« Anne Jackson talks about tithing | Main | Howard Dayton offers financial advice for newlyweds »
October 15, 2008
3 brutal facts about giving grounded in the Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle is more commonly known as the 80-20 rule. In other words, 80 percent of the result is generated by 20 percent of the effort.
This can be applied to church giving habits too. 20% of your congregation is driving 80% of your funds. This will either paralyze you or motivate you to become more strategic.
The reality is the it's the 20% who end up on stewardship and finance committees. These leaders can't imagine or understand why 80% of the congregation doesn't give.
What I've found true is the often the 20% thinks they are actually 40% or 50%. Most church leaders think their church is different (i.e. better) than the average. (Ever run into that before?)
Here are the brutal facts:
1. When your long-term funding strategy is hung on the giving habits of a small percentage of your entire congregation, you are tempting fate. Someone in that small group will leave the church, change jobs, loose their job, die, etc. If you're not building giving habits with the 80% group, you are leaving yourself wide open for disaster to happen.
2. Providing things like e-giving and offering envelopes are primarily to encourage giving and make it easy for the 80% to do so. The 20% don't need offering envelopes or e-giving. They are going to give anyway. If the pastor requested all donations be made into pennies, the 20% would take off from work early to stop by the bank and exchange paper for pennies. (Over dramatic, yes. But you get my point.)
3. Stewardship is more important than your sermon preparation. (I'm anticipating getting some negative feedback for this one. So I'm ready.) Stewardship is about discipleship. It speaks to giving of ourselves - our time, talent and treasure - because we recognize that everything we have is from God and is designed to be used to multiply kingdom efforts. While years are spent preparing pastors to preach, without a consistent stewardship education program pastors won't have a pulpit to preach from. (Pulpit can be symbolic if you are natually opposed to the piece of furniture that usually is found center stage at tranditional churches.)
Now more than ever pastors and church leaders must concern themselves with the fundamentals of organizational funding, stability and sustainability.
Let me sum it up by saying this: More Money. More Ministry. No Money. No Ministry.
That's the brutal facts.
Posted by bstroup at October 15, 2008 10:44 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.lifeway.com/cgi-bin/mt4.1/mt-tb.cgi/1495