When Lizz Pérez moved an hour away from her evangelical church in Mexico City, her weekly visits turned into monthly ones. Paying her tithe, a voluntary donation, became a hassle — she now had to carry four times as much cash in her wallet.
One day, while watching a YouTube livestream of her church’s Sunday celebrations, Pérez saw a brief announcement on the screen: Voluntary donations were now possible through a digital bank transfer. “I saved the church’s bank number on my phone and started paying tithes like that,” she told Rest of World. “Since then, I register each transaction as ‘church donation,’ so I don’t get taxed for it.”
Paying tithes or other church donations using digital payment methods has become increasingly common in Mexico over the past four years. Members of a congregation can make donations by scanning the QR codes displayed in pews, which show the bank account information, or transfer the money directly through their banking apps. Larger churches, like the Basilica of Guadalupe — the main religious center in Mexico — also receive digital bank transfers and have embedded online payment processors, like PayPal, on their websites.
Though 90% of the country still uses cash in most daily transactions, digital payments are on the rise. In most cases, people transfer money between accounts through their bank’s app — often a tedious process. Alternative payment methods, like Mercado Pago and the government’s own instant payments portal, are not widely used.
In 2020, the Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico, which covers an area of over 4 million people in Mexico City, created MiOfrenda.mx, a website where the congregation can send digital donations. On the site, church members can choose to donate to specific causes: paying tithes, supporting elderly priests who cannot run a church anymore, or helping to sustain a specific parish within the archdiocese.
The program reached about 3,000 active yearly donors, most of whom switched from cash to digital tithe payments during the pandemic. Broader adoption since 2020 “hasn’t been so easy because usual churchgoers aren’t tech savvy,” Javier Rodríguez, who manages communications for the archdiocese, told Rest of World. “They’re usually older than 50.”
With the average churchgoer in mind, the archdiocese frequently shares information about Mi Ofrenda on Facebook, the social media platform they’re most likely to use. For those who are reluctant to part with cash, Rodríguez said the archdiocese allows them to generate a pay order through its website and pay with cash at Oxxo, the country’s largest convenience store chain.