By Lilly Fowler

Last Thursday’s Los Angeles Times fronts a clever if tad dismissive piece on “an ‘ATM for Jesus.’” Richard Fausset reports, “Pastor Marty Baker preaches that the Bible is the eternal and inviolate word of God. On other church matters, he’s willing to change with the times.”

Apparently, a group of Protestant churches, most of them in the South, have opted to install “Giving Kiosk” machines in order to gather donations from members of the congregation. Baker thought of the idea when “he had just kicked off a $3-million building drive.” Fausset explains that “the kiosks can let donors identify their gift as a regular tithe or offering, or direct it to building or missionary funds.”

This, however, is the extent of Fausset’s explanation for the purpose of the kiosks and money-collecting. As Fausset points out, the installation of the machines will no doubt strike some as crass. Such modern, convenient technology is bound to be associated with Mammon by some. The machines will make collecting funds uncomfortably obvious. And for many this change will be too distracting from what they feel should be a church’s real focus—God. Yet though all this may be true, it would have added a nice balance to the piece had Fausset written more about the ways in which the money will be used. It would have meant taking the church’s efforts a little more seriously, rather than just pointing out another clumsy way religion is attempting to stake its ground in the modern world.

What is also interesting about the piece is the fact that all the churches who have decided to go with the ATMs have been Protestant. Fausset explains the pattern by pointing out that, although the Baker congregation liked the idea of the ATM and an electric house band playing “Dream On,” a Catholic Church isn’t an “Aerosmith kind of place.” Anyone familiar with the Reformation might suspect it’s probably more complicated than that. Isn’t that worth writing about?

–Lilly Fowler is a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.