“Let’s skip the giving moment and have it in the announcements”

One of the first things that became clear after the lockdown measures, is that a moment to give during the church service was suddenly less self-evident to churches. We completely understand that if the collection moment was known as passing collection plates or bags around, this whole concept is difficult to have as a part of an online streamed service without any physical attendees. We’ve seen a lot of churches stop having a giving moment at all or reducing it to only mentioning how thankful they are for everybody who started or maintained their standing order or even increased them. Sometimes it is combined with making giving and options to give within the context of online services part of the slides which are shown before the service starts and after the service ends. We’ve seen how eliminating a giving moment during service negatively impacts the giving behaviour in those churches. We also know from validations we’ve done around giving behaviour that there is a potential risk in having your givers only give by standing order. But how can you solve this? You could drive to each member’s house with the collection plate, but we need to think about the environment sometimes! Even with partly physical services passing a collection plate or bag around is a serious risk in spreading the virus. We understand the difficulty and that, with the strange situation taking on longer and longer, it is becoming more important to find ways which do work.

As we know an effective collection, which appreciates the needs of a giver to give in the moment when it is most relevant to them, requires a dedicated giving moment during the service, we make sure that we help you find a way to do that, fitting your church services, your congregation and your resources. We provide you with everything you need in content like videos, slides to show and even physical material to hand over. But we also help you with guidelines, graphics and an interactive guidance program in which you will learn, experiment, evaluate and get inspired by us and other church leaders joining the same guidance program. Other church leaders said that especially this guidance program was vital to make it work.