For Wilshire Baptist Church
Thursday was North Texas Giving Day – a day when more than 3,000 nonprofit organizations in the Dallas/Fort Worth region opened their coffers and invited us to support their activities. We’ve been hearing about if for weeks through social media, traditional media and mail. Folks could give early if they wanted to, but Thursday was the actual big day to step up and support the causes they believe in.
It’s a great program with a web site that makes it easy to give: just click the organizations you wish to support and follow the directions. It provides tallies and other data that gives one a sense of being part of a grand effort to make our immediate world a better place to live.
While a couple of dozen churches participate directly in North Texas Giving Day, most do not. Wilshire doesn’t participate, although some of the programs we are especially close to do, such as Grief and Loss Center of North Texas, Faith Commons, New Song Community Choir and Gaston Christian Center.
At Wilshire in recent years, we’ve made it easy to give to the work of the church through on-line giving: you can give whenever you wish, or you can set yourself up for a regular, automatic payment. And you can always give during the worship service on Sunday when we pass the offering plates.
We stopped passing the offering plates in worship during the Covid pandemic for obvious reasons, but we’ve resumed that, and I think it’s great. It’s a visual and physical reminder — as the plate is passed to us and we pass it to the next person — that the work of the church doesn’t happen on “a wing and a prayer” as the saying goes. There are real costs to what we do together, and through our giving to the church, we support the work of ministries and organizations both locally and abroad.
I’ve been an usher and plate-passer at Wilshire for decades, and for many years I was the so-called “usher captain” at 11 a.m. That meant I mostly stayed in the narthex and sent the ushers out to their assigned positions in the sanctuary. That role has been de-centralized in recent years, with more people serving as captain and more people ushering. I sign up when I can, but most Sundays I simply stop by and volunteer to collect in the balcony if needed.
In the balcony, ushers don’t so much pass the offering plate as offer it to the clumps of people sitting here and there. Some quietly let me know with their eyes or their body language that they don’t have anything to give, and I assume they’ve already given online, and that’s great. But in recent months, I’ve seen something very interesting happening: more children are putting money or envelopes in the offering plates. They come toward me, or their parents gesture to me, and I lean forward with the offering plate and they drop in their cash or change or envelope. The children are always smiling as they give – like they enjoy the process – and I try to remember to whisper “thank you” in return.
It’s a great thing to see, and a great practice for these children to participate in. They’re at an age when almost anything they do on a regular basis – including putting their gifts in the offering plate – can become a habit. In time, as they learn more about what the church does, they will begin to add discernment to the practice of giving. And hopefully, they’ll become life-long givers — to the church and to organizations doing good work and who appreciate their help on North Texas Giving Day.