Most synagogues charge money for membership. People are usually free to attend Friday night/Saturday morning services without paying, but - as I understand it - anything more than that starts to get into ‘for an annual contribution’ realm. This is my limited, mostly second-hand experience with reform, conservative, and reconstructionist synagogues; I’m sure there are synagogues that don’t do it but it does seem to be common.
Is this ‘pay to pray’ idea unique to Judaism, or do other religious groups operate on similar models? I know about collection plates in some christian denominations, but I’ve always been led to believe it’s both wholly optional and meant to be wholly anonymous.
Really? I had no idea, that’s quite interesting in a number of ways I won’t get into.
But from my experience with Christian churches, while they don’t require you to pay, there is strong pressure to give at least some of your money to the church. Most churches just pass around ‘collection plates’ at service and you toss some money in there. And believe you me, it gets noticed when you continually let it pass you by. But more in a church gossip sense than about getting in trouble.
And, on the other hand, you always have those people who get gossiped about because they go out of their way to make it obvious they are slipping in a hundred.
I’m sure there are some churches that do something like a membership fee. Like those big evangelical churches named things like “Church of the Holy Jesus, LLC,” but your average church is going to ask for only voluntary tithing.
Personally, if I go to a place of worship, I want a place of worship, not a place of business.
Catholics, and maybe other christians, have a tradition called tithing. A tithe is your payment to the church. It has been understood that this amount is ten percent of whatever you make, although it is not mandatory.
Most synagogues, IIRC, don’t charge for worship, so much as classes and events. Keep in mind, in the Jewish community, synagogues are often centers of more than just worship. They hold functions, teach classes, etc.
It’s not really ‘pay to pray,’ it’s more ‘pay to get taught Hebrew for your [bar/bat] Mitzvah.’ I could be wrong, because I’m not at all religious, and the only time I’ve been to synagogue (in my recollection) was for a friends Bat Mitzvah.
I know that there are certain Evangelical Christian churches that charge 10+% for membership – and it is mandatory. There was one in Central Columbus.
The little church I attended growing up was a Reformed Church. There where no regular dues or fees for membership. But if you asked to become a member, or where approached to become one; they would give you a box of white donation envelopes. And once a year asked you to fill out a donation form of what you would be donating for the next year. This was to help with there bookkeeping and budget planing. There was no pressure on amounts or penalties if you didn’t meet your projected donations.
From my experience, if you where attending enough to become a member, you saw the expenses the church had and wanted to donate. You where probably attending their picnics, baseball outings and other events.
Expenses where: Church maintenance, The Sunday School, The Cemetery, The Manse, the Ministers salary, a car allowance for the minister, and dues to the hierarchy the Reformed Church of America
There where about 150 registered members. Weekly attendance was about 80. I would say the regular die hards’, about 30, who attended and organized every event Tithed. The rest, way below tithing. All middle class people.
We where usually just barely making budget, and some times under budget
I’m told that Mormon and Unitarian churches have a very formal 10% tithing arrangement. At our Catholic church, my dad used to just flip in a $20 every week (raised to $50 in his later years).
In John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (a novel loosely based on the Black Dahlia murders), some RCC priests discussed ways of goosing up the collection take and considered giving everybody envelopes with their names pre-printed on them and then publicizing how much each parishioner gave. That might have happened in the 40s, but never when I went to church in the 60s-80s.
When I moved to North Miami, the local parish had these signs about “registering with the parish” and “parish fees” being compulsory and set at specific values. My head still tries to explode every time I think about it again…
One of my mother’s “regular charities” is her own parish (she’s registered with them to give them a yearly donaton through direct debit, as well as whatever she drops into the collection plate), but that’s 100% voluntary, she’s done it because it’s convenient for her and a way of donating that’s more secret than the plate (if she’s in Mass with my brother’s family, for example, and drops a note, Bro and SiL see how much it is, which is none of their business).
The people of Navarra (well, the Catholics, I imagine it didn’t apply to the Jews and Muslims for obvious reasons) got excommunicated a couple times during the middle ages for arguing with the Archbishop; at least in one of those occasions, it was because the Archbishop wanted a 10% income tax to be created, managed by the government and given directly to the Church. I don’t know what was the argument in the other cases, but in all of them Rome told the Archbishop to stop behaving like an ass and apologize.
I’ve never heard of paying being a requirement. In the churches and mosques I have been to, there was either a plate passed around or some sort of box near the door to deposit money.
In our church (Disciples of Christ) there are no membership fees. Anyone is welcome to attend services and other functions. Anyone is welcome to join as a member.
The collection plate is passed at each service. Members are encouraged to make an annual pledge (as mentioned above, this is a great help in budgeting). Many members mail in their contributions rather than putting them in the collection plate.
One requirement of serving an official function in the church - being a deacon, elder, or officer - is a certain level of giving. I don’t know what that level is, but I do know that it’s less than a traditional 10% tithe. My impression is that it’s not a hard and fast mathematical rule so much as looking for an indication that the giver has taken seriously the concept of contributing to the financial needs of the church.
I hope someone who knows more about this custom than I sees this and expands on it, because my own grasp of the custom is vague:
In colonial days certain pews in a church “belonged” to specific families (seems they even put “gates” at the end of such pews to keep out the riffraff). I presume this was some perk obtainable only by paying a fee for it. It’s the closest I can come to an example of a “membership fee”.
ETA: a search for “pew fees” brings up all sorts of relevant stuff. If I find anything worth linking to, I’ll let you know.
I’ve been a parishioner at a few different Catholic churches. I’m hardly religious, but I go often enough that I’m not really a lapsed Catholic either.
That said, we get collection envelopes sent to the home. We’re expected to show up each week with the envelope filled with cold hard cash. It’s not a requirement, and there’s no mandatory fee. But if you want any church service, you better have your envelope in the basket nearly every week for the last 6 months.
My wife is currently pregnant. When we want to have our kid baptized, we’ll have to apply / reserve a date. Someone will review our files and if we haven’t been going to church, I’m nearly certain they’d ask us to become “more active” before taking on the serious commitment of raising a child in the faith. IOW, get your damn envelope in the basket. What’s in the envelope would never be questioned openly. It would be sufficient just to put the envelope in with $1.
When I was married there were some issues with one parish authorizing us to get married in a different parish. The problem was that we didn’t really go to church more than a few times a year at our parish. We skirted the issue because the church in our childhood hometown (where both our families attended) had enough rapport (read: decades of contributions) with the local parish where we were to be married. Yet another side note… we didn’t attend the church where we were living because of the strange way they cut up the parish boundaries. We would’ve had to attend a church in a… um… uh… less desirable part of town. This was in Miami, FL. Basically, our choices were go to the “correct” church and risk life & limb, or attend the church that wasn’t ours and had only one (rather inconveniently timed) English speaking Mass that was held by a real old-school fire-&-brimstone asshat of a priest. Sorry for all the tangential info. I’m chatty this morning.
So there’s no membership fee, but there is a reasonable expectation of attendance to receive any church service.
I’ve never been to a church that required donations. For that matter, most of the pastors I know make it a point never to be in the room when the collections are being counted; they don’t want to be accused of treating a member differently because of what he does or doesn’t give.
Now, most churches around here will give their members numbered and pre-printed envelopes for tithes and offerings.
Don’t know about mormons, but I’ve never seen such a thing in the Unitarian churches I’ve been involved with. You get canvassed once a year, to pledge something. But there’s certainly no requirement. Lots of folks give ‘sweat equity’ to their local fellowship: formal members who do lots of work to maintain the building/grounds, run classes, etc.
The Quakers (at least, the one my daughter was involved in) have two classes: attenders and members. Anyone can be an attender and attend worship, and you can do it indefinitely. Members join the group and are expected to pay dues. Only members can vote on policy.
I got the impression that this sort of model is pretty common in most religious groups. If you’re a member of the congregation, you are expected to pay dues.
Forgot to add this too… the envelopes are tracked. IIRC, they have bar codes on them, but I may be mixing up my current church with a different one. I know a friend in FL went to a Catholic church that not only had bar codes on the envelopes, but published a lot of revealing, guilt-inspiring collection statistics in the weekly newsletter. I found that rather distasteful.
Mormons are supposed to give 10%, but not in a collection plate, and it’s all voluntary. You put cash or check into an envelope with a receipt detailing what sort of money it is–you can give tithing, fast offerings (food for the poor), humanitarian aid, or other particular funds. Hand the envelope to one of three people whose job it is to take them or mail it in. All the money is carefully entered and accounted for, and no one but the financial clerk and the bishop knows what you gave. At the end of the year, you go to tithing settlement, where they hand you an itemized list of everything you gave, ask you to verify that it’s all correct, and give you a list for your records. Then they ask you to define yourself as a full or partial tithe payer–full is a complete 10% of whatever you earned, which may be nothing at all. The end.
At every church I’ve ever been a member of, it works out like this.
You can hang out at it, but never “join.” IOW, you show up every Sunday, get to know people, go to the open events, etc. But you’re never officially on the membership rolls or anything like that.
If you decide to join, they’ll hand you a box of envelopes or ask you to pledge some amount. But if you tell them you don’t want to pledge, and just make contributions, I’ve never seen anyone pressured further. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t some churches that don’t try high-pressure arm-twisting, but I haven’t experienced it.) So there’s no real “pay to pray.”
Member or non-member, if you want to use church property for a reception, wedding, funeral, etc. you’ll probably have to pay a “building fee” just like you would for any facility. Sometimes, the church won’t rent out facilities to non-members, or the fee is waived for members “in good standing” but that’s really a separate issue.
In my small Episcopal church, you only have to claim you are a member to be a member and you don’t even have to proclaim it to anyone else. They give budget status updates about 2 times a year and you don’t have to give anything and almost nobody tithes in the purest sense of 10% of income. They do ask that regular attendees give a contribution estimate for the entire year for budgeting purposes but you don’t have to give even after you signed up for it especially if you have unfortunate life events with no questions asked.
I only found out about the Jewish system a couple of years ago and it isn’t the same for most Christian churches. No one is going to corner you about the money. It is supposed to be about free giving and the church making due with that.
Maybe that is why those Jewish people are so damned rich. They have to get a good job to afford those Temple fees. I kid. Episcopalians are generally wealthy as well but it is just a different style.
