AfricaPress-Tanzania: IN a bid to ensure smooth and friendly system of revenue collection, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church has partnered with the CRDB bank to digitalise its systems across the country.
The system, launched in the city on Wednesday, aims at increasing collections of the offering, tithes and other donations from believers through mobile networks wherever they are and not necessarily visiting the church.
Speaking during the launching ceremony, Archbishop of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the Archdiocese of Southern Tanzania Mark Malekana said the system is expected to bring some changes to 4,000 churches in the country.
He said the system will further improve the level in which members of the congregation will pay their alms, tithes and other contributions to the church.
“This online revenue collection system will bring significant financial changes to the church from local churches, states, unions and conferences and build faith in believers to contribute more,” he said.
Treasurer of the churches’ Southern Province of Tanzania, Mr Athanas Sigona, said the system would help increase revenue but make it easier to collect collections from even rural churches.
He said the church is working on creating awareness on how to use and manage the system and that some of the members of the church have already started using it.
He was optimistic that the new system will transcend making the church match-up with the development of science and technology.
The church’s Northern Diocese Treasurer Dickson Matiko said the system is set to help members wire and transfer money wherever they are with the help of the internet.
“This system ends the use of receipts and carbon offsets to collect revenue… this will be an easy way to making church payments,” he said.
CRDB’s Head of Commerce Joseph Witty said Adventist Church leaders had been wise in their decision to adopt the system, describing it as simple and cost-effective in which will also help prevent financial losses.
Speaking via video call from Nairobi, Kenya, the church’s East, Central and Horn of Africa leader, Dr Blasius Luguli, commended the move saying it has opening a new page in the church by introducing a modern system of controlling revenues.
