October 2015 Editor’s Letter: Rethinking Stewardship
What can we learn from the experiences of others? This issue of Vestry Papers features articles that share ways three congregations are overcoming challenges related to annual giving as well as offering an antidote for the anxiety that can arise during giving campaigns:
In my head I really believe this, and I’ve long thought it’s absolutely fundamental to effective ministry. I trace the origin of the concept back to my time in the Diocese of Chicago’s intentional curacy program, and my introduction to the thinking – and the person – of Kennon Callahan, author of The Twelve Keys of an Effective Church, among other volumes. I think Callahan said this, or at least he planted the seeds in my mind and, like I said, it seems very, very basic to me.
But then I attend meetings with clergy and diocesan leaders and it seems that I’m the only one who thinks this. And then I start to think that I might be wrong or misguided. But, still, I can’t shake it from my mind. And, still, I think it’s a downright bedrock truth of effective ministry.
The concept is simple, or at least I think so: Congregations need to fit their basic expenses into their baseline – let’s call it pledge and plate – giving. That is, congregations need to live within what people give.
The point is about making the institution called ‘church’ speak clearly the message of Christian discipleship. A congregation’s baseline giving, most notably plate and pledge giving, is perhaps the most significant numerical indicator of how well that congregation is engaging the work of Christian ministry. Pledge and plate giving is the fruit, so to speak, of everything a church does which is readily identifiable as Christian ministry: worship, formation, preaching, pastoral care, outreach, engaging the neighborhood – all of these streams of activities flow back into whether and how well the local congregation is a vibrant missionary center. And all of those streams of activities reflect themselves in certain numbers, financial giving among them.
Want some advice on how to grow your church?
Hire a communications director.
Yes, you heard that right. A communications director. Not an additional pastor, not an education director or another musician. But a professional communicator to craft an effective narrative, develop a marketing campaign, and use latest digital technology to push your message out to people you don't know yet,
Let me unpack that job outline. First, a professional -- someone who has training and experience in using digital technology, email campaigns, social media campaigns, push marketing, inbound marketing, and blogging. Not someone wedded to paper, and not someone whose primary focus is on internal communications. If you keep talking only to yourselves, your church will die.
Second, someone who can craft a narrative. That means persuasive content that will help people understand who you are, what you are about, what you value, the difference you hope to make in the world, and the benefits they will find in engaging with you. We are way beyond posting acolyte schedules and promoting parish suppers. Infinitely beyond internal budget discussions.
Third, it's about marketing. Yes, that is a term from commerce. Get over it. Marketing simply means going into the marketplace in a way that touches other lives. Good marketing, especially for a faith community, is grounded in honesty and transparency, and it seeks to draw people closer to you and what you value. All not-for-profits do marketing. Churches do marketing, too. They just haven't been doing it well. A sign out front is marketing, but it isn't enough. A web site is marketing, but it's too passive.
Sometimes my dog barks.
I know, this is not unusual, but I wish he wouldn’t. We have neighbors. Sometimes he startles me. But he’s a dog so he barks.
In fact, he does all sorts of things I wish he wouldn’t. He growls at other dogs, licks things, sniffs garbage.
My wife and I are working on training him a little better so he barks a little less and plays better with strangers, but there are limits to what we can do. Ultimately, we have to let him lick and bark and be a dog.
This is a lesson I’ve gradually been learning in my life and work: to let other people be themselves. Sometimes people in my life behave differently than I’d like. My coworkers go on tangents during meetings, for example, or my wife might confront someone when I might just let it go. I can make my preferences clear, we can talk and make sure we’re generally on the same page, but ultimately I can’t control other people and I shouldn’t try.
Not that I’m a controlling person, actually. But sometimes when people do things that I wouldn’t—maybe they talk a little loud or say things I wouldn’t—it makes me anxious or grumpy.
All websites need a domain name and a web host. These are easy to acquire, but sometimes churches have a hard time keeping track of them – and end up losing them, with dire results. They could find themselves locked out of their own website, or the website could vanish altogether. Here’s what you need to know to prevent this from happening to your church.
First, some definitions. A web host refers to space on a server accessible via the World Wide Web, on which the files making up your website reside. Using the analogy of a house, the webhost is like the lot on which the house is built.
Each “lot” on a web host has a numeric address called an IP address (where IP stands for Internet Protocol) written as four numbers of one to three digits, separated by periods. The IP address of the [Diocese of Newark] website is 72.10.32.221. Since a meaningful name is easier to remember than a number, a domain name is registered to refer to the IP address. The diocese registered dioceseofnewark.org as its domain name.
You can register a domain name for a small annual fee, and obtain a web host for a somewhat larger annual fee. You can get both together from the same company, or separately from different companies.
Here’s where the potential problems come in.
Unlike traditional utilities such as the church’s phone line or electricity provider, which are tangible and linked to the church’s address, the web host and domain name are more intangible – in the cloud – and not necessarily officially linked to the church at all. Here are some scenarios in which things can go wrong.
The words leapt out at me, challenging my understanding of what was happening at Boston University. Were they actually doing what the headline promised (providing authentic Asian cuisine to students) or where they planning to as suggested by the phrase: “…aims to serve traditional Asian cuisine.”
Words matter. A familiar adage tells us “actions speak louder than words.” Yet when we rely on words to describe what’s important to us as a congregation, I believe it is important to use words that accurately describe not only what we believe or what we intend to do, but also what we are actually doing.
As congregations, we often share our intentions in the form of a mission or vision statement. These are often found on the home page or the About Us pages on our websites. Before starting this post, I took a quick look at ECFVP’s About Us page and was pleased to find the words “offers” and “explores.”
When she walked down the aisle, I caught my breath.
We had prayed for this moment, hoped for it. But we weren’t sure if we would ever witness it.
This was forty years in the making. Forty years since she lost a child, an infant whose name she can still only whisper and not without unbidden tears. Forty years since a priest, instead of listening and consoling, criticized and belittled. Forty years since she had taken communion, the rift a chasm her heart couldn’t cross.
For the past three years, on her visit to this country, we have shared meals and attempted conversation. My college German is rusty, and my husband’s is non-existent (except for Gesundheit and schnitzel). Her English is minimal. There are lots of gestures and smiles, yet somehow we have communicated.
On her last Sunday before flying home, she rose during the invitation to Holy Eucharist. When she knelt at the altar and held out her hands, she offered forgiveness to a Church that had deeply wounded her. She accepted a Church that for its divine center is still full of flawed and faulty humans. She bridged her heartache with hope as the priest placed the wafer.
Capital campaign planning includes both thought and study about a church’s 'To-Do' list. As people gather data, the project list may soon dominate the conversation. Yes, it is important to build the new wheelchair ramp with the required 1:12 ramp slope ratio that equals 4.8 degrees slope, but, is that going to stir the hearts of parishioners to support the capital campaign? Wouldn’t it be better to…
Tell me a story
Of how it will be.
When the work is complete
What will I see?
Will I see people with new ways to welcome their guests?
Will I see the hungry in new ways be blessed?
Will I see holy space transformed to be accessible
Or designed to make God's house joyfully flexible?
Will I see new ministries for serving the poor?
Will the church be a beacon for neighbors once more?
Will strangers find light where once there was dark?
Or will they at last know where they can park?
Will children have safe classrooms for learning and play?
Will young lives be challenged to love God and pray?
Will young families be welcomed with their needs in mind?
When all generations seek, what will they find?
“The divine in me bows to the divine in you.”
Perhaps you’ve spoken these words at the end of a yoga class.
Usually spoken with a slight bow and hands pressed together, with palms touching and fingers pointing upwards. Thumbs are held close to the chest. Namaste is a respectful form of greeting, welcoming, and acknowledging another.
Recently, I experienced this word as a cudgel.
During our noontime walk and sensing we were about to be overtaken by someone, my friend and I stepped aside. As he passed, the younger man turned, brought hands together, bowed, and said “Namaste.” I smiled at this unexpected greeting, before responding “Namaste,” expecting him to continue down the path.
What happened next caught me off guard. (Perhaps because we did not bow or raise our hands?) Turning, he challenged us, “Do you even know what Namaste means?” Startled more by his tone than the question, a jumbled response tumbled out of our mouths. “You’re wrong,” he thundered, lecturing us on the ‘proper definition,’ before continuing on his way.
Tone matters. Actions matter. When there’s a disconnect between the two – as my friend and I experienced – it can leave you stunned; wondering, “what just happened?”
You may have seen a Little Free Library or two in your neck of the woods. They are popping up all over the place -- a small creative mode of freecycling that allows strangers and neighbors to share books with one another. They are basically just boxes, placed at eye level, with a door and some shelves. They hold anywhere from a handful of books to a few dozen. The idea is that you can either take or leave a book, no questions asked, and no library card required.
St. Mary's recently installed a little free library in our prayer garden. It's a small always-open space with a couple of benches and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. People come to sit, pray, sleep, chat, and smoke (judging by the cigarette butts we have to sweep up from time to time!). Now they can read and "shop" for books.
When we put in the library, I imagined it would take the neighborhood a while to catch on. There aren't any other free libraries in our area. It seemed like a good spot; it’s on a street with substantial pedestrian traffic and next door to an elementary school. Our congregation has plenty of readers, and book donations have poured in. We've asked people to focus on children's books, with our school neighbors in mind, but we have received a predictably wide variety of things.
The library has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Far from struggling to catch on, it emptied almost immediately. The first week, we were actually suspicious that someone was taking all the books and doing something with them. Not sure what...resale on the black market? Hoarding them in a tiny apartment somewhere? Used books are really mostly good for one thing: reading! Our initial suspicions reminded me of how little experience most of us have with given things away truly for free, no questions asked. Seeing how hard it was to offer up our motley collection of books without suspicion turned out to be a spiritual lesson in generosity and offering, among other things.
Autumn’s annual return means that most congregations are starting to put together financial plans for next year. The annual fundraising campaign or pledge drive is about to begin. Alongside this work, and at the same time, vestries and finance committees are undertaking aggressive analyses of the current year’s budget, plus projections for next year’s priorities.
By way of a generous dose of honesty, I think we who are raised up as leaders in the church need to take a good hard look at what’s driving our attention and focus. The mission of the church, as defined in the Prayer Book, is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (BCP p.855) That sounds to me like a very clear call to raise up and equip disciples of Jesus Christ. You’d expect, then, that a church’s budget would reflect that its chief source of income is from those persons who are practicing generosity, including financial generosity, because they are disciples of Jesus. And the second largest income source should be those ministry events that clearly are ministries, not fundraisers. This is true, in large part, but I’m not certain we’re fully investing in making our budgets match our talking points. In too many cases, what’s missing most of all from many congregations is a willingness to line up talk with actions, to make our money speak mission, and to do so clearly and unambiguously.
Take a look, if you will, at overall income trends in your congregation over the past several years. I did this the other week. I looked at nine years from fiscal year 2007 through 2015’s projected numbers (based on financial activity through July). I was amazed at the results.
Here are a few things I learned.
Her eyes rimmed with tears, red from a night of mourning.
“I had to come, to take my communion,” she told the priest. Her husband died mere hours earlier. She had a lot of places she could be: in bed, on the couch, numb and unseeing, drowning in grief. But she came to church. Because as her beloved husband crossed from this life to the next, she needed to partake in the presence of the body of Christ.
On the same Sunday at a congregation three miles away, picketers greeted worshipers. They were not gentle picketers who merely wanted to be seen but hecklers and taunters. A coworker who attends the congregation said her Sunday School kids were rattled: “They said my mom was a terrible person.” Ultimately members of the congregation formed a human tunnel, a safe space for congregants to walk into the church.
About a week ago, my wife, Denise, and I adopted a dog. He looks a bit like a cross between a tiny sheep and an Ewok (he’s probably a Shih Tzu), and he brings with him a lot of questions: Like, how do I put his leash on him when he is jumping up and down on his hind legs? What do his huffs and puffs and barks mean? And why is he wiping his little face on the rug like that?
We’re slowly getting to know him and learn how to better care for him, but in the meantime he’s a little furry mystery that lives in our house.
All those unknowns require a lot of communication on the part of my wife and me. How are we going to deal with his bad habits? What’s the best way to play with him without getting him too riled up? Can we deal with washing him in the same bathtub that we use?
I am reminded again and again that ministry takes time. Relationships take time. Changes takes time. New life takes time. Even resurrection took three days, for heaven’s sake.
We are in a huge hurry in the church these days. In part, we are making up for lost time -- time when we should have been reaching out and were mostly reaching in. But just because we didn’t pay attention to everything that we might have doesn’t mean that new ministries and new efforts will grow overnight. Just because we are worried that we might die before we find ways to grow again does not mean that we can rush the growing process beyond its natural rhythm.
I am blessed to be part of a collaborative ministry that includes a parish I served ten years ago. That parish was struggling then, and it still has its struggles. But it has much of the vibrancy and freedom and depth of relationship that I dreamed and hoped and prayed for it ten years ago, very little of which I saw in the time I was actually there. The people who have hung in there with the ministry see the beauty of the church’s scrappiness and love one another more deeply than they did when I was there. They are more motivated to bridge gaps of culture and language because trust has grown, trust that they are all working with love to build one church.
Communications is Ministry
For the September Vital Practices Digest, we share five resources to support the ministry of communications in your congregation. Our fifth resource is to help congregations strengthen their practice of year-round stewardship.
It’s easy and free to connect with these resources for your congregation. Subscribe to ECF Vital Practices to receive Vestry Papers and this Vital Practices Digest in your inbox each month.
We stood in the drizzling rain, some huddled under umbrellas, others with water darting down glasses and dripping off noses. There wasn’t a football game or concert to keep us from escaping to the dry indoors. Instead the magnet was a desire for community.
For two hours, the rain fell, off and on, and still people came—and stayed. The kids played ga-ga, a dodgeball-type game that has nothing to do with the Lady. They rode their bikes in the street, which was closed for the event, and played Capture the Flag as night fell.
The adults stood in clusters, various drinks in one hand, scrumptious potluck offerings in another. And we talked and laughed. Met new people and reconnected with old ones.
It was a great neighborhood block party.
One of the women I met was new to the area. As we talked throughout the evening, she shared her longing. I just want some friends, she said. It’s hard to meet people when you’re working and new to a community. I want somebody to take a walk with or to sit on a porch and catch up on the week. I want to feel like I belong.
This is the last of a 3-part series about the relationship ministry of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in South Bend, Indiana. Read part 1 and part 2.
Holy Trinity in South Bend, Indiana, is a church with a passion for processionals with “smells and bells” around its neighborhood, and a penchant for developing relationships over food. So, what better symbol for one of its latest neighborhood events, a barbecue cook-off, than a grill-turned-thurible!
Everyone who competed in the “Holy Smoke” cook-off was asked to prepare 5 pounds of meat.
“We invited neighbors to come help feed neighbors,” explains Holy Trinity priest-in-charge Terri Bays.
The day included fire prevention education provided by the South Bend Fire Department and kids getting to sit behind the wheel of a squad car at the invitation of police officers who came for the food and fun.
Holy Smoke was another example of how Holy Trinity’s ministry is with its neighbors and community, not “for” them. For the past three years, parishioners have worshipped and prayed not just within the walls of the church, but on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. They’ve invited neighbors, police, and other government officials to eat, meet, and work together to combat crime and poverty.
A bivocational Episcopal priest in eastern Kentucky shares his joy at being part of a changing church.
It’s a clear morning in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. Mist is rising over the rolling hills and limestone fences. Horses graze on the dewy grass, briefly raising their heads as I drive down the narrow blacktop road.
No matter how long I live here, I give thanks each day for the stunning natural beauty that surrounds me.
Today I’m doubly blessed, because my destination lies two hours east. I’ll drive from the hills of the Bluegrass into the valleys and green mountains of Appalachia.
On the way, I’ll cross 500-million-year-old river gorges, swing around hairpin mountain turns, race down steep inclines and creep back up behind loaded logging trucks.
I’m a bivocational priest, and my work takes me all over the eastern half of Kentucky.
When my family and I came here in 2011, we had no idea what to expect. We were from the Midwest and were used to big skies, open landscapes and churches large enough to support full-time ministers.
What we found here was lush country, loving, welcoming people, and a network of small, vital but struggling congregations.
The church that called us -- St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harrodsburg -- was typical. Yes, they could pay a small salary plus benefits, but only for two years. They had a little money in the bank, but the congregation was aging, membership was declining, and unless something radical happened, the situation was unsustainable.
Something radical did happen. In four years, we’ve gone from about 30 people on a Sunday to about 70. We’ve doubled the size of the congregation, and we’ve doubled the amount of energy, passion and tangible resources.
This took a lot of prayer, a generous measure of God’s grace (that indefinable working of the Spirit that makes the unimaginable into reality), a lot of community outreach (“Yes, we’re here and we genuinely care about you -- you should check us out!”) and a church that actually wants to grow.
What is discipleship? What does it mean to be a disciple in today’s world?
Jesus is pretty clear that this is important. We call it the Great Commission, the passage of scripture where Jesus commands (yes, commands) that we “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). And to be able to go and make disciples, we have to be one ourselves.
But what does that mean? Is discipleship a buzzword without substance? A fine thing to say and a hard thing to do?
I suspect each of us has our own version of a definition for discipleship but we should also have a common understanding. Essentially discipleship is about living for Jesus, seeking to grow in a deeper relationship with the living Christ, and to do that in community, talking about our faith with others, witnessing by word and deed what it means to live as a Jesus follower. It means that we are committed to not only being there in the beginning as someone embraces Christianity but also walking with the person as he or she grows in the faith, teaching and learning along with him or her.
It’s a tall order. When we define our lives of faith, we might start with calling ourselves Christians. How long (if ever) would we call ourselves disciples? Yet Christ wants this for us. Wants us to jump with both feet into a life of learning and growing.
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