In a valuable new eBook, “Finances & Administration for Church Leaders” Rev. Dr. Sara Day, CFP®, examines the value of a pastoral relations committee — among the most effective methods for strengthening the lines of communication between the pastor and the congregation.
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Whichever end of the spectrum your church falls on — big, small, urban, rural, tech-savvy or still improving — I’m sure there are things about your church’s online presence that sometimes make you cringe. With that in mind, I’d like to talk about the five most “cringe-worthy” mistakes I see churches make with their digital giving strategies. My intention here is not to “throw stones,” but rather to shine a light on some of the low-hanging fruit in the oft-confusing and ever-changing world of digital giving.
Read More >On May 18, 2014, Powhatan Community Church (Powhattan, VA) enjoyed its largest single giving day in the church’s 13-year history. And, founder and Senior Pastor Brian C. Hughes reported that the church was on budget to make the most aggressive budget increase in 10 years. All this exceeded the giving increase for which Hughes and his staff’s planned and prayed.
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While churches might have to be run like businesses, there are specific needs and flexibility which non-CMS financial management applications just cannot provide. For some, the leading secular accounting software might be the answer — but we suggest otherwise. Here’s why.
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In this series installment, Paul Gage — who has consulted more than 500 church capital campaigns, with results exceeding $1 billion — focuses on the second phase of a campaign: Organization. According to Gage, the three most critical components of this phase are Prayer, Presentation and Preaching.
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Mark Kitts served as a founding pastor before establishing People Driven Software, which merged with Elexio Church Software. Today, Kitts is Elexio’s Lead Software Architect. Here, he talks about how church management software helps churches with financial management.
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Church members not only look for spiritual leadership from their pastoral staff, but they also have expectations that donations made will be widely used. Often, they expect leadership to provide financial reports produced from a reliable accounting package, verifying their trust.
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Anyone with resources — whether believers or not — will only give generously to what they understand and value. If your givers can’t articulate the result, or if they don’t fully support the outcome that their gift is meant to achieve, they won’t give much. Typically, they won’t give consistently, and they certainly won’t give lavishly or at great sacrifice.
Clearly communicating vision provides both the roadmap and the destination for the generous heart.
I recently conducted a small Facebook test. Survey participants were asked to answer three questions about giving. Here’s what I found:
• 96% of people consider themselves to be generous
• 80% of those same people want to be more generous than they currently are
• 92% feel held back by a lack of money
These findings represent a strange tension between who we are, who we want to be, and our perceived lack that stands in the way.
We are a check-less, cashless society. Yet, in 2011, Lifeway Research discovered that only 14 percent of churches offered online giving. Recent studies are showing that that number is increasing. Hopefully, yours is one of those churches that has implemented online giving.
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