Do you love budget discussions at your church? When I first came to one of my churches, we had no budget at all. How do you start budget conversations and financial discipline practices from scratch?
Our conversation started with “What If…”
1. What would our budget look like if we trusted God?
2. What would our budget look like if part of our mission is to connect to God?
3. What would our budget look like if part of our mission is to support current disciples as they grow in spiritual maturity?
4. What would our budget look like if part of our mission is to make new disciples?
We started with TRUST, and we decided that trusting God meant that we would set aside the first 20% of our income to give away to ministries outside our church. This meant paying our connectional giving to our denomination/conference (about 15% of our income) and 5% to ministries in our area that we want to support but are now our own ministries in our building. In the past our church had relied on our own resources and we didn’t always include God in our planning. Now we would practice generosity and role-model tithing to our congregation.
Then we looked at CONNECTING to God. This mostly included our worship program, so we planned the financial & facility & staff resources we needed for worship.
Next we looked at our current disciples and the ways that we can encourage and support them as they GROW and mature. We developed a plan for the resources (finance, facility, staff) that we needed in the areas of small groups, retreats and service projects.
Finally, we looked at how we could plan to GO and reach new people with God’s message. We developed a budget plan for community outreach and new disciple development that included service projects, servant evangelism and small groups.
After this ministry & missional planning, we reviewed the total staff and facility costs to allocate them among the ministry areas. To be honest, this was the biggest stretch for us, since we used to start financial conversations with the building and the pastor’s expenses and then put together a budget of what was left over for ‘ministry.’ Now we had more confidence that we knew what our mission was and we were using the resources we had to make progress fulfilling our mission.
The most amazing thing to watch was how people in the congregation developed pride that we were giving to God and outside ministries first. I would overhear conversations where church members were almost bragging about how we were giving away the first 20% of our income because we trusted God.