By Gretchen Keiser

At least 16 parishes, in coming weeks, will be part of a pilot project using professional consultants to increase, and regularize, offertory contributions.

The program reflects the rapid growth of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, and a need to have contributions keep pace with it, according to those involved.

“The family is growing, and as it does, there are more needs to address,” said Monsignor Jerry Hardy, chancellor of the archdiocese. “But also, fortunately, there are more resources to which to appeal.”

Impetus for the program came from two directions: a five-year projection drawn up by archdiocesan officials last year, which looked at sources of long-term financing and the income base of the archdiocese, and the inquiries of pastors who felt they needed professional assistance in fund-raising, Monsignor Hardy said. Consultants from the Martin J. Moran Co. were selected to direct the program.

While it is an archdiocesan effort, the program will vary from parish to parish, depending upon the pastor’s preference. Some will speak from the pulpit on the topic and use mailings and others may also call parishioners to talk personally about parish finances. All the parishes will be asking their parishioners to make a one-year financial commitment to the church and to re-evaluate that commitment at the end of 12 months.

The parishes involved include the ones where pastors were already looking for ways to improve their offertory collection, and others chosen to represent a variety of rural, city, small, large, and affluent and less affluent areas. “A number of parishes were looking for this kind of assistance and had made some contacts on their own and I wanted to do a coordinated effort that we could monitor to see just how successful this kind of professionally assisted effort could be,” Monsignor Hardy said.

The Martin J. Moran Co., which has extensive experience working with parishes, expects offertory contributions to increase 30 percent overall as a result of their program, and includes a two-year follow-up to maintain that rate of increase.

The parishes involved use a variety of offertory programs, and where a “commitment approach” is already used, this plan will try to improve it; in other parishes where such an approach is not used, it will be implemented.

While part of the impetus was a sense on the part of the archdiocese that pastors wanted assistance in fund-raising, the sheer growth of the Catholic community has also created a need for increased support.

In the last five years, seven parishes have opened in the Archdiocese of Atlanta. In addition, while state statistics anticipate that three to five percent of the population in a given area will be Catholic, recent parish openings, in Gwinnett, Cobb and North Fulton counties, have been in areas where between 20 and 35 percent of the population is Catholic. This puts additional pressure on a new parish and the archdiocese, to move quickly to build churches and parish facilities.

The archdiocese has a ceiling on the amount of mortgage money it can borrow and has more than that amount ready to place with banks to finance new construction. As a result, Monsignor Hardy said, parishes already paying off long-term mortgages will have to be challenged to pay off this debt more quickly, and allow other parishes to enter the long-term mortgage market. In addition, each new parish added to the archdiocese places new demands upon the services supplied by the central offices in Atlanta.

Monsignor Hardy said that the history of generosity on the part of the archdiocese’s people “is exceptionally high.” In 1979-80 the archdiocese’s 100,000 Catholics contributed $10.57 million. “That is an enormous amount of money per capita,” Monsignor Hardy said, “and ample evidence that our people understand the importance of giving.

“While those figures have gone up,” he said “expenses have also gone up and what those dollars will actually pay for has changed radically too.”

While everyone has a built-in resistance to appeals, he said, “one of the real tangible ways we have of expressing our gratitude for the things we have received is by sharing them in an increasingly generous manner.”