Two of the Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society, Michael Pabst and Scott Preller, traveled with Michael Seek, Managing Editor of the German Herald, and Luisella Jaques-Deraney, Managing Editor of the French Herald, through Germany, Switzerland, and France to conduct meetings about the future of the Herald. Below, Michael and Scott report on their visit to these churches, which took place last February and March.
To really catch the spirit of this "Church in action" story, you have to go back several months before this trip took place. The Mother Church had decided it was no longer viable to maintain the Treasurer's representative program, which had been in place for many years. These representatives had served as wonderfully helpful liaisons between The Mother Church and church members all over the world. They helped collect donations for the Church and payments for subscriptions to the periodicals. However, the cost of the salaries of these individuals, as well as the transaction fees and expenses, was taking up about the entire amount of the subscriptions that was being collected, so that the net payment that was reaching The Mother Church for the periodicals was practically zero. Everyone knew that such a result was in no one's interest. Members didn't want to feel that their payments to support the periodicals were having no effect. And The Mother Church needed to find a way to make progress on reducing the deficit that it was incurring in publishing these magazines.
The simplest solution to emerge was to have members pay for their subscriptions directly through credit card payments. But the fact is that credit cards are not widely used in much of Europe. The transition from making payments through the well-known Treasurer's representative to the unfamiliar credit card model led to some unfortunate confusion, miscommunication, unhappiness, and even some distrust.
