« Evangelicals tithed three times national average | Main | Develop a church giving plan »
February 6, 2008
Ministry impacted when church giving drops
I was talking to a staff member of a large church in a metropolitan area today. He expressed to me that they've had to make some difficult decisions recently. Giving has dropped, so they needed to control their expenses. And the easiest way to make up a loss is to cut personnel--which is typically the largest line item in any church's budget.
It's an unfortunate situation that this staff member feels horrible about. I asked him why he thought giving was down. He speculated as most people do and then revealed what he believed to be the true answer: they are without a senior pastor.
This is contrasted with another conversation I had recently with a completely different church--still large in size and located in a metropolitan area. They recently lost their pastor too--only church giving has grown. In fact, they collected more money than they needed this year. They are moving forward with finding a new pastor and carefully considering how they'll invest the additional contributions to grow the Kingdom.
These are two different churches in similar demographic settings who are both without senior leadership. Only one is suffering deeply from a decrease in church giving while the other one is continuing to thrive.
A church's ability to minister to others is directly connected to its level of giving. That's a given. That being the case, I wonder what a church can do to protect itself from the loss of its senior leadership to ensure that when that happens (for whatever reason) the ministry and giving habits of the church continue to thrive.
Any ideas?
Posted by bstroup at February 6, 2008 1:09 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.lifeway.com/cgi-bin/mt4.1/mt-tb.cgi/557