Shopping Helps the Church!

Do you know that you can help the church financially just by shopping?  Just by buying your gas and groceries each week, you can help make a donation to the church without  having it cost you a penny.  I know it sounds too good to be true, but it isn't.  Here is how it works.  The program is called scrip.  The Waterville Evangelical United Methodist Church has an account with the Great Lakes Scrip Center which allows us to buy gift cards from national retailers at a discount.  Our parishoners pay face value for the cards, while the church then makes the profit off the discount each retailer gives us for their cards.  We also have many local vendors who take part in the program, so you can buy local or nationally and still help the church.  Each retailer selects the percentage that they wish to donate.

Here is a specific example of how it works:  You wish to buy gas at Kwik Trip.  You buy $100 worth of gift cards for Kwik Trip at our church.  You get $100 worth of gas for $100. The way we make money is that Kwik Trip has a 4% discount.  The church buys the gift cards from Great Lakes Scrip Center at the discounted price.  In other words, we pay Kwik Trip $96 for the $100 worth of cards.  We make $4 on the deal for church use.  The way we really make money is on volume.  If we could get everyone to just buy their gas and groceries by using our gift cards, we could make a lot of money for church use.  We have a scrip worksheet available at the church, and also at the bottom of this page.  It has a list of all particpating local and some of the more popular national retailers and their percentages.  If you want to see every national retailer that takes part in this program, click on Great Lakes Scrip Retailer Listing

Now available in scrip: