Hi Jeff,

I thought I would let you know that one of your ideas went over very well in our congregation.  I sent thank you cards out with all the year end receipts.  One lady, who is 92, said, “In all the years I’ve given to the church no one has ever said thank you.”  She loved her card.  Thanks for the idea, as I work on the others you shared.

Spoiler alert:  this post and the next few are going to report on some of the more interesting results from the exercise.  If you wish to complete the survey before reading what other people said, click on this link.

I have assembled the data from each workshop and produced a summary of the responses from all of them.  With around 125 people responding, I feel we have a reasonably representative sample of what congregational leaders believe about giving in their own church.

The profile of responses was not the same in each workshop.  No doubt this indicates a variety of experience and belief, to some degree at least, across the synod.

Half of the twenty statements produced a strong majority response.  Here are the ten on which there seems to be considerable consensus.

1. “If we ask for money for a specific project, people respond generously.” –  94% agree
2. “Many of our members are seniors on a fixed income.” — 91% agree
3. “What people give to the church is considered a private matter between them and God.” — 83% agree
4. “We teach that giving has both a spiritual and a practical side.” — 80% agree
5. “We regularly thank people for the money and volunteer time they give to the church.” — 76% agree
6. “We offer the PAR system for offerings and encourage people to use it.” — 67% agree
7. “People are already giving as much money to the church as they can.” — 75% disagree
8. “We have enough money to be the kind of church we want to be.” — 73% disagree
9. “Our total congregational income is growing at or above the rate of inflation.” — 66% disagree
10. “The pastor knows how much each person/household gives.” — 65% disagree

In future posts I’ll examine each of these in greater details.

“At the risk of oversimplifying, people give money away for two main reasons: to extend their own accomplishments and to bond with a community. “

Dan Hotchkiss

The article reviews four “beliefs that are optimistic, wishful, and mistaken”.

1. “A unified stewardship drive is better than a lot of special appeals.”
2. “Donors want their gifts kept secret.”
3. “Only evangelicals can ask people to tithe.”
4. “Faith and gratitude are the most important influence on people’s giving.”

To read the full article, click here.

• In the first step they completed a worksheet by themselves, without discussion.  The sheet contained twenty statements about giving, with the introductory phrase “In our congregation today . . .”  Participants checked off one of three boxes after each statement, labelled “agree”, “disagree” and “don’t know”.
• In the second step, they discussed their responses with the other people at their table (often people from their own congregation).
• In the third step we collected the responses to each question from the entire group, by show of hands .

All of the statements are about matters of fact, and people’s responses reflect whether they believe them to be true.

In future posts I am going to report on some of the more interesting results from the exercise

If you wish to complete the survey before reading what other people said, click on this link.

• Wellesley, ON
• Sudbury, ON (Hannah Lake Bible Centre)
• Eganville, ON
• Lunenburg, NS
• Burlington,ON
• New Hamburg, ON [both and2]

Others are scheduled for 2013 in London, ON and Montreal, QC.

To learn more about the program, or to explore the possibility of scheduling a session in your area, drop me a line at jpym@elfec.ca.

A breakout group in the Hannah Lake chapel

I have been impressed by the commitment of the people who showed up at these workshops.  In total, more than 120 people gave up several hours on a Saturday to think about the future of their church, time they could have used to do other things.  In the case of the group who met at Hannah Lake Bible Centre in Sudbury, several carloads of people came from Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins.  That meant that they spent 6 hours or more on the road, in addition to the 4 hours of the workshop.

Photo op at Hannah Lake

In the quilting room at Zion L.C. in Lunenburg

Congregational discussions in Lunenburg

It’s Black Friday so we wanted to hook you up with a killer discount on all Giving, Preaching & Systems resources.

This is from a company whose slogan is  “We coach the church, providing the best content and building community among church leaders.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

One that I particularly like comes from Sumac, a company that sells fund-raising software to charities.  I haven’t tried out their product, and I’m certainly not shilling for them, but their newsletter is great and their graphics are cool. 

The newsletter arrives every month or two and contains several articles of interest to people who work in the charitable sector, particularly fund-raising (natch).  The last issue came with links to three articles, all of them interesting.  But the one that was particularly striking bore the title “6 Truths About The Donor Psyche & How They Inform Nonprofit Marketing” and came with this teaser:

Peter Singer, arguably the most famous and influential modern philosopher, delves into to the human psyche to determine what’s holding people back from giving at their full potential. He cites 6 reasons, which give way to 6 very clear things you can do to inspire giving in your next campaign!

If you are put off by the word “victim” in reason #1, I suggest you replace it with “beneficiary”.  It will make just as much sense and probably fit our context better.

To go straight to the full article, click here.

Clicking on the “Library” tab at the top of the Sumac web page will take you to . . . you guessed it:  a library of past newsletter articles, all helpfully sorted into categories.  Enjoy!

Here’s the link to conference information on the diocesan website, from which you can proceed to the registration page:

http://contact.toronto.anglican.ca/osn-conference-main-page

John was sincere in his praise:

“I’ve been an avid follower of Dave Ramsey for about 2 years now and he’s made a big difference in my life my giving to the church.  At first I was a little skeptical, but after two years of listening I see he is genuine.  The nice thing about Dave Ramsey is he’s a devout Christian and references many biblical references in his teachings and the importance of Christian values and beliefs.  He has a live 3 hour radio program on each weekday from 2:00 – 5:00 EST which can be accessed through the radio tab in the link.  I never took the course but listen to him on average 8-10 hours per week and also have an audio book of his and others he  recommends.  All of his material is faith based.”

Disclaimer:  My inclusion of the name in the quote above is not an endorsement of the person or his material.  I am not familiar with his products or approach.  There are many other providers of material that purports to teach people how to manage their finances more effectively.

I tend to be skeptical of this sort of thing, especially when it is offered “from a Christian perspective”.  (Some day I need to work through the reasons why I am skeptical, but that’s another story.)  Perhaps it’s time to put my skepticism aside while considering the underlying question.  Should Eastern Synod congregations be offering some sort of program in basic money management to their members and others?

Many other denominations consider such programs a key part of their ministry, but I don’t know of many Lutheran churches that do so.  The argument in favour of the programs is easy to state:

• Many people encounter difficulties managing their financial life.
• Financial difficulties can spill over into other realms, destroying relationships, marriages and families.  One’s spiritual life can be affected by financial woes.
• Churches offer programs to address other types of “life problems”:  marriage enrichment; pastoral counselling with individuals, couples and families.  Why wouldn’t they offer programs to help people better manage their financial affairs?

If we examine the question from the perspective of giving, we might ask how we can expect people to be generous if they are deeply in debt and struggling with financial chaos?

If congregations were to offer such programs, they could form an important part of the church’s ministry to the community outside the congregation.  According to the statistics, millions of  Canadians are drowning in a sea of mortgages, car loans and credit card debt.

What do you think?  Does your church offer programs in basic money management?  Is this something we should be doing?

“[This book] is about liberation that begins with a sense of gratitude for the most ordinary and taken-for-granted realities.”

Mary Jo Leddy, Radical Gratitude

In Leddy’s analysis, our society and most of us who live in it are held in a “captivity of craving for more”.  She calls the result a “culturally induced dissatisfaction” that transforms us at a deep level of our being.  We become convinced that:

• I don’t have enough
• I am not enough
• I am not good enough

Who among us has not experienced a dark night of the soul when doubts like these force their way into our consciousness?

Western culture tells us that there is only one cure for not enough, and that is more.  More gadgets, more food, more friends, more love, more exercise, more spiritual awakening; each of us has at least one weak spot in our life that would benefit from more of something.  Our economy works by creating dissatisfaction — wants and needs — through advertising and then selling us something to fill the gap.  But whatever we buy is never enough, so we’re launched on the cycle again and again.

Leddy’s proposition is that the only cure for dissatisfaction is the liberation that comes from radical gratitude, which she says begins when we stop taking life for granted.

My wife and I are blessed to live in a neighbourhood of wonderful neighbours.  Lately the tranquillity of our little corner of suburban Eden has been disrupted by road construction.  It began about 6 weeks ago and is scheduled to be completed by the end of August, but no one is betting the farm on that date.  The heavy equipment and dump trucks start up by 7:00 a.m. and rarely shut down before 5:30 p.m.  It’s noisy and dusty beyond description.  Because we live on a dead end, there’s only one way in and out, and traffic is often delayed by the excavation.

On Saturday night some neighbours wandered over to join us on our deck, and inevitably the conversation turned to the construction project.  After a few minutes of predictable complaining, one of the women said, “Won’t it be wonderful to have new sewers, sidewalks and a smooth road surface?”  Another chimed in, “And haven’t the crew been great?  They’re so patient and polite, and they worked through that awful heat and humidity last week.”  Someone else said, “How lucky are we to live in a society where, when our water is shut off for a few hours, it comes back on and it’s as drinkable as it was before!”  All of these comments were made without any prompting from me.

This is why I love the people who live near us.  Our neighbours have an attitude that does not take roads and sewers and clean water for granted.  They appreciate the construction workers (most of whom don’t look or talk like the people you sit next to at church) who labour on our behalf under a hot sun.  They are grateful to live in a municipality that provides us with all this (and much more) at the cost of a few thousand dollars a year in property taxes.

Do you have a story about finding gratitude where you least expected it?