September 2015
Rethinking Stewardship

Raising Disciples, Generous Givers

Greg Syler

Year after year, at the kickoff to the annual pledge campaign, we’d run up against the same basic things. Despite the fact that our community was growing and participation was increasing in worship and ministry, relatively few people turned in their pledge cards in a timely manner. And, instead of sparking some energy for change, the tasks of assembling giving estimates, mailing pledge letters, and putting together the budget were done with the same spirit as someone checking groceries off their shopping list. After all, our expenses were kept in line, and we guessed giving could be bumped up a little bit, here or there. I wouldn’t say our approach was optimistic, but it was certainly cautious.

At the same time, there were other realities and these were causes for celebration and rejoicing. Overall giving was up and our reliance on fundraising income – often a primary source of volunteer burnout – was way down. More people were joining the St. George Valley Lee community and young families and children were filling up the parish hall and Sunday school. Ministry initiatives were growing, and targeted financial giving to ministries – now set apart from the operating budget – was growing by leaps and bounds. Youth group, for instance, never really had much funding via the old operating budget but new enthusiasm, new leadership, and celebratory events sparked a huge increase in targeted giving to youth ministry. Outreach, too, went from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands in giving, and giving away. All of this growth, both numerical and spiritual, was because we shifted our attention from programs to lives, from commitment to community, from institution to people.

Meeting institutional needs

But all our talk about moving away from institutional thinking doesn’t actually mean ignoring the needs of the institution itself. Even though we’d trimmed our operating budget years ago to the bare essentials (salaries, utilities, office expenses, and insurance), we still had those expenses, which were helping build up the ministries and people-to-people engagements driving the community’s overall success. We’re all ministers, of course, but some of us are compensated to do the work and coordinate the ministries, while most of our other ministers work at their day jobs. The parish administrator’s salary, for instance, isn’t just a number on paper: it’s an investment in paying a specific person to act on the community’s behalf in carrying out what the community discerns God is calling us to do. The institution still needs funding, and relatively significant and robust financial resources at that.

Which brings us back ‘round to the initial challenge: how do you lift up ministry, participation, and engagement as the primary mission of the church and, at the same time, raise awareness and money for the institution called church?

Why we changed our approach

Our answer, some years back, was to ditch the traditional pledge drive system. Over time, we had noticed that the number of signed pledge cards was getting smaller and smaller, even though the amount of total dollars given, especially through plate contributions, was getting larger and larger. The obvious fact was that people simply weren’t signing their cards and mailing them back. We wondered if the amount of energy spent on hounding folks to sign and return their cards would actually return a more robust result. What if we were witnessing the early days of a larger trend away from institutional thinking and toward event-driven, people-to-people encounters with Christian community and God in Christ? So, instead of hounding people to sign and return pledge cards, we opted to send boxes of envelopes to all active members of the congregation and community.

I’ve written plenty about this process before, and I won’t go into too many of those details because you can read about it – including the details and specifics – in my earlier writing, links to which are provided at the end of this article. In sum, overall giving grew (though modestly); expenses were kept in line, and what we once called the ‘Open Pledge Campaign’ worked, and works. At St. George’s, we went from receiving roughly 70 signed pledge cards to distributing nearly 140 envelopes.

Overall, more people are using the envelopes from the boxes than were returning signed pledge cards. A significant benefit to this approach is the ability to track box numbers without necessarily associating the number with a name.

Opportunity for greater participation

The Open Pledge Campaign gave us the opportunity to give everyone a goal for giving; we simply did the math for them: total budgeted expenses divided by total number of boxes mailed out equals someone’s share.

This new campaign helped us get over a perennial obstacle to growth, namely, including everyone, even those who are new to the community and those who might have ideas that may challenge the way we’ve always done it. Through this campaign, everyone is included, and everyone is invited to full inclusion. Once a newcomer fills out a welcome card, which we specifically say on Sunday mornings is a more than sufficient offering for someone who’s spent a few weeks checking us out, they get a welcome letter and a box of envelopes and an invitation to fully join. It may seem counterintuitive to say ‘Welcome!’ by handing someone a bill, but that welcome is nothing more than surface-level pleasantry if someone’s invited to sip coffee but not have full access to the money and power and structure-stuff. Real welcome means full inclusion, emphasis on the full.

Forming Disciples of Christ

A few years into this program what we’re now learning is that we also need to be bolder in raising the standards of giving and membership. It’s not that the Open Pledge Campaign failed us in this effort; it did not. It’s just that this kind of campaign is more descriptive than prescriptive. It’s enabled us to welcome and invite; it has not, however, helped us to raise the bar and teach, or form Disciples of Christ.

At St. George’s, then, we’re moving this year into a subtle, though we hope impactful, transformation of this program. No longer will we call it the Open Pledge Campaign, it’s now the Generous Giver Campaign. People are still going to receive boxes of envelopes, but we’re going to do a lot more teaching and a lot more norming. We believe that discipleship moves people toward generosity, and we also believe, in turn, that generosity can be an effective teaching tool for Christian discipleship. A timeless principle of Christian stewardship affirms that the reason the church asks people to give their time, talent, and treasure is because the church is teaching the gift of generosity. Generosity is, itself, an invaluable life lesson and discipleship skill; disciples of Jesus give, and give without strings. That’s what the cross is all about, after all, and the reason why Jesus didn’t want people to know he was the Messiah until after the Passion. You could say St. George’s new focus is actually in keeping with our other shifts, for this is moving away from institutional self-preservation (…we need x amount of dollars) to teaching and raising up disciples of Jesus (God gave you x amount of dollars and only asks you to give 10% away).

Raising the bar

The question I get asked most often by newcomers and those interested in working on their faith life as a part of this Christian community is “What do I need to do to become a member?” Sadly, the only thing I’ve been able to tell them so far is a paraphrase of our church’s ridiculously low standards: “Well, come at least three times in the calendar year and give at least something in the offering plate and make sure the treasurer knows about it.” Our shift from ditching the pledge to raising generous givers and disciples of Jesus is all about a shift away from maintenance and toward engagement, which carries with it standards, and increasing standards at that, and norms around how we use and deploy our time, talent and, yes, treasure.

To that end, the Generous Giver Campaign is also about raising the bar. Our vestry recently affirmed that the church’s standard of giving is the biblical standard of the tithe, which is giving 10 percent of one’s income. They also passed a resolution establishing a new metric, the ‘Fair Share,’ which is a dollar amount determined by dividing the church’s total budgeted expenses for the current year by the number of active giving envelopes for the previous year. If the tithe is the ceiling, the Fair Share is the floor. The reason we’re doing this is because we’ve noticed, now with the benefit of being able to track patterns and practices of giving, that even long-time established members are not contributing as fully as needed, even though we suspect they have the means and the resources to do so. Given the ways in which ongoing giving does not meet ongoing expenses, we know people are not fully investing in the model of church they think they enjoy. Perhaps that model itself needs to change, and that is one thing we are actively pursuing, even as we’re having this other conversation about increasing generosity and stepping up commitment.

Moving toward a Generous Giver Campaign means we, the church leadership, need to do a lot more teaching. Ditching the pledge drive a few years back helped us welcome more and encourage greater participation, but, now, the challenge for us is to build upon that welcome and raise the standard, not just for those who are new among the faithful but for all who claim membership in this Christian community. We do this of course in prayer, above all, asking the Holy Spirit to do a whole lot more formation around generosity and practices of sacrificial giving, all of which are a part of discipleship.

Try This
Other people’s ideas or processes can be a valuable starting point for congregations looking to make a change. As Anna Olson writes in “Other People’s Ideas," the experiences of other congregations can serve as a starting point for conversations. Here’s how she describes the process:

  • “What if we read to understand their discernment process? How did they get from “we’ve always done it…” to “let’s try…?” What wasn’t working? How could they tell? What did they figure out about why it wasn’t working? What gave them courage to ditch the “always done it” way? How did they work with people’s doubts about change? How does what they decided to try reflect what they figured out about their people, their place, their strengths and weaknesses?
  • Now you’ve got something you can use, even if your context looks very different from the one you are reading about. What isn’t working in your place? What would it take to change it? What is it about your particular place that makes this thing not work? What are your people good at? What makes them feel able to give of themselves? How might you use that knowledge to come up with a new idea of your own?
  • Someone else’s Something may not work for you. What can you learn from someone else’s effective discernment to make your own effective as well?”

What might your congregation learn from the experience of St. George’s Episcopal Church?

Greg Syler is the rector of St. George's Episcopal Church in Valley Lee, Maryland, the oldest continuous Anglican parish in Maryland and, today, a vibrant, historic congregation in the Diocese of Washington. Greg has served on Diocesan Council, convenes the Region 6 Clericus, is a member of the Southern Maryland Steering Committee, and a leader in collaborative Episcopal ministries in southern Maryland. He also helped envision and create and, together with others, runs Camp EDOW -- the diocese's first ever summer camp for kids and youth.

Resources

Don't miss an issue of Vestry Papers! Sign up for your free subscription here.

This article is part of the September 2015 Vestry Papers issue on Rethinking Stewardship
Save Issue