You may have noticed that some wards (including ours until recently) no longer print their sacrament programs. This is has been a church-wide trend lately and it’s due purely to how collecting tithing has changed over the years. It used to be that tithing was largely collected in kind. This meant the people would bring eggs, or milk, or scraps of scratch paper. This scratch paper would be used to create the sacrament programs. Later, people paid in cash. The donated dollar bills would be bleached and used to print the sacrament programs on. Now, more and more people are donating via direct deposit. This saves time for those donating, and for the clerks recording the donations, but it means that the church no longer has access to paper to print sacrament programs on.

The reason we have started printing programs again is that children have started paying tithing in anticipation of the end of the year. Children, obviously, do not have bank accounts and so pay in cash. This has allowed us to build up our reserve of paper to use for Sacrament Programs for which we are all grateful. Please tell your children to give tithing. If you don’t have children or they are already grown, consider having or adopting some. That way, we can always have paper to print sacrament programs on.