of it.
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