5 Practices to Cultivate a Culture of Giving
A few years ago, my local church was facing a budget deficit. While you never hope for this, it forced our elder team to look closer at our budget and grow in how we taught on giving. We prayed for God’s provision and wisdom in response to the deficit. Thankfully, God provided both. We learned valuable lessons, and our church grew in God honoring stewardship. Along with prayer, here are five action steps we took in response to our budget deficit. This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully, it helps spark ideas for your church.
Tighten Spending
When things got tight, it made us take a closer look at our budget. What could we cut? What projects need to be postponed? Working with our staff team, the elders ensured we trimmed back our budget for a season. We wanted to ensure that essential ministries and staff were still funded if things didn't turn around (also why we have a 90-day reserve fund). It turned out to be a really good exercise to ensure we were staffing and spending according to our means.
Action Steps - When facing a deficit, work with key staff and the leadership team to trim spending for a season. Pray together for wisdom. This also requires that you have regular financial reporting to be aware of giving trends.
Regular Communication
Our church had enjoyed several years of surplus giving leading up to the budget deficit. One negative consequence was that we didn’t talk as much as we should’ve about giving and did not give regular updates to our congregation. We decided that moving forward, we wanted to keep our congregation updated on our monthly budget needs and financial situation. We put together a simple giving update that we started sending out monthly, showing the monthly need and giving totals. By God's grace, our church responded to the deficit and giving increased.
Action Steps - Create a communication plan for sharing regular giving updates with your church. We recommend a monthly communication that includes the "why" of giving, the total budget needed for the month, giving totals, and year-to-date totals for each. Pray that God would use it to cultivate generosity in your church.
Giving as Worship
Around the same time we faced a deficit in giving, we also started making giving a key part of our worship on Sundays. Each week during our response time (each church will need to figure out what works for your liturgy), we would talk about the "why" of giving and remind people that giving is worship. We also let them know how they could give. We hoped to keep giving connected to worship and repeatedly remind people why they give. We decided to talk about giving regularly and not just bring it up when things were not going well.
Action Steps - Consider how your church can make giving a regular part of worship. How can you make it regular and remind your people of the “why” of giving? Once your leadership team answers these key questions, ensure you integrate giving into the regular liturgy of the church. Pray for your church to see giving as worship.
Preaching on Stewardship
When we started to pray about how God was leading us to respond to the budget deficit, we realized it had been several years since we preached on stewardship. In our early days as a church plant, we often shied away from teaching on giving in reaction to seeing it done poorly. But just because something has been done poorly doesn’t mean it should be ignored. The deficit was the wake-up call we needed to embrace preaching on financial stewardship. This led us to do a month-long series on stewardship and giving. We plan on carving out time each year to preach on giving.
Action Step - Does your church spend time preaching on giving and stewardship? We recommend talking with your leadership team about a one-off sermon or a series on stewardship that could help your church grow in giving. Pray for God to use the series to cultivate generosity.
Teaching on Stewardship
After finishing our preaching series, we realized there were many practical questions on stewardship that we couldn’t cover in a sermon series. So, we put together a class that would pick up where the sermon series left off and dive into the practicals of stewardship. The class would focus on the practical skills of stewarding our time, talent, and treasure. It put financial stewardship in the larger story of stewarding all we have for God's glory.
Action Steps - Consider having a regular class on financial stewardship. Your leadership team could create one or use one of the many available resources. This could be a great class to offer yearly that helps equip the church for healthy financial stewardship.
Recommended Resource - If you want to read more about biblical stewardship we recommend Randy Alcorn’s book, “The Treasure Principle.”