PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership
MONEY, STEWARDSHIP & FUNDRAISING
Sean Mitchell: Five questions Christian leaders need to answer about fundraising
Five questions Christian leaders need to answer about fundraisingWHY DISCERNING YOUR MISSION IN STEWARDSHIP MINISTRY IS ESSENTIAL
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How do spiritual leaders lead through challenging times? They ask challenging questions.
Questions travel to places of the heart and mind that advice doesn't. Good, thought-provoking questions can lead us to new understandings of ourselves, God and the church.
That includes those dreaded questions about budgets and giving.
As director of stewardship development at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and as a consultant, I equip leaders of church communities to foster generosity through initiatives ranging from planned giving to annual stewardship. I've developed a set of questions to ask stewardship leaders to help them in their work.
(1) What is your mission in stewardship ministry? Notice, the question is not, "What is the mission of your stewardship ministry?" The question is about your mission, the reason for your being involved in stewardship ministry.
It is critical for you to know what unique role you play in this ministry and to be honest about how much of yourself you are giving to this work. When people, companies and congregations are on a mission, we know it. Missions are contagious. Is yours? How would people describe your mission in stewardship ministry? Contagious and inspiring, or apathetic and fearful?
Examine why you do what you do in stewardship ministry. Hopefully, you are giving it your best time and thinking. But if your mission is not based on a sense of calling, you will struggle, and your stewardship ministry will suffer because of it.
Think about ways you can have more impact. What might happen if your focus on stewardship ministry changed? Think and decide. Do you really want to be on this mission? Is it time to change your mission?
(2) Do you know the reasons why people are not giving? It is valuable to become familiar with the answers to this question. People have reasons for giving, but they also have important reasons for not giving. Here are some common reasons I’ve encountered:
- They have never been asked directly. Sure, they may have been asked to give through a letter or email, but face-to-face requests in small group gatherings -- or even better, in one-on-one conversations -- is the best way to go.
- They believe they don’t have enough to give. Some people are in debt, some spend more than they should, and some people face both issues. These reasons need to be considered when planning a campaign. The challenge of the leadership is to help people re-evaluate their situations and determine ways that giving might still be possible.
- They don’t trust the leadership. Unfortunately, cynicism is prevalent these days. People often question their leaders’ truthfulness and scrutinize organizational decisions. How can you respond? Be authentic. Don’t hide the numbers. Tell potential donors exactly how the money is spent.
Imagine a potential giver meeting with you or sitting beside you on the train in to work. The person might ask the following questions: “Why should I give money to the church community when I can give directly to causes that are meaningful to me in caring for the poor?” or, “How would our city be different if your organization was not here?”
If you can craft answers to these questions, you are on your way to creating an elevator speech that will elevate your community’s uniqueness and relevance in the minds of potential givers.
As you craft it, remember that every unforgettable elevator speech contains an expression of the organization’s uniqueness, the “why” behind its existence and its impact on the world.
(4) Do you believe fundraising is a spiritual exercise? Whether they admit it or not, most people who are not professional fundraisers are afraid of asking donors to give. They fear being perceived as offensive, being rejected or being labeled as one of those “stewardship” team members.
Each of those things might happen -- and does. Still, the overall exercise is worth the investment of time and effort. Embrace fundraising as a spiritual act. It will help your church community or organization flourish in many ways.
Fundraising deepens relationships. It provides the opportunity to tell the story of how your congregation or organization can do more good works for the kingdom. And fundraising challenges your members to redirect some of their resources to support the group’s mission and ministries.
Fundraising matters. Don’t be afraid of it. Think of it as a gift and an opportunity to invest time in your community relationships and your spiritual journey.
(5) What are you grateful for? Gratitude is at the heart of Christian generosity. We give in response to the grace of God. Hopefully, gratitude is one of the primary reasons one decides to serve on a stewardship committee.
In the absence of gratitude, the job can become anxiety-provoking and all about the numbers. Gratitude keeps the work centered on God’s ongoing faithfulness and the truth that the world belongs to God, not to us. The work of stewardship ministry is given to us by God, as a way for us to inspire more generosity and care in our world.
(6) Are you grateful for the opportunity to participate? Do you believe this is an important ministry to God? I hope so. I hope you can reach the place where the prevailing undercurrent becomes gratitude rather than simply a desire to raise more funds.
Be grateful. This is what it means to be a leader in fundraising ministry. Do everything in response to God’s grace. Give your money and your acts of leadership in response to God’s grace.
Read more from Sean Mitchell »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CONGREGATIONAL ECONOMICS
Faith & Leadership
For the future of congregations, we must discuss economics
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY
Dave Odom: For the future of congregations, we must discuss economics
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY
Dave Odom: For the future of congregations, we must discuss economics
BigStock / Cliff Marshall
Many congregations dream of being places of radical welcome, but that vision is not sustainable through tithing alone. It's time to think differently about how to accomplish such work, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
The pastor of a new church start in an economically challenged community recently shared with me a quandary. His community is achieving its mission, which includes bringing together young adult and homeless members. But the church is not able to sustain itself. He was hoping I might help him find a meaningful part-time job.
I have heard so many stories about committed people making a difference in their community in ways that are not economically sustainable. They have created places where the abused and the privileged worship side by side, where all people are welcomed as members of a community.
Yet many of the congregations are struggling to pay their own bills. Like the new church start pastor, they don’t have full-time pay or appropriate benefits for the staff. They borrow buildings that are barely suitable for the ministry. Many congregations dream of being places of radical welcome but find that vision unsustainable with the tithes and offerings of those who participate in the community. They are trapped by the American view of sustainability -- to be self-supporting.
Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen proposed a theory called disruptive innovation. He began by studying how new products can disrupt established products by entering the market in a place no one would expect. Initially, the new products were often cheap, low-quality and sold to customers who were not buying the older, established products.
For Christensen, disruptive innovations are experiments with a new economic model. They often start with a market that is unnoticed or undesired by established industry. When an innovation is successful, its economic model begins to win over the customers that the industry does care about.
Churches like the new church plant are the opposite. The market they are reaching is prized as a sign of faithfulness and hope, but there is not much thought given to the economics. In fact, church leaders often assume that the money will come if the ministry is faithful.
More than 10 years ago, I asked a pastor in the emergent church movement about the economic model that supported his ministry. He said that his congregation did not and could not contribute enough money to pay all their bills and the salary of a person in midlife with family responsibilities. He wrote books and consulted with established congregations about how to reach new members. The fees for this work supported the pastor and his family. Because he sensed that the demand for his services would wane over time, he was also working on a Ph.D. to make him more marketable as a consultant in the future.
My conversations 10 years apart with a pastor looking for part-time work and a pioneer in the emergent church indicate that one economic model for these ministries depends on a leader who can develop different sources of revenue to support the leader’s work. This approach puts a lot of stress on the leader. Another model treats such churches as mission outposts, dependent on a larger organization for support. Both models do work, but each has difficulties being replicated and scaled.
Instead of starting communities that require leadership, space and more, what if we focused on the work that needs to be done? The economic model would focus on the mission rather than the creation of yet another congregation that would need to be self-supporting. The efforts that prove to be effective and sustainable over time would be models that others could replicate in places where the work is needed.
In such cases, the pastor would not be looking for part-time work. The pastor and others would begin by considering what needs to be done in a community. Do people need housing? Do those trafficked into slavery and prostitution need to be freed? Do children need to be educated? Donors would be attracted to projects that change lives. Microindustries might be started to create needed products and jobs. A community would likely form that has many of the attributes of a congregation but with a different type of work at the center.
Those of us who care about the future of congregations must have a sustained conversation about economics. We need to look at the ministries we most admire and work in partnership with them to explore their sustainability. As we find great ideas that are succeeding, we need to share the news with others, spreading a new way of thinking about how to accomplish our missions.
Read more from David Odom »
Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY, MONEY, NEW ECONOMIC MODELS
Articulate your institution’s mission, then develop the financial model
Articulate your institution's mission, then develop the financial model
Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY, MONEY, NEW ECONOMIC MODELS
Articulate your institution’s mission, then develop the financial model
Articulate your institution's mission, then develop the financial model
The programs and services you offer must align with your mission, and decisions about staffing, facilities needs and revenue sources follow.
Conversations about money are uncomfortable for many ministers. In the last two weeks, two leaders of Christian institutions confessed to me that they could not use Excel, the basic tool for budgeting in most organizations.
You can imagine that my recent blog posts on finding a sustainable financial model or the importance of virtuous cycles in the economics of Christian institutions have not been very popular because I advocate for leaders to think much more about these issues.
Last week the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians published a book on the future of higher education that illustrates what is at stake for discussions about financial models. Bob Samuels argues that public college education should be free(link is external). This would require trimming non-essential functions, redirecting a bunch of money and ending tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families.
Even a brief look at Samuels’ proposal illustrates the importance of the financial model. He is advocating for a narrowing of the work of the public university to focus on the classroom experience of undergraduates. He proposes dramatically reducing athletics, research and residential life. The public university he describes looks much like the community college of today.
One of the first steps to explore the financial model is to clearly articulate the mission. Next, establish the programs or services required to accomplish the mission. The staffing, facilities, revenue sources and other practical considerations follow. These are all elements of the financial model. When Samuels defines the mission of the public university in a narrow way, he begins a process that results in changes to every aspect of the university.
Consider what would happen if a congregation defined its mission as “winning the lost” or evangelizing the unchurched. Every worship service, class and activity would be evaluated based on that mission and the metric of new Christians. Those activities that did not contribute to new Christians would be subject to reduction or elimination.
If the mission is more complicated, such as “baptizing the nations” or “loving God and loving neighbor,” a second question becomes helpful: What does success look like? Hopefully, leaders can name several observable signs of success to create metrics. Activities can be reviewed in terms of how they contribute to the various signs of success.
I headed a ministry that was part of a large teaching hospital. My little ministry made a contribution to the character of the larger institution, but not to the mission. Thus my work did not contribute to patient satisfaction, length of stay or other measures by which the institution assessed its mission.
One part of my job was to be vigilant that the ministry’s financial model was contained and profitable. If asked, I wanted to assure leaders of the mother institution that we were not drawing resources away from the primary mission and that we provided some less tangible benefits in terms of services to important constituents.
Mission, services and financial model overlap. A decision about one area impacts the others.
Perhaps ministers would be more comfortable if discussions started with mission and moved to questions about the financial model. In that way the conversation about money might be more grounded in the work rather than worry about scarcity of resources.
Read more from David Odom »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Conversations about money are uncomfortable for many ministers. In the last two weeks, two leaders of Christian institutions confessed to me that they could not use Excel, the basic tool for budgeting in most organizations.
You can imagine that my recent blog posts on finding a sustainable financial model or the importance of virtuous cycles in the economics of Christian institutions have not been very popular because I advocate for leaders to think much more about these issues.
Last week the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians published a book on the future of higher education that illustrates what is at stake for discussions about financial models. Bob Samuels argues that public college education should be free(link is external). This would require trimming non-essential functions, redirecting a bunch of money and ending tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families.
Even a brief look at Samuels’ proposal illustrates the importance of the financial model. He is advocating for a narrowing of the work of the public university to focus on the classroom experience of undergraduates. He proposes dramatically reducing athletics, research and residential life. The public university he describes looks much like the community college of today.
One of the first steps to explore the financial model is to clearly articulate the mission. Next, establish the programs or services required to accomplish the mission. The staffing, facilities, revenue sources and other practical considerations follow. These are all elements of the financial model. When Samuels defines the mission of the public university in a narrow way, he begins a process that results in changes to every aspect of the university.
Consider what would happen if a congregation defined its mission as “winning the lost” or evangelizing the unchurched. Every worship service, class and activity would be evaluated based on that mission and the metric of new Christians. Those activities that did not contribute to new Christians would be subject to reduction or elimination.
If the mission is more complicated, such as “baptizing the nations” or “loving God and loving neighbor,” a second question becomes helpful: What does success look like? Hopefully, leaders can name several observable signs of success to create metrics. Activities can be reviewed in terms of how they contribute to the various signs of success.
I headed a ministry that was part of a large teaching hospital. My little ministry made a contribution to the character of the larger institution, but not to the mission. Thus my work did not contribute to patient satisfaction, length of stay or other measures by which the institution assessed its mission.
One part of my job was to be vigilant that the ministry’s financial model was contained and profitable. If asked, I wanted to assure leaders of the mother institution that we were not drawing resources away from the primary mission and that we provided some less tangible benefits in terms of services to important constituents.
Mission, services and financial model overlap. A decision about one area impacts the others.
Perhaps ministers would be more comfortable if discussions started with mission and moved to questions about the financial model. In that way the conversation about money might be more grounded in the work rather than worry about scarcity of resources.
Read more from David Odom »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
More Than Money: Portraits of Transformative Stewardship by Patrick H. McNamara Is stewardship past its prime as a motivating vision for ministry?
A social scientist, McNamara tells the stories of 11 mainline congregations where stewardship is the animating force that has transformed them into vital centers for mission. Church leaders who question whether stewardship education is worthwhile will be encouraged and inspired by these accounts of promising practices.
Learn more and order the book »
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