Cash or charge?

More and more parishes are doing this, and now there’s an item in a Palm Springs, California paper about it: giving parishioners the option of contributing via credit card:

You swipe a credit card to buy furniture, clothes and even fast food.

Now some local churchgoers can swipe for their offering, too.

Parishioners of at least three Coachella Valley churches – St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in La Quinta as well as St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church and Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Palm Desert – are joining some 8 million people across the country connected to parishpay.com.

The online service allows people to give regularly to their church by having an automatic withdrawal from their bank account or charged to a credit card. Members can also put parish pay deposit slips into the offering baskets during Mass.

“Two-thousand years ago, when people gave to the church, they gave wheat, they gave the goods they had,” said the Rev. Howard Lincoln of Sacred Heart. “Later on, money came into being, then checks came into being. Now we’re in the electronic age.

“It’s part of the evolution of giving.”

Sacred Heart plans to formally unroll the idea later this year. St. Francis started the online giving option on Sept. 8.

According to its Web site, ParishPay is the country’s largest religious donation and tuition handling organization. Churches, that use it have seen giving increase as much as 75 percent among enrolled parishioners.

But it comes at a price. ParishPay withholds $1 and 1 percent from each parishioner’s monthly transaction and passes the credit card charges along to the church.

ParishPay officials say the increase in giving more than covers the costs of the service.

Plus, there’s the biggest benefit: convenience.

“This (giving) is easier to do with our credit cards,” said Catherine Ault, a St. Francis member, who, for seven years wrote out checks, put them in envelopes and dropped them into the offering basket.

“You don’t have to write a check or find an envelope,” Ault said. “Sometimes the envelopes get misplaced.”

Footnote: my parish is investigating this system, and there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for it.