Why Senior Pastors Are Keeping Churches Broke
Have you ever put your everything into something and not seen the results you hoped you would see?
That was me.
In 2008, I left my church staff position as a CFO to start my own company. When I started, the company’s name was actually ReThink Money.
I started the company to help pastors and people win with their personal finances. My thought was simple, if I can just educate enough people about their personal finances, they will become debt free & start being generous people to their church.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As I soon found out, people don’t give more to the church when they receive help with their personal finances. They become more generous when God totally grabs their heart & rearranges it from inside out. While this can happen from a personal finance course, it wasn’t as explosive as I wanted it to be.
And you know what got to me the most? A lot of Senior Pastors that hired me to come into their church, didn’t even show up for the personal financial training. I would get hired to preach about money because they didn’t want to.
This was alarming to me.
So, as I dug deeper into why churches were not breaking through financially, I saw that the common factor wasn’t classes they were offering or systems they implemented, it started with the MINDSET of the senior leaders.
I spent the next 3 years working onsite with senior leadership teams of churches on how to increase church giving without doing silly fundraisers.
Here are the 3 steps I’ve seen in hundreds of churches that increase tithing and giving, and will help your church be financially healthy in 2015.
- Clarify the Win
How much do you want to increase your giving in 2015 exactly? Most pastors do not have an exact answer for this. Instead of saying I want our giving to go up, you should have clarity and say I want our church giving to go up 15% by the end of this year.
Do you know your number this year? If you don’t, you are waiting on hope and chance to be on your side and you’ll probably get the same results you got last year.
- Clarify the Owner
When I sit down with senior pastors and leadership teams I ask this question, “Who is in charge of increasing operational giving this year?”
Crickets.
Then I would ask them to write down their answers without talking with anyone & there was never a clear winner.
Why?
Most churches don’t have a person who is responsible for financial increase. We say stuff like, this is everybody’s job. Well guess what, when it’s everybody’s job, it’s nobodies job.
Your church can’t breakthrough by committee. It takes a person to say, I’ll take this responsibility. I’ll do it.
Who is responsible in your church?
- Clarify The Plan
It’s great to know how much you want to increase & who is in charge but without an intentional plan for growth, you probably won’t get there.
So, what’s your 2015 month-by-month plan to breakthrough financially?
Is it on paper? Can you literally print it out right now & it has specific actions you will take for the next twelve months?
Most churches DON’T do this, so don’t feel bad if you can’t produce this document.
So… I want to help & The Rocket Company wants to help.
Next Wednesday (Jan. 14th) I’ll be doing a live training on The Three Keys To Explosive Church Giving in 2015. We’ll dig deep into the 3 points mentioned above as well as the other steps you can take to have a financially healthy church at the end of the year. Click the banner below to sign up.
