Church Installs “Giving Kiosks”

Orginally published on Thursday, October 05, 2006 at 6:46 AM
by Todd Rhoades

Pastor Marty Baker and Stevens Creek Church, in Augusta, GA have installed three "Giving Kiosks": a sleek black pedestal topped with a computer screen, numeric keypad and magnetic-strip reader. Prompted by the on-screen instructions, church members can perform a ritual more common in quickie marts than a house of God: swiping your credit card and making your donation. One member said, "I paid for gas today with a card, and got lunch with one. This is really no different." Or is it?...

Baker came up with the kiosk idea a couple of years ago. He had just kicked off a $3 million building drive but noticed that few people seemed to keep cash in their wallets anymore for the collection plate.

So he began studying the electronic payment business. He designed his machine with the help of a computer programmer who attends Stevens Creek and found ATM companies willing to assemble it for him. In early 2005, he introduced the first machine at his church.

Since then, kiosk giving has gradually gained acceptance among his upper-middle-class flock. The three kiosks are expected to take in between $200,000 and $240,000 this year — about 15 percent of the church’s total donations.

“It’s truly like an ATM for Jesus,” Baker said.

This summer, Baker and his wife, Patty, began selling the devices to other churches through their for-profit company, SecureGive. They are its only employees, but a handful of contractors help them custom-tailor the machines for churches. The Bakers charge between $2,000 and $5,000 for the kiosks. And a card-processing company gets 1.9 percent of each transaction; a small cut of that goes to SecureGive.

So far, seven other congregations have installed or ordered the machines. All of them are Protestant, and most are in the South. If the idea takes off and makes the Bakers rich, Patty says they will thank the Lord — and give a significant sum to their church.

Electronic options
The concept is in its infancy, but it is part of a broader attempt among houses of worship to boost donations using modern technology. Among the most popular are “e-tithing” systems, which allow churchgoers to set up automatic contributions from their bank accounts — much as they would their Netflix dues.

But Baker — a 45-year-old preacher who grew up in the Pentecostal churches of South Carolina — sees a more dramatic change afoot in the culture of church-giving, as Americans increasingly turn to plastic for their everyday expenditures. He says the next few years could be comparable to another upheaval centuries ago, when offerings of grain and animals were replaced with what was then the newfangled medium of money.

“I’ll bet that caused a stir, too,” he said, chuckling.

Reservations
The Bakers have heard naysayers at trade shows mutter disapproval of the kiosks: Some church leaders apparently fear that a technology so closely associated with commerce might come across as crass.

Those kinds of reservations emerged in Baton Rouge, La., before Baker went into business. About three years ago, the Roman Catholic diocese there worked with a Canadian company to produce a machine that would accept bank-card donations from churchgoers. Church officials hoped to place it in the Cathedral of St. Joseph, an imposing Gothic Revival building near the Mississippi River that dates to the 1850s.

It’s not an Aerosmith kind of place. Church officials eventually changed their minds.

“I think that when it actually came time to put a kiosk in the back of a cathedral, it just wasn’t quite, well — I’d like to say ‘kosher,’ but we’re Catholic,” said Mark Blanchard, the stewardship director for the diocese.

FOR DISCUSSION: What do you think?  Would you ever consider a “Giving Kiosk” in your church?

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Hi... I'm Todd Rhoades. I'm a Christ-follower, husband, father and I love to connect leaders with other leaders. Hopefully you'll find something here at MMI you like and will return often. If you want, you can find out more about me or follow my every step on Twitter.

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