CHESTER – Every Sunday, millions of people in the United States drop a small paper envelope into an offering tray as it passes by in their church pew.

That little ritual, so much a part of American religious life, has been facilitated largely by a company that has called Chester home for 100 years.

National Church Solutions (formerly National Church Supply) is celebrating its centennial on Friday with an open house at its Pyramus Road headquarters. There will be demonstrations and tours for the public, who will get a behind-the-scenes look at a company that has been manufacturing church envelopes since 1915.

“It’s amazing to me that we’ve been here for 100 years. We don’t take that lightly,” said CEO Doug Wright. “We want to stay here and continue to be part of this community. The people here are wonderful.”

With 135 employees, NCS is one of the larger employers in Hancock County and enjoys a status as the nation’s largest non-denominational provider of offering envelopes to churches, Wright said. Its biggest competitor is the Roman Catholic publisher Our Sunday Visitor, based in Huntington, Ind.

Although NCS has some Catholic customers, its main customer base is Protestant – an estimated 20,000 individual congregations in the United States and Canada, to be exact. It has contractual relationships with about 14 denominations, which contribute to a database of 81 denominational codes, said Jackie Bailey, director of sales/customer service.

NCS also is the envelope provider to LifeWay Christian Resources, Cokesbury – a Google search of Cokesbury brings up a map of Chester – the United Methodist Publishing House, and the Southern Baptist Convention, among others, Bailey said.

Those large contracts are part of the reason NCS merits its own in-house post office – a detached mail unit that processes 8-12 million packets a year, said Chief Operating Officer Justin Babcock.

“We’re in the top 10 mailers in the United States,” Babcock said.

At the heart of NCS’s operations are the people, with an average company tenure of 11.4 years, who manufacture, print, package and otherwise process the envelopes that get sent out across the country. Some of those envelopes are packaged for monthly mailings to individual families, while most are sent as boxed sets or pew sets to churches.

The company’s converter machines can cut, fold and glue 650-700 envelopes a minute, Bailey said. Some of its Harris presses date back almost to the company’s founding but remain in use.

“(The employees) go home every night feeling like they did something for somebody. … It’s nice to work somewhere where you can make a difference every day for somebody,” Bailey said.

NCS was founded as the National Church Supply Co. by C. Cyril Taylor in the basement of his Chester home. A potter from the Isle of Man in Great Britain, Taylor came to America in 1909. He worked for the Edwin M. Knowles China Co. and the Taylor, Smith & Taylor Co. before becoming one of the incorporators of NCS.

Taylor stayed involved with the company through 1966, although his son, Charles, took over the business in 1950 and moved it to its current location. The elder Taylor died on the Isle of Man in 1968. Charles Taylor retired in 2005 at age 84 and died in 2009, leaving the company to his widow, Maribeth, and a board of directors.

Longtime employee Toni Shaffer remembers Taylor as a man who was not averse to visiting people in the plant. “Charles was one of those people who always came out and said ‘good morning’ to you and made you feel at home,” she said. “We’d complain to him about the small orders, but he’d say, ‘Those little churches are the ones that made us.'”

Shaffer, 59, of Chester, just celebrated her 41st anniversary at NCS on Aug. 5. Her mother and aunt also worked there – her mother for 22 years. Shaffer has worked on the old Harris presses for so long – as a feeder, an operator and a lead adjuster – that she thinks of them as her children.

“I’ve always liked the company. They’ve always treated me well,” she said.

Pam Forsythe, wife of Chester Mayor Larry Forsythe, has worked in the sales department at NCS for nearly 30 years. She likes to think of it as more than a job.

“It makes you feel good that you’re working with churches,” she said. “They keep coming up with ways to help churches grow. As a sales person, you try to introduce to them different things that will help the churches with their income. A lot of churches have been suffering because of the economy.”

Under the younger Taylor’s leadership, NCS became less of a “mom and pop” operation and more of a modern company, Wright said. The name change – from Supply to Solutions – in 2011 was precipitated by the introduction of online giving in 2004.

“Probably the biggest change in our industry has been technology,” said Wright, who has been at NCS since 2007. “How we were viewed in the marketplace with a name like ‘Supply’ was old-school. We really evolved over 100 years. We’re not just a manufacturer of envelopes for churches. We’re more about helping the organization in terms of achieving their goals through solutions we can provide, whether it was an envelope or helping them manage a campaign or using technology.”

NCS has expanded its customer base to include not only churches but also other non-profit organizations. Those clients can now avail themselves of a host of online tools – custom mobile applications, kiosks, e-giving – that ease member giving, Wright said.

The online portion of NCS is known as NCS Services Inc., based in Pittsburgh. NCS also recently opened a sales office in New Braunfels, Texas, where officials boasted at the ribbon-cutting that organizations using NCS services could boost member participation and financial support by 15-30 percent.

Wright said such services – everything from the simple paper envelope to sophisticated online tools – are about promoting an essential aspect of Christian discipleship: financial stewardship.

“They facilitate church giving in a very tangible way. Our goal and objective is: We support the church in terms of how they raise money. The envelope itself is a great teaching tool. … It’s not just a conduit by which a transaction takes place. It’s really a great communication tool and a great teaching tool,” he said.

Despite the growing popularity of online giving and NCS’s expansion in that area, envelopes – whether individual, boxed or mailed in monthly sets – are still the company’s bread-and-butter, Wright said.

“One hundred fifty-two billion dollars are distributed through churches annually. Less than 10 percent of that is done electronically,” he said. “The majority of the money is still flowing through envelopes or cash. It will evolve and change as time goes on because the traditional methods that we provide today – the youth aren’t going to know that.”

Although envelopes have not proved strong enough to counter negative giving trends in the U.S., they remain a crucial part of any strategy to encourage regular giving by church members, said Sylvia Ronsvalle, co-author of “Behind the Stained Glass Window: Money Dynamics in the Church” (Baker Books, 1996).

Wright said NCS plans to stay in Chester but is looking at making changes to its facility so that it can continue to adapt to new trends in giving and technology.

Earlier this year, NCS joined with the state of West Virginia and West Virginia University in an effort to review its manufacturing process and explore new product development.

The collaboration, known as the Innovation Adoption Program, is a project of TechConnect West Virginia and WVU’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Through it, NCS can get access to funding and technical support for new product development and product redesign.

“NCS might be one of our state’s oldest companies, but it can represent a new generation of innovation-based manufacturing in West Virginia,” said TechConnectWV Executive Director Anne Barth. “We’re looking forward to seeing this project help lay the ground for new opportunities and growth for one of our state’s manufacturers.”

(Huba can be contacted at shuba@reviewonline.com)