[BONUS EPISODE] Creating a culture of generosity

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Speaker B: 00:00:08

Welcome everyone to Unfiltered. We're glad to be with you. My name is Lee Stevenson.

I'm the executive director of church planning for Converge and we're excited to be able to just talk about the real things of church planning. Today. We have a great episode ahead. We're going to be talking about the building of generosity as a cultural value in the life of your church.

And really thinking about the earlier we can begin that conversation, begin the processes, the better it's going to be for us. My co host here, Danny Parmalee. Danny, say hi.

Speaker C: 00:00:40

Hello, everyone.

Speaker B: 00:00:41

So, Danny, tell us just a little bit about who you are, what you do.

Speaker C: 00:00:44

So I oversee church planting in Converge Mid America, which is all the way north to Michigan and down to Tennessee, and so work with church planters and recruiting, coaching, training, and also on this podcast.

Speaker B: 00:00:58

Awesome. Glad to have you, Danny. And we have a guest today. So Mark Albrecht is our guest and he's going to be sharing his experience.

Mark understands generosity, has birthed generosity in the life of his church, and I think makes a fantastic conversation point for us today. So, Mark, say hi. Why don't you introduce yourself to us, tell us just a little bit about yourself and the history of your church.

Speaker A: 00:01:20

Hi, everyone. Mark Albrecht. I'm at Northbridge Church in Antioch, Illinois, which is on the Illinois, Wisconsin border.

We're about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. We're in a suburb that's about 2/3 white collar, one third blue collar. It's got a lot of lakes. So it was initially a kind of a vacation area.

It was sort of a beer and boating town that's been transitioning into a suburb. A lot of now young families, a lot of first homes for couples and young families. Tells you a little bit about who we are.

We planted there in: 2001

Speaker B: 00:02:06

Mark, how long were you guys in a portable situation? Because I think that's definitely part of this conversation and has influenced your perspective in this.

Speaker A: 00:02:16

Yeah, we started in: 2001

We had our first campaign in: 2005

We not only were faced with the economic crisis that Impacted so many churches, but we faced an incredible amount of zoning challenges. Make a long story short, we went 15 years of a portable church in a high school, planted three churches.

All three of those churches not only got up and going, but all had their own facilities, permanent facilities, before we had our own. So we were forced into generosity, I guess, in a certain level there. But, yes, over 15 years in portable facilities.

Speaker B: 00:03:08

Great. Which is a great sidebar, because I know some of you, you may be six weeks into this going, man, I'm ready to get that permanent facility.

You can do it. Okay. You can make it 15 years and still exist as a church. Not just exist, but have a thriving ministry.

Speaker A: 00:03:22

I wouldn't recommend it, but sometimes that's reality.

Speaker B: 00:03:26

So, Mark, talk to us a little bit about why this is an important conversation. Why is generosity something that should matter to us as a pastor, and it should matter to us from the church perspective as well?

Speaker A: 00:03:41

Yeah, generosity is a real kind of sexy topic right now. But I think when we think about it from a pastoral perspective, it starts with the character of God, of who we are called to be as pastors.

We're called to see people follow Jesus, to be imitators of God, as Ephesians says. And we see in the character of God that he's a generous God.

We always talk about it says, for God so loved the world that he, what he gave, he gave the best of what he had for us. We have a generous God who then calls us to be like him. And we long to see the image of Christ formed in our people.

And we say, jesus, what did he do? Well, it says in 2 Corinthians 8 that he and his riches became poor in order that we might become rich. Jesus gave everything he had.

The ultimate expression of generosity, of course. And so we want to see people become like Jesus. Right.

And so if we are calling people to become like Jesus, our heart should be to see them grow, to become generous people. Now, along the way, there's lots of other reasons for building a generous culture. I think it's practical for advancing the mission.

I, too, think it's actually an avenue for evangelism. Now. I think we have a culture that is attracted to evangelism. I think when we.

We see generous leaders and a generous culture within a church, lost people are attracted to that. And I think it gives an avenue for sharing the gospel. So I think generosity is a platform for evangelism as well.

Speaker B: 00:05:14

Wow, that's great.

Speaker C: 00:05:15

Yeah.

So what are some of those even just practical things that you do within the church that actually model generosity, because it's one thing for a pastor to get up there and to talk about generosity, but how does that flow throughout the church?

Speaker A: 00:05:31

Yeah. And that generosity of what that is kind of touched on a lot of different topics.

I mean, our first thought is financially, but I think there are so many other ways that we express generosity, how we use our time. Are we generous with our words of praise? Are we generous with our people, with the resources that God's entrusted to us?

And I think even as pastors, even sort of how we're generous with our pulpit time of, like, how we use that to give credit to others, to kind of generously share with our congregation, with the people who are making a difference, and use that in generous ways. So I think that's all really, really important.

But, you know, structuring your ministry so that generosity is a part of it from the beginning and marks who you are is really, really important, you know, so for us, as we talked about, we planted the church very early on, and we said, this is who we are as a church. This is what we're called to do.

And I think one of the things that's really important for building that culture of generosity is reminding people that we started because of the generosity of others.

And telling the stories of those who made sacrifices so that our church and our ministry could get going reminds us that we are the recipients of generosity. And so therefore, it would be our natural desire then to express that down line. We're recipients of the gospel of generosity, if you will.

And we want to be generous people. And then along the way, too, we want to express, you know, the generosity that's been given to us, express that onto others as well.

Speaker B: 00:07:03

I want to press into something that you alluded to and dive a little deeper in that mark that you talked about. How we use our platform, you know, talking about as a pastor, as a preacher, as really a mass motivator from the stage.

How have you used that position then to help build the culture of generosity?

Speaker A: 00:07:25

Yeah, yeah. As I said, I think part of it is telling the stories of people who have been generous with us.

I think that's how early on we were reminded that we've been blessed by others.

You know, I tell our congregation, people that you never met made significant sacrifices for our church to get up and off the ground, and telling some of those stories, I think is important then also looking for the stories of generosity, of expressions within our own congregation that we can celebrate. We've had some really neat stories in the life of our church.

In one of our campaigns, we had a guy who called who was nearing retirement age, and he said, I really want to be part of the campaign, but I don't really have anything that I can give. And so I said, well, you know, how about if I just pray and ask the Lord to lead you in what you can do?

And so we prayed together on the phone, and he called me back a week later, and he said, I've been smoking for over 50 years. And he said, I'm going to give up smoking and take my cigarette money and give it to this campaign.

And so you realize that was not just a financial commitment, but that was a big commitment of a whole lifestyle move on his part.

And when we told that story to our congregation, I mean, you could hear the ooze just across this room, how that moved our congregation, telling stories like that.

And sometimes there are really big, dramatic sacrifices of finances, but there's other kind of ways that people are expressing generosity, really move the hearts of people. I'll tell you just one other one, because I think it's really interesting.

In our very first capital campaign that we ever had, we announced that we were going to do it, and we had a date. We were asking leaders to make a commitment, and ultimately the rest of the congregation to make a commitment.

But the very first commitment that we had made was by a junior high girl. And she wrote me a letter, and she included a wad of cash in it. It was about $200 in fairly small bills.

And she talked about how God had moved in her life and in her mom's life. And so she wanted to kind of be the first one. She said, I want to be the first one to give to our future.

And so she said, this is money I've saved from babysitting over the last year. And so she gave an envelope of about $200 in cash and fives and singles and stuff like that. So I read that letter to our congregation.

Like how that moves when you see those kinds of expressions of generosity, that's so contagious and inspiring and compelling. And so thinking about how to use our pulpit to tell those kind of.

Speaker C: 00:09:46

Stories, really important as generosity has really taken off, and a lot of people have kind of grasped on it. How do you caution against it being, like, cliche or kind of manufactured type of thing, or.

You're welcome to share if you had any of those moments where you did do that or it felt that way and you had to pull back, or if it was just like, hey, you figured out how to not go down that path. Does that make sense, what I'm asking?

Speaker A: 00:10:10

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, there's a certain pragmatism here with this of like, hey, when we talk about generosity, we were even talking in the car ride on the way over here. Sometimes we can talk about generosity where that kind of puffs us up, you know, it kind of enhances our own reputation.

So we don't want to be about that. But I think first it's a response to the gospel, to the character of God and what he's given to us.

But then, yeah, help me out if I'm headed down the right path here. What you're saying here of like, we don't want to get here, go ahead.

Speaker C: 00:10:41

Let me say so I think that people will hear about generosity and they see how it works in a church. So they'll go, hey, Mark, had this girl do this thing. So maybe what we're gonna, I don't know, just like figuring out ways to kind of manufacture.

It's not this genuine generosity, but it's used almost as a tool to just, you know, raise more dollars or that type of thing. How do you caution against it becoming manufactured or cliche?

Speaker A: 00:11:07

Yeah, I think some of it is not just telling financial stories.

There's lots of other ways generosity is expressed and I think that's really important when people are open handed with their time and, you know, people who are great servants. We just did something this Sunday, kind of get into a pulpit story as well.

We had a guy who's been an audio tech, a really gifted guy who is a single guy who gave an incredible amount of his time to help us. And he's relocating and we gave him kind of a salute and just honored that.

We don't speak often about people who serve us well in kind of sacrificial and generous ways. And so we saluted him in that way. And so it wasn't about necessarily trying to raise money, but just enhancing a culture of generosity.

Speaker B: 00:11:48

Talk about if this is such an important piece of the life of your church, I am assuming that there are structures that have been put in place to kind of enhance generosity among your people. And, and we talked a little bit about just using your voice as a pastor.

What other ways have you structured the church to enhance people's awareness towards generosity, to celebrate generosity the way that. Are there things. Do you do a sermon series on a regular basis?

Are there other pieces behind the scenes that you do to make sure that this stays as a cultural value?

Speaker A: 00:12:26

Yeah, it Seems like those initial steps you take to lay that kind of culture are really, really important. To say, this is part of our DNA. This is who we are. You know, one of the first things we did was we started giving away our Christmas offering.

And I think that was mentioned yesterday as we were here. But that's such a powerful thing. When lost people come, they get a sense of, hey, it's Christmas. This is a huge crowd.

This is probably one of the biggest offerings of the year, and we're giving it away to help people in need or to advance another cause. That's very inspiring. So that says something to our church in that regard. And then certainly just basic things about.

We tell people all the time that if you are going to be obedient to what the scriptures say and to live a generous life, you have to live on less than what you take in. And churches often don't do that. And so how do we, as churches, model what we want people to make true in their own lives?

How do we live on less than what we take in and understand that we're part of the Great Commission and we're called to not just do the work in our own community, but also to invest in God's work around the world. And so some of those kind of steps, I think, are really important.

Speaker B: 00:13:38

Okay, I got to push that button, because I agree when I look at a lot of churches out there, they don't necessarily set their budget that way. So talk to us practically. How do you actually set up your budget?

Budget to make sure that you're not spending more than you take in and that you're holding this cultural value at a high level.

Speaker A: 00:13:59

Yeah.

One of the things that's been true of our church planting circle is that we've encouraged our planters from day one of taking public offerings to tithe off of that. Now, initially, we asked people to pay their church planting grant forward for new church planters. That's kind of the initial steps there.

But that gets a church from day one living on less than what they take in and learning to tithe. And so it takes a little time, usually a couple of years, before you begin to form a board and a finance team or whatever.

But when they begin to understand that this is a commitment that we made from the very first day of our church, now, this affects how we put together our budget because we understand that this is part of what we do. We invest in the starting of new churches. We want to see the gospel touch unreached, unengaged people groups around the world.

We want to be a part of that. And so that's got to figure into our budget.

So in our first couple years, I remember we put our budget together and kind of added up all the numbers, and we weren't at 10% of giving. We said, well, we have to go back and start, because that's the minimum of what we're committed to do. And that just started a process.

And then as we started to, you know, take special offerings for church planting, and we gave away our Christmas offering and things like that, it just enhanced our kingdom investment of our. Of our budget and money. So we took in.

Speaker B: 00:15:23

How did you overcome other people's fear? Because sometimes leaders, you know, may look at that and not grasp it, and they're going, but, but.

But we need that money, you know, to pay the rent or pay whatever. How did you help alleviate their fears? To make sure this.

Speaker A: 00:15:39

Or.

Speaker C: 00:15:39

Or your fears?

Speaker A: 00:15:40

So you can.

Speaker C: 00:15:41

You can say both.

Speaker A: 00:15:42

Yeah.

I remember very early on, as we formed a little finance group that one of the guys said, my background is that a nonprofit should have six months of income in the bank at all times, and said, well, if we do that, well, first of all, we're not even close to having six months in the bank. So they said, we shouldn't be giving away any money until we get to six months.

And so we had a long discussion about walking in faith, being obedient to the Lord, what's our culture as a church?

And my feeling has been, you know, when you begin to put people together who work with your finances, your tendency is to put together accountants and people who are really good at managing money. But those people are always very protective of money.

And so I've said we always need a mixture of, you know, bean counters and gunslingers on our finance team of, some people are going to be careful with the money, but people have a big vision as well. So that. That's all part of our conversation. And so we had to make some of those kind of decisions very early on to say, we want to manage our money.

Well. We ought to remind people of, like, why do people give money to our church? It's not to grow our bank account.

They want to see us make a difference in our community and in the world. That's why people are investing in us. And so we do have a responsibility to, you know, you want to think about generosity over the long haul, too.

Not just what can we do in the next six months, but especially as you're starting a new church of, wow, this church could be raising funds and other things to advance the kingdom for decades into the future if we do this wisely. And so we want to be smart about how we do that, but we want to be generous in the now and walk in faith now. Right.

And so it's kind of finding how to balance all that tension together.

Speaker C: 00:17:22

Did you build up to the six months. Six months in operating?

Speaker A: 00:17:26

No, we're still. We're still not there. Depending on how you calculate it. No. Yeah, we're still not there.

We definitely have nest egg and protection and things like that, but no, we've never. Never gotten to that. That point at this. At this time.

Speaker B: 00:17:42

Where was. What point did you get to then?

Because I know a lot of guys in the room may sit there and go, I, you know, we have a week sitting in the bank account, you know, and. And if anything major happened, it's like, oh, no. So what. What compromise did you find with those leaders?

And what have you found as a good middle of ground that, you know, leaves room for faith, but at the same time, you have enough there if something did happen that you. You're not going to close down the doors of the church.

Speaker A: 00:18:14

Yeah, yeah.

Some of our financial principles, and I know it's probably true of a lot of those listening here, of you don't want to wait till you only have a week left. You know, you want to have some. Some benchmarks of what do we do if we get down to 60 days of money left or 30 days of money?

How do we inform the congregation? What stage steps do we take? When do we need to maybe cut back on expenses?

So hopefully some of those conversations are happening before we get to that point. But for us, in terms of savings and things, we just set goals of like what. As we put our budget together, where.

What is our kind of our floor of where we want to be in our savings accounts, if you will. And so we said we're not gonna let ourselves drop below that. So we want to meet our budget.

We don't know exactly what the revenue is going to be coming in in the coming year, but we want to protect a minimum level in our savings accounts for us. But beyond that, we want to be as generous as we possibly can.

So instead of being so aggressive that we didn't use excess for kingdom use, and just to meet a savings goal, we just said we're going to have a minimum amount in there that we all agreed upon and then be as generous as we can on top of that.

Speaker C: 00:19:25

And this is getting practical with budget stuff, but I do believe it deals with generosity. Do you do your budget based off of projected giving for the next year or do you do it off of the last year's total giving?

Do you understand the question?

Speaker A: 00:19:40

Yes, yes, we do do projection and we've had a lot of change here recently. So that's kind of made projection more difficult than in the past.

But we certainly look at where we were the last year and do a little bit of projection for the coming year. We try to be as conservative as we can, so we're not getting over the tips of our skis, but trying to imagine some of the new initiatives we have.

Do we project some growth that are going to help us fund some new ministry initiatives?

Speaker B: 00:20:12

There are pain points in the generosity journey as well. I know from practical experience. I'm sure Danny's had the same experience.

Probably most pastors, anytime you preach on generosity and touch the finance conversation, there's going to be a pain point. What have been some of those pain points for you as a leader trying to build this into the culture of your church?

Speaker A: 00:20:35

There's no doubt that every year that we're putting together our budget, we have to say no to certain initiatives if we're going to be generous in investing in church planting and missions work and things. So that's always kind of an annual conversation. But I'd say a couple of the more significant ones we had were both related to campaigns.

In our very first campaign, we committed to giving 20% of our campaign away. And that freaked out a lot of our leaders who said, there's no way we can do that. That's silly. We don't have our own place.

We don't have, you know, we're not set up for permanency as a church. Why would we give away money at this point in time?

And we felt led to do it, and to just give you the math, because this is kind of part of the cool part of the God story of it. We had a million dollar goal and we said that we're going to give away 20% and we were hoping to have $800,000 then for purchasing property.

And people said, I don't know if we can raise a million dollars. We shouldn't be giving away 20%. But we felt compelled to do it. We cast vision.

We said this is what it means to be a generous church and has an eye on the Great Commission, not just our own backyard. Well, make a long story short, despite all the objections, we raised over 1.2 million, we gave away our 20%.

We still had a million Left and then got open the door for a piece of property that was initially about $1.5 million. The guy reduced his price to a million dollars in our campaign, did everything.

And so it's just like an incredible story that way that we never could have orchestrated the second one. A pain point. I'll give you more of a pain point, though. Our second campaign was for building, but we were planting a church as well.

And so we sent out our associate pastor and his wife is our programming director. So we sent out two very dear. Yeah, two very dear staff members. About 40 adults went with them, and we gave 10% of our campaign to go with them.

So as all of that happened, we lost a significant chunk of our church. Big enough that we went from two services back to one.

And as I've told people, it felt like for about six months we were almost grieving as a church because we lost people that we love. We lost a little vibe, and we just really struggled for a long time along with that.

The major part of our campaign was for building our building, which all didn't work out. And so we ended up planting a church, not getting our own home taken care of.

And for six months to a year, we had a lot of people saying, what have we done? We've killed our church. This is foolish. But the Lord ultimately backfilled with people, opened up a door later on for us to be able to build.

And our second daughter church is prevailing in their context as well. So it was a journey to get there. There was a lot of pain in the process.

I heard somebody say that church planting, sending out people, resources and everything is like hacking off one of your limbs and sending it away. And we really felt that way for a long period of time, for sure. So generosity sounds really cool until you're.

And I'll even say this too, it was mentioned yesterday, but relationally, too, when you send off dear friends and you realize you've lost something that you're not going to get back, and it's part of the. The call of the kingdom and it's part of being generous people. But there's a loss as well.

Speaker B: 00:23:44

Have you found, and I know there are a lot of different opinions out there about this specific thing. Have you found it helpful to know what people are giving in the life of your church, or do you prefer not to? And why. Why have you made that choice?

Because, you know, if you're thinking about generosity and you're wanting that to be a high cultural value in the life of the church, how much do you know, when it comes to the practical ins and outs of your people.

Speaker A: 00:24:11

Yeah, yeah. Certainly a debate that we all have to work through and figure out the right way to do it. I think to some degree it impacts.

How does it affect us having that information? Sometimes we can get really obsessed about it, good, bad or otherwise. So for me, I don't. I'm not like a looking often or getting information.

A couple things that we do do. One is our finance people who handle our money.

When we do get generous expressions, they let me know who it was from so that we can honor that as well as kind of stir up that gift.

When you see people who have the gift of giving, who are generous people, we want to really affirm that and celebrate that, let them know that it's making a difference. And so we want to express.

Speaker B: 00:25:00

How do you do that? Like, what do you do then to honor, to thank? I mean, do you show up to their house and give them a tv?

What do you do to say thanks for being such a generous giver?

Speaker A: 00:25:11

I mean, it usually starts with just a personal note from me. Just. It's really funny. I think often when people give to the church, they think the pastor knows.

And so when people give something that's going to really impact your ministry, they expect that you would know. So if you don't know and therefore don't respond, they don't think you don't know. They just think that you chose not to respond in gratitude. Yeah.

So I think it's really important that we figure out how do we do that.

So we are finding as kind of a threshold that if a gift of this kind comes in or a new gift of this kind comes in, they alert me so that I can honor that and do that. So it usually starts with just a thank you note. And at times there's other things that I do, you know, just. It's also personal time.

I think there's times we want to give to people to say, you're making a difference in our ministry. I want to let you in a little bit about what's going on in the life of our church, in my life, what we're talking about in leadership circles.

And that helps people to feel like I've got a. A sense of knowledge of what's happening here and I'm being valued as a person and my contribution really matters.

And then over time too, as people are generous, I usually say that they care deeply about your mission.

And so how do we involve them in certain circles of leadership or influence so that their Heart for our church, not just their checkbook, can also have an impact on us as well.

Speaker C: 00:26:43

Lee, what did you guys do?

Speaker B: 00:26:47

Very similar step. Danny. We. We would take time to, you know, it was kind of based on gift.

If it was $1,000 to $2,000 gift, they get a personal letter from me, kind of handwritten note saying thank you. If it was under $1,000 gift, they got more of a generic form letter from our bookkeeper, just saying, thanks for your gift.

If it was over $2,000 gift. I actually called him on the phone and just said, I just want to personally say thank you for your willingness to be generous. And I wanted feedback.

I want to ask them, what about our mission has compelled you to give at the level that you gave? And it really helped us understand our culture internally as well.

And then once a year, I would take our top 10 givers out for lunch and just sit down and talk with them and just. It was more relational. It wasn't, you know, hey, I know you're a top giver type of thing. It was more, hey, I just wanted to.

I know you're invested in the life of our ministry. I just want to know, you know, how are you doing? And just sit and listen.

I want to know, ask questions about their kids, how their marriage was, and then kind of follow up and say, is there just. Is there anything about the life of your church that you want to know? And that was.

I mean, those moments were gold in helping them realize that we cared about them. It wasn't about the dollar that they were giving. It was more about the relationship and that we were investing in that and them.

I had one person that said, the only reason you're calling me out is because I gave you a big check. And I was like, no. I tell everybody in our church, thank you. If you serve in the nursery, I tell you thank you.

This is a practical way that you're serving our church. And I just want to tell you thank you. So never had any issues.

Speaker A: 00:28:38

That's really good.

Speaker C: 00:28:39

When we. When we first started, I prided myself on not looking and not knowing people's giving. I don't know where I wasn't told that. I just.

That was kind of the way that. That we started. And I had someone, I think, a couple years into it, kind of challenge me on that a bit.

And I'm so thankful for that because I learned so much when I made that shift. And it really goes to Mark. What you were saying is that giving is a spiritual activity, and it's very Important to people.

And it sometimes is a barometer in their relationship with God. And I say that good or bad.

So in other words, we would also see if people's giving was increasing, that sometimes that was an opportunity because God was doing something in their life, but also decreasing in giving, that sometimes it was life stuff, people that lost jobs. And when you know that and say, hey, what's going on here?

And I'm not calling because you're no longer giving at the level that you were and had plenty of stories because, yeah, I lost my job or we're cutting down our income, or my wife decided to stay home to homeschool. Awesome. Praise God. God's doing something. And so understanding that giving is a spiritual thing.

And for some, if it is a spiritual gift, we need to know that if someone has a spiritual gift of evangelism, we want to know that we want to do whatever we can to foster that.

Speaker B: 00:29:59

Yeah, that's. That's well said.

I had a seasoned pastor when I was young and before I actually planted the church and moved into senior leadership, gave me the advice that you should always know what, or at least have access to what people are giving in your church. And in his reasoning was same thing, it's a spiritual matter, and you want to be invested in the spiritual development of your people.

But he also said when you get criticism, the first thing you should do is pull their giving record. And what I found, I don't know what you guys have found.

I said when I, when I began doing that, 100% of those critical emails or phone calls I got, those people gave nothing to the church. And that made it a whole lot easier to manage criticism as you're moving forward with the vision, keeping going.

Well, you're not with us anyways, you know, and you're able to toss it aside and just kind of continue to press forward on, on the mission. So.

Speaker A: 00:30:50

Yeah, and I do think it's important for leadership candidates that you should know before you put people in leadership, they should be invested in your ministry.

Speaker B: 00:30:59

Yeah, absolutely. What, what advice, Mark, would you give a young planter?

You know, they're, let's say they're getting ready to start or in their first year of church, planting. What are must do's when it comes to building generosity.

Speaker A: 00:31:16

Yeah, I think it's really important to set that as your culture right away to say this is part of what we do.

And I think it's really important as you talk about your church, I think your congregation often rises to the expectations of the pastor and so when you say, hey, we're a generous church, this is what we do, people will begin to see, yeah, that's who we are and we're going to want that.

And so when we talk about maybe sacrificial expressions of generosity in the future, they're already going to have in their mind of like, yeah, we want to be a generous church, this is who we are.

So talking about that early on and finding some ways to express that in a way that's appropriate, even a very young church, what can we do that would express our generosity? Just tell you one quick story.

For us, we were wanting to address some challenges in our community and we wanted to do it in partnership with a couple of other local churches. So we had a few conversations with him about doing something together, but we weren't sure what to do or how to get started.

So at our one year anniversary, so our first year, we took a collection to do something to help organize our other local churches, crossing denominational groups to lead out as a church in this way.

And so we're a one year old church and so we're thinking about, wow, we're being generous enough to reach across to other churches in our community to rally together and we're going to make a financial investment in that. What we ended up doing was there was a church in another part of the country that was doing some things that we could learn from.

So at our expense, we actually flew pastors of four other churches in our community and a couple of their leaders at our expense to go and learn from them and then came and addressed a project together.

And so it wasn't a dramatic amount of money, but it was really a significant marker moment for us as a church because it became a story that we told again and again.

Remember at our one year anniversary when we didn't have a building, when we didn't really have staff or any of that kind of stuff, we raised a little bit of money and did something to further the cause of uniting churches and serving a practical need in our community that was really marking for us. So finding a win like that I think is really important.

I think another thing that's really important is I talk to a lot of our young leaders who really want to be generous leaders and I love that.

But sometimes as you're building a young church, you have to make sure that you are building the church that then can be generous in the years and decades to come. Sometimes people in their desire to be generous almost give away too much early on.

And I was telling Lee earlier of like, it's kind of like the goose that lays the golden eggs of like, you have to feed the goose in order to keep getting the eggs, you know?

And so I think all of our dreams of generosity, all of our dreams of launching a church planting movement, touching missions around the world, all go back to us being a strong, growing, prevailing missional church.

And sometimes I think, as young leaders, we want to get so focused on kind of investing ourselves in extension activities that we don't build our own church first. And that limits us for years and decades to come of what we can do.

So it's trying to find the balance there, but finding some appropriate wins in those young years that'll help you really say, yeah, this is who we are. We are a generous church culture.

And as we grow in the years and decades ahead, we want to do this in increasing ways and have some of those initial stories that anchor that in the DNA.

Speaker B: 00:34:49

I love that picture, and I encourage you all post that on Facebook, feed the goose and that make a great T shirt when it comes to generosity.

Speaker C: 00:34:59

So I'm going with the bean counters and gunslingers.

Speaker B: 00:35:05

I agree. Mark, I really appreciate what you've brought to our attention and how you shared your personal experiences.

I do think when you think through generosity, generosity has the ability to touch people's heart like nothing else out there. It is a phenomenal evangelism tool. I think about my non Christian friends, and when I buy them lunch, like, they're just shocked.

They don't even know what to do. They're like, no, no, no, no. I'm like, no, let me do that. That's a small token of generosity. And we can think of different ways.

Sometimes it's our time, sometimes it's our talent. But it is undeniable that God used generosity to connect the dots of the gospel to his people.

And so we cannot neglect generosity when it comes to understanding the evangelism power that exists within it. And so I appreciate you bringing that to our attention.

asting today from Exponential: 2018

We want to kind of close out our time by taking some questions that may be rolling around in people's mind. We'd love to talk. So anything that you have, I'm going to make my way around the room with the mic, and that way we can capture that. Any questions.

Speaker A: 00:36:30

Any big missteps or things that you thought were going to promote generosity you know, initiatives, fundraisers, that maybe really killed it or put you down the wrong path. I would say not so much missteps.

But for us, we have had a harder time rooting out the stories of generosity from our congregation so that we can share them. I think maybe out of a humble spirit, people don't often share what's happening.

And so it's been a much harder climb for us to draw out those stories to be able to share. You know, I've heard people give talks about generosity as a pastor, just tell some generosity stories. You're like, yeah, where are those?

You know, and some of you have to.

And like, how to do that, how to get small group leaders to talk about somebody else in their small group or, you know, ministry leaders to tell some of those stories. So for us, that's maybe been our biggest challenge of how to really be able to tell those stories, gather them so that we can tell them well.

Speaker B: 00:37:37

Any thoughts on modeling your own giving? To what degree should you share about your level of giving from up front?

Speaker A: 00:37:48

When we do campaigns, that's a little bit more a part of what we've done because we always talk about leaders, make the first steps in terms of regular giving. It's amazing to me that still an awful lot of people who come to our church think that pastors are exempt from that and think that we don't give.

So just the fact that we do give back to our own church is surprising to a lot of people.

I don't talk about dollar amounts, but I talk to people that we are faithful to what the scriptures call us to in not only the minimum level of the tithe, but being generous, and that we want to continue to grow beyond minimum expectations of the scriptures and growing in generosity. So we've talked about that.

Another thing that's really practical, and I don't know how this works in the culture of so many of the churches represented here. While we're seeing an increasing amount of our giving being done online, we still actually pass baskets in our church on Sunday morning.

And I am amazed at how many people watch me when the basket comes and do I put something in? They don't have to know even what it is, but like. And so I think, how do we model that?

Not in a way that's showy or drawing attention to ourselves, but saying we want to model sacrifice and generosity and investing in the kingdom is really important. So that's how we've done it in our context.

Speaker C: 00:39:05

And just to add to that, I think when there are opportunities to Speak about your giving and generosity not during a generosity series, but throughout the year is a really important thing. And I would add to that, don't make your generosity campaign your three week sermon series that you do one time a year.

But the generosity is throughout the year that you're always talking about, that's interweaved into everything.

And the reason you can say that is if you look at scripture and you're teaching through scripture, you're going to see generosity coming up all the time.

Speaker B: 00:39:38

Another question over here.

Speaker D: 00:39:44

Mark. How do you manage the definition of generosity?

Sometimes your manager types will start to say, okay, if we're going to be generous, we did so many Kids for compassion this year. 20 kids raised money for youth group mission trip. We hire somebody for admissions pastor.

And so all of a sudden that definition could become very broad. So they can kind of minimize generosity. And I know that's got to be a battle. So how do you manage the definition of generosity?

Speaker A: 00:40:14

I mean, I think all those things are good. I think they're all worthy of celebration.

And so sometimes, you know, we get to the end of a year and we're talking about what, what God has done in our midst and all the different things that we can give thanks for. We talk about all the expressions of generosity that those are, are part of it.

But I think what you're asking is almost around, like, what are our generosity initiatives? What are we going to focus on? Where do we. Yeah, yeah. How are we going to pinpoint the areas where we believe that God is calling us to be generous?

And, and I think generosity always comes with some measure of stretching, discomfort and faith steps. And so if it's not a, an expression of generosity that, that cost us a little bit, then it's probably not really a generous step.

And so sometimes we lower the level to say, yeah, we did a little bit over here, but it wasn't really anything that was sacrificial or costly.

I love that passage in John 12 where Jesus is anointed with the perfume and it's a year's salary and it's this lavish expression of worship unto the Lord. And of course Judas is mad because he was the keeper of the money. And you get the sense of, I've lost control of a valuable asset here.

But Jesus rewards her and honors her and says something to us about lavish displays of generosity and costliness. So I guess that'd be for us around kind of identifying some initiatives for the year and are these ones that are really costly to us?

Speaker B: 00:41:46

Question for both Danny and Mark, how, how did you guys, in leading your church, make sure that you, you spoke to every income level when it came to generosity?

Because I know sometimes we may talk about generosity from the stage, saying, hey, if you just give up a cup of your Starbucks coffee this week and give it to here, like, we, we say that that's generous, but those that actually have financial wealth, that means nothing to them. And sometimes we can actually alienate those that have a real gift of developing wealth in the way that we talk about generosity.

So how did you guys connect the dots across the, you know, both those that are wealthy, but also those that, you know, aren't? So.

Speaker C: 00:42:33

Well, for us, we did learn it in the campaign very early on. It was about giving a gift that was significant for the person, and that was our challenge.

And we said, we want 100% participation, and that's what we were looking for. And so for some people, that literally was like to $10 a month was like, that was a significant sacrifice.

And for others, yeah, giving thousands of dollars. And I think the big thing is highlighting all those different stories.

So, for example, here you have the young girl, she's given a few bucks that is, you know, in the whole grand scheme of things, is really small. We would have the same thing if there were people who were making significant sacrifices, they were being generous in that.

We focused on that generosity. So, and for us, one thing that was a practical thing is I did handwritten thank you letters for every single giver.

So if someone put a dollar in the plate, they got a handwritten thank you card in the beginning, just to kind of start that conversation. Obviously, as we grew and as we multiplied to other campuses, then the campus pastors did that. But still, that still happens at our church today.

If anybody gives at any amount, we say thank you for that.

But then we have the same kind of stratification that different things happen at different levels or I'm just notified the team notifies me if there's some sort of large increase in giving percentage wise or numbers wise.

Speaker A: 00:43:56

So, yeah, and I think you're bringing up a good question because sometimes at the concern of alienating those on the lower side of the income, we just talk about smaller gifts and we honor that. And we should, you know, the, the widow and her mites and such. But, but there are people of significant wealth who need a personal challenge.

And too often as pastors, we're afraid of them. And I think they know that we're afraid.

But when we have the willingness to not only speak publicly about more Dramatic gifts, but at times, to be more personal in our challenges there, I think that is an important part of funding the mission, but also calling people who've been given significant means to really bring that to bear on the kingdom and to not kind of tilt too far or the other. And as I said, I think sometimes we're afraid of calling out and challenging those who have the capacity.

Speaker B: 00:44:53

I think that's well said. I know there are seasons in leading the church that I felt like the Lord purposely was like, be courageous about this. I'm like, I don't want to.

Like, Lord. Honestly, I'm intimidated to do this. I had one time in particular, we had a major need. Our children's ministries were running at 115% capacity.

I mean, if the fire marshal showed up, we were shut down. I mean, that's where we were at. And we were like, we need to get portable classrooms or something immediately.

And we Knew it was $30,000, and we didn't have that on hand at that point in the life of our church to be able to dedicate that there. And I felt God going, ask for it. And I'm like, how did I. No. And he said, no, ask for it. I couldn't shake it.

And I stood up on stage and said, hey, guys, we have this need.

I shared the need, talked about our desire to be a generous church, and said, you know, I'm just asking that two couples in our church to give a $10,000 gift. If you can't give that, I'm not talking to you. You know, And I let everybody out, and I felt like we could handle 10,000 as a church.

So if we could raise 20,000 in one day, we could basically take care of that need. I was blown away because by the. Before our last service was done, I had three $10,000 checks. Wow. Wow.

And so I'm like, all right, God, I'm not going to doubt anymore. So I think that you hit an important piece. We have time for two questions. So right here and then over here.

I think sometimes it can be hard to be on the receiving end of generosity.

Speaker A: 00:46:32

How do you develop that culture to be able to receive the generosity of others? Well, initially, when you're desperate, you have no other choice. You need to do so.

But I think something that's really missing from a lot of our kind of emerging planners is knowing how to really say thank you. Well, that is such an important thing. And there's a grace in giving. There's a grace in receiving. But I think when we're able to express gratitude.

And some of these you've heard of like thank you notes and things like that.

When you think about a pastor or a ministry receiving expression of generosity, to express back to those who gave, how those gifts are making a difference is so really, really important. And ultimately, I think the person that's really blessed is the person who gave.

And so I think it's an opportunity for us to help them attach their giving to the mission and see the impact that it's making.

So initially, it might feel weird to receive something overwhelming, but when you're able to help those individuals and sometimes even in personal ways to feel the impact of what they're doing, I think that's just a beautiful expression back to them.

Speaker B: 00:47:49

Question on money for generosity coming from.

Speaker A: 00:47:53

The budget and from the people, how.

Speaker B: 00:47:55

Do you balance that?

Speaker A: 00:47:56

And what do you mean by from the people?

Speaker B: 00:47:59

In other words, you've got your money.

Speaker A: 00:48:02

In the bank that you want to maybe use as a token of generosity or raising it right then and there.

Speaker B: 00:48:08

In an offering, or do you do both?

Speaker A: 00:48:15

There have been some times, I think, where we didn't have money in the budget, where we made a decision to kind of take some money that we had set aside because of a particular need that came up or a tragedy or something of that nature. But for the most part, either we put it into our budget or we call people to contribute to it along the way when something comes up.

Sometimes we've also done kind of a matching thing where we knew about a tragedy that took place, so we asked people to give towards it, and then we matched it with something out of our savings. So we kind of doubled the gift in that direction. But yeah, if I think I would understand what you're asking of.

You know, most of the time we try to plan our generosity. You know, I think generous people plan to be generous. I think that's the first thing, as opposed to just waiting for the spontaneous moment.

There are times when we need to do something above and beyond what we've planned. But as much as we can, we plan generosity into our budget and into our ministry plans.

Speaker C: 00:49:16

And I think we see that in scripture as well too. In First Corinthians, when Paul asked them to, hey, I want you to plan for this gift.

So I think it's being in a position, and that's why even savings, going back to what you were talking before, that's putting you in a position to even spontaneous be able to be generous later. There was some planning that has to happen there.

Speaker A: 00:49:37

That's good.

Speaker B: 00:49:37

Great. Mark, I want to thank you so much for being our guest today. It was a fantastic conversation and a lot of good nuggets there.

I like the gunslinger and. And, yeah, and make sure you feed the goose. So. But this has been a great conversation. I think it'll be very helpful to our pastors out there.

I want to thank everybody else for tuning in. This is unfiltered, real conversations about real situations in ministry and church planting. We'll see you at the next episode.

Until then, keep it real.