Recurring gifts are what most small churches actually run on. They arrive in January when attendance does not, and one member setting one up is worth more than a good Sunday.
Frequencies
Weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Those are the five on the give page. Monthly is what most people choose; every two weeks suits anyone paid fortnightly and is worth mentioning to a congregation that gets paid that way. There is no twice-a-year option for recurring gifts.
Why a recurring gift needs an account
A one-time gift needs nothing: a visitor can give in under a minute with no account at all. A recurring gift requires the giver to sign in, and that is deliberate rather than an obstacle.
A commitment that renews every month has to be something the giver can change or stop themselves, at 11pm, without finding a phone number. An account is what makes that possible. The alternative (recurring gifts only the church office can cancel) is the arrangement people rightly distrust.
Worth saying plainly when you promote it: "You'll sign in, which means you can change or cancel it yourself any time."
What the giver controls
From their own giving screen, without contacting you:
- Pause it, and start it again later
- Change the amount
- Switch which fund it goes to
- Update the card (this opens a secure Stripe page)
- Cancel it
You will occasionally hear that this is a loss of control. It is the opposite: the gifts that quietly stop are the ones where somebody had to ring the office to reduce them, and cancelled instead.
Expiring cards
The most common way recurring giving dies is not a decision. It is a card reissued after a fraud alert, and nobody noticing for four months.
Stripe updates card details automatically when a bank reissues, so most of these never break. It does not catch everything (a closed account or a card that switches network still fails), so the recurring dashboard is worth a glance monthly. A member whose gift failed almost always wants to fix it and does not know it has stopped.
Talking about it
Two things that work better than a general appeal:
Give people the number. "Twenty of our families give monthly" is more persuasive than "please consider giving regularly", because it is a description of what normal looks like here.
Say what it does for the church, not for you. Predictable income is the difference between planning a year and reacting to a month. Most people have never considered that their giving pattern, not just its size, is useful.