Are Online LDS Tithing Payments Coming?

As a child I remember watching Bro. B in the ward clerk office typing up the weekly tithes and offerings reports on triplicate forms that used carbon paper. He was meticulous about destroying the discarded carbon paper because data could easily be read from those flimsy black sheets.

My turn came when I was called to serve as assistant ward clerk over finance in my young adult ward. By then we had modern typewriters that used an OCR font, but could also output other fonts. The triplicate forms we used were on carbonless NCR paper. But any mistake meant retyping the whole report.

By the time I was called to serve as a counselor in a bishopric, our ward clerk used an archaic DOS based text screen system for entering donation data. I quickly became the backup guy because I had experience in banking, accounting, and software development.

While serving in the bishopric we were upgraded to a GUI fat client called MLS (Member and Leader Services). It was slow and we still had to use a dial-up connection to transmit data to Church headquarters. But it was light years ahead of the system it replaced. It took years for data transfers to move to the internet. Actually, our local church building got internet capabilities a couple of years ago.

The Church has not always been quick to adopt new technologies. You wouldn't know by today's copious online resources that the Church was very cautious about developing a presence on the internet. The Church's first rudimentary site had only a handful of pages. I know from an inside source that every single word and image on every single page had to be personally approved by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve in the early days.

Back to the finance topic. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are commanded to pay a tithe, ten percent of their annual "increase." They are also admonished to pay other offerings, including a monthly fast offering equal to at least the amount of two meals not eaten during the fast. These funds are used to help the poor. A variety of proselyting, temple, and humanitarian donation categories are also available.

For most faithful church members in North America, paying church donations means cutting a check and filling out a donation slip by hand. Those slips are then manually transcribed into MLS by clerks, who also reconcile and account for donated funds, and then deposit the funds at a bank.

This system seems perfectly normal to most people over 50. But for those that have grown up making most payments electronically, it seems like the dark ages. Tevya Washburn reports on his Mormon Life Hacker site that the Church is running an online donation payment pilot in some stakes. Washburn even has a screen shot.

The system appears quite simple. The interface looks like the current donation slip. You have to link up a bank account. I doubt the Church will ever allow credit card payments. It seems like it would be antithetical to gospel teachings to use debt to pay tithes and offerings. But I wonder if the Church will ever accept something like PayPal payments. Maybe not, because I doubt the recipient can tell whether the PayPal source is a bank account or a credit card.

Many are fearful of online payments. As I understand it, they are mainly concerned about identity theft. But most of these people engage in all kinds of activities that create at least as much identity theft risk as direct online payments.

It would seem that the online donation system would simply offer another method for paying tithes and offerings. I suppose the standard system will continue to be available for many years into the future. At the very least, children that have no bank account will still need an avenue for their donations. But I don't foresee anyone being forced to use the online system. So everyone ought to be happy.

I look forward to the day that the Church's online donation system becomes more generally available. It will simplify life for many donors as well as for clerks and bishopric members.