The Giving Pages, Plate to Platform

A congregation's own ledger keeps the same arithmetic: a gift is a gift whether it lands in a plate, an envelope or a processing fee. Reston Presbyterian's give section, active from at least 2014 to 2017 in the archive, names three ways to send money and a fourth page for everything that is not money.

A congregation's own ledger keeps the same arithmetic: a gift is a gift whether it lands in a plate, an envelope or a processing fee.

The stated protocol

The ways-to-give page lists the channels in order. Weekend service: cash or a check in the offering plate during any service, name and address on the envelope so a donation can be credited for tax purposes. By mail: a check sent to 10610 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190, the church's street address, same tax-credit instruction. Online giving: a specific dollar amount deducted automatically from a bank account, credit card or debit card, run through a third-party platform named on the page, Faithstreet.com. The non-cash-giving page is a separate protocol again: the church will accept a non-cash gift, but only after an officer of RPC agrees the gift serves the church's purpose, and the valuation is the donor's job, not the church's.

What the record measures

The online-giving paragraph is the most specific instrument on the bench because it states its own cost. The page quotes Faithstreet's processing fees directly: 1.5% plus 30 cents per transaction from a bank account, 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction from a credit or debit card. That is a dated fee schedule for a named vendor for a specific vendor, not a vague mention of "fees apply." The page also promises a future feature, the ability to add a little extra to a gift to cover the fee so the church receives the full amount intended, which the archive catches as a plan rather than a finished product. The non-cash page measures intent rather than money: the church states plainly that it will not appraise a donated item, will not put an estimated value on the donor's receipt, and leaves fair-market valuation to the donor, and it cites IRS regulations for the receipt it does give: an acknowledgment with a brief description of the item.

The deviation

Captures of ways-to-give from 2014, 2016 and 2017 show the vendor name steady throughout; the fee numbers, read across the surviving captures, do not change either. What the archive cannot show is volume: no total raised through online giving, no split between plate and platform, no count of non-cash gifts accepted or declined. The giving pages document the rules of the game, never the score.

Held against the building campaign

This card sits next to the capital campaign on purpose. The building-campaign card recorded a single project's fundraising machinery, a thermometer, renderings, a dedicated push; this card records the standing infrastructure that ran underneath every ordinary week regardless of any campaign. One is a sprint with a visible finish line; the other is the plumbing that never stopped running. Reading them together shows a congregation that built both a one-time ask and a permanent system, and kept the instructions for each in public.

The non-cash clause as a small act of honesty

The non-cash page is short, but its central sentence does real work: "The church is not responsible for appraisals and will not determine the fair value of donated property." The page adds that the estimated value will not appear on the receipt or on the donor's record of contribution, and that determining fair market value is the donor's responsibility. It declines, in writing, to put a number on a gift it did not appraise, and the bench records it as such.

What the fee schedule says about the era

The dated fee numbers are themselves a small clock. A 1.5% plus 30 cents bank fee and a 3.5% plus 30 cents card fee, quoted together with a named vendor and a "plus up" option still described as coming "in the near future," fix what one platform charged this church between the 2014 and 2017 captures. Read next to the capture dates, the fee schedule dates the page's underlying technology the way the sermon archive's dated files dated the sermon library: the instrument changes with its decade even when the institution using it does not.

Verdict

Documented: three cash channels with a full fee schedule for the one that costs anything, and a non-cash policy that puts valuation squarely on the donor. Not shown: how much moved through any of the three channels, or how many non-cash gifts were ever accepted. The instructions are complete; the ledger itself never left the building.