Giving to Kingdom work is a profound, life changing, and deeply personal process for each person in your church.
For every leader, it requires artful and prayerful leadership to inspire a congregation to give.
Candidly, I’ve hesitated to write a post like this because I don’t like the potential risk of “trivializing” giving by making a simple list.
Personal stewardship is a deeply spiritual issue.
That said, I know how much stress pastors and church leaders carry about church finances. So my hope is that this “simple” list is helpful, encouraging, easily accessible, and therefore worth the risk.
1) Never make money about expenses, make it about vision.
People can smell desperation from a leader.
When you allow your financial pressures to leak into your teaching and general announcements from the platform you receive less income not more. Vision is what moves people to contribute financially.
People work hard for their income and want to know it’s going to a Kingdom purpose greater than they can produce on their own.
2) Practice generosity personally.
Your personal giving patterns may never be of public record, but your level of generosity is inherently connected to your leadership.
When giving to others is as natural as breathing, that finds its way into the DNA of your leadership and people respond accordingly. You behave differently and the congregation responds in kind.
3) Offer an online giving option.
Online giving has caught tremendous traction in the local church. It fits the normal practices and patterns of your people for many of their personal finances.
In short, it’s easier than remembering to write a check and carry it to church. Don’t stop receiving your physical offering, but I highly recommend you set up online giving.
4) Teach one series on giving per year.
If you talk about money too much your congregation becomes anesthetized to what you are saying. In general, people know they are “supposed to give,” they see the offering received every week!
Merely telling them or asking them the same way over and over again doesn’t change anything.
If you prepare and present, for example, an annual 4-week series on biblical stewardship, including tithing, the impact is far greater.
Never pressure anyone to give. Encourage your congregation to follow God’s plan and promises.
5) Demonstrate wise stewardship.
Giving starts with vision, but continues through good stewardship.
Nothing increases trust faster than when the leadership consistently demonstrates wise money management.
If you are not great at the financial part of leadership, get some help from a few sharp business leaders in your church.
6) Teach tithing for the benefit of the people, not the church as an organization.
This should be included within your annual financial series, but it deserves special note on its own.
Giving is not about money as much as it is about trust.
It’s a heart issue more than a wallet issue.
Trusting that God will provide for personal needs, and that principles like obedience and gratitude are part of spiritual maturity are of huge benefit to each person.
The results of giving are a major blessing to the individual and far exceed the significance of the church “making budget.” I’m not downplaying or dismissing the church’s need for financial resources, but I’m saying make it personal not organizational.
7) Be bold about tithing with leaders.
Tithing is part of a believer’s spiritual journey.
It’s good to be clear and direct, but also be very encouraging with the general congregation when it comes to your teaching on tithing. But when it comes to teaching leaders to tithe, it’s good to be bold.
If they are representing the church, carrying spiritual responsibility and commensurate spiritual authority, it needs to be backed by spiritual obedience.
Again, never communicate guilt, but remember the idea of giving started with God, not you.
8) Tell stories of life change.
Few things are more inspiring than stories of life change.
When your congregation consistently hears these stories, whether you tell them or by video or just a hallway conversation, they are reminded of the vision and what God wants to do through your church.
Make baptisms a part of your worship experience, they are some of the best stories ever told!
9) Offer personal financial training.
When we as leaders challenge people to give without equipping them to give, we create a kind of spiritual dissonance.
Without knowledge of basic budgeting, debt reduction and personal savings etc., it’s difficult to embrace consistent giving, let alone tithing.
Offer top-notch finance training through small groups and seminars at your church. Financial freedom is a powerful tool to help your people grow!
I have heard SO many sermons on tithing it makes my teeth itch, and most recently, it reared it’s head again after we paid off our mortgage 2 years ahead of our already aggressive plan. “Well done” had barely left the pastor’s lips before he started a 3 part series on tithing and giving.
WOW.
My wife and I did some reading on what the Bible says and doesn’t say about tithing and what we discovered was very enlightening, and not surprisingly, never discussed by pastors:
Tithing is an Old Testament law put in place to provide for the church leaders who had no job other than to minister to their congregation, and as such, these tithes and offerings were sustenance in nature and not financial. While I agree a faithful and cheerful heart will give, I believe the message of giving TEN PERCENT of your income, regardless of your position, is reckless, unbecoming and quite destructive for some people. It is in my opinion, God entrusted my family to ME, and to provide for their needs first and foremost, and THEN give back to the Kingdom. Please understand I am not referencing those of us who have the perpetually new luxury car in the driveway and the largest house on the block and thus I am broke- those are ignomious pursuits of pride and greed IMO, rather I am writing of those of us who are judicious with what we have received and still don’t have enough to cover the necessities of life like health insurance for the family.
I make this point because as a child, my wife’s grandfather used some of his pastoral earnings to send less fortunate children to church camp yet his own grandhchildren could not attend. I suppose he felt his own magnificence was enough to sustain them and not let them experience the joy of camp at least once in their summer.
Given the demands on our time, I believe one of the greatest gifts we can give our church and Lord is more of our TIME, yet few sermons touch on that. That is all some people have to give back and often times, is exactly what someone hurting in our Kingdom needs most- someone with a tender heart and big shoulders to share time with them in this God-forsaken world.
I can tell you have passion on this subject and it’s very personal to you. Sounds like this might be a great conversation for you and your pastor. Thank you for your comments on giving of our time, I agree that we all should also be generous with our time!
Not really passion- just what God has revealed to us. We left our last church after the Holy Spirit revealed to us, among other things, we had NEVER met our pastor and would likely never meet him, nor did we have insight on where out tithes & offerings were going (I later discovered we had a new satellite church in Buffalo, NY, we’re in the Dallas area). Thank you for your kind words- I look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
The Mosaic law of tithe was instituted for the priests only job was to serve in the temple and had no other source of income, and could not own land to generate food/income. It is true that the OT tithe was not purely money, but was more so commodities (animals, fruit, grain, etc). But if a person wanted to redeem the commodity, money was used as a fair-market-value substitute in place of the commodity.
However, the principle of tithing actually predates the law of Moses in that we see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all tithed more than 400 years before Moses. So while the legal requirement did start with Moses, the principle started before Moses. Therefore, I believe it is not good to try to put a legal burden on people to pay a tithe like it is a tax, but rather to teach people to give the best gift they can and strive to have a 10% level of giving as a minimum. Because the same law of giving to support the priests, also was to support the work they did which included serving as Community Health Officials, Community Social Workers, Community Judicial Oversight, Marriage gaurdians and Community Educators. I believe God intends for churches’ incomes to continue to be used to have influence in all of these areas today. In my opinion, if our churches would return to assisting the community in these ways, the ministry becomes far more valuable to the giver. People would then be eager to give the best they can instead of being eager to argue about how much should be given.