Starting Strong

Starting Strong

Jim: Hello friends, Jim Shepard here with the one, the only, the amazing Frank Bealer.

Frank: Heyo.

Jim: Right here for the summer sessions.We're continuing the summer sessions of the Next Sunday podcast. A little shorter, a little tighter, designed to give them a little summer dose to help them deal with things that are probably coming in the fall and help them get ready. And so this is our third of the summer session episodes. I feel like we've laid some pretty good groundwork to this point. What do you think?

Frank: Well, I just realized we probably had a pretty big miss here. We probably should have had some frosted pina coladas on the table or be wearing our sunglasses during the summer session or something like that. Yeah, we had basically had intern Isaac paint our walls, but that's the only thing we changed. And so that's it. That's all we did.

Jim: But it looks better here, huh? It does look great. Does look better. But we could have gone with We could have gone a little more summery.

Frank: Yeah. Festive colors. You and I could be wearing some Hawaiian shirts. Yeah.

Jim: That's it. That's it. I missed it. You go out to the West Coast pretty often.

Jim: You could have snagged up a Hawaiian shirt with some kind of bright pattern. That's a mistake. But you know what hadn't been a miss? Those first few episodes.

Frank: That's it. They were solid. I think we really hit it off. So let's claim the good.

Jim: That's terrible. Let's keep going in the midst of you know we the vibe is off.

Frank: That's exactly but the spirit is right. Yeah, we want to help you. We want to help. We're gonna have editor Dan and editor Pedro put some Beach Boys music under the next introduction.

Frank: Let's go with that. We're going to pull this thing together one way or another.

Jim: Help me. Help me. That's it. Here we go.

Jim: What are we talking about today? Help me.

Frank: Helpful for them other than tone. Maybe a little lighter mood today. Hey, so I think what we want to talk about today, Frank, is this rhythm that a lot of churches get into. It feels like around September, October through the end of the year and then into the first of the year.

Frank: I'm going to introduce that part because it feels to me like we get into this rhythm. And if your church does an annual giving campaign or emphasis, you know, there's a lot of emphasis and effort toward that. And then you move into say Thanksgiving, post Thanksgiving, we're moving the year end giving. And what I think a lot of churches don't see is those two really are part and parcel of the same thing.

Frank: They're the same motion. And then they miss the third element, which is January, February of the next year. Right? So what I'd like for us to talk about here is this idea of leveraging the fall season to finish well.

Frank: That's one season. Whether you do a giving campaign or not one season and then merge that into the January February which is you know start strong. So finishing well and starting strong is one rhythm starting from September October going through about January February.

Jim: Yeah that's so good that it makes sense. And why don't we culminate this episode with the single most opened piece of communication from the church all year long and how most miss a tremendous opportunity.

Frank: I think I know what that is.

Jim: Yeah, it's not the church Christmas card. It's not the church Christmas card. That's not what you have in mind.

Frank: That's exactly right.

Jim: So we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit more about, in fact, you've written about this in multiple different forms.

Jim: We'll make sure to get the end of year from last year's ebook out as part of this so they can download and read that. We'll be refreshing that going into the fall and keep an updated version. But they can go ahead and access what's there. So, we've got the workbook that's guiding them through summer sessions and we'll make sure this ebook is here as well.

Jim: So, talk about where the miss is in doing these kinds of separate things that can cause confusion or be unclear for the congregation to ultimately get us a point of why maybe it should be more cohesive.

Frank: Yeah. So, if you do an annual quote without a stewardship emphasis, and there are a fair number of churches that still do that, the temptation is to see that as just one season. And so you get to, let's just say, commitment Sunday, if that's the way you do it. Yeah.

Frank: And then maybe a couple of weeks after that, you have the, you know, the mailings to remind people to get their commitments in. And so you see that as a season. And then let's see, you get to Thanksgiving. And then you see, oh, wait a minute.

Frank: We got to move into year end giving. Yeah. Right. So the annual campaign is about what I anticipate that I'll be giving next year.

Frank: So you're encouraging me to think ahead, right? But you can't encourage me to think so far ahead that I forget about what I'm going to do between now and the end. Y and that's where I think the idea is Frank don't miss the opportunity that those are one synchronous movement and that they need to be developed together, right? I would put this out real quickly.

Frank: And this may be one that we do another time, but I would just say if you're still doing your emphasis, your annual emphasis in the fall, I would encourage you to rethink that. It's a holdover from a time when we were more of an agrarian economy because farmers plant in the spring, harvest in the fall. Yeah. And pastors thought, well, while they've got money in their pockets, let's go talk to them about church.

Frank: Nothing wrong with that. I can see that it is seasonal. The problem is we don't have that many farmers left in our church. Yeah.

Frank: Certainly not in mine. But a lot of people who find out what they're going to make next year in say December and maybe even early January. And so maybe your annual emphasis belongs in January, February, not in September, October. That's a topic for another time.

Frank: And for those of you who are really annoyed that I mentioned that, don't let that get you off track here with what we're trying to say. It's okay if you keep it there. I'd love for you to think through that could be a better solution for you because a lot of this is well gosh we've been doing that way for 30 years in this are they also sinking that up with their fall budgeting in some way I think a lot of times we do yeah that's exactly right so we don't want to budget until we know how much we have pledge well look I'm a finance guy by training and background you know we've adopted provisional budgets in in business for years for years giving ourselves permission to adjust it in the new season based on other factors, right? So, if I were going to because that might be the obvious question.

Frank: If you're going to do it, then what about our fall budget for the end of the year? Well, just adopt a provisional budget in view of what you think is happening already and then let your pledge campaign support that one or or invalidate it. Yeah. As the case may be.

Frank: So, that's great. I don't want to get too far off topic here with the idea of shifting, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to introduce that because I think it is time for churches to rethink the timing of that.

Jim: That's good. So, how do they go about, let's say, culturally they've been doing it separately. What does it look like to introduce a more cohesive plan? Well, you've used language before to finish well, start strong.

Jim: Do you think that the congregation can introduce similar language or that similar idea in a way to draw it together and paint a clearer picture?

Frank: Yeah, I think to me Frank I think the obvious place that you could weave that together is under the banner of discipleship. So these are two distinct motions all under discipleship. One of them is as I anticipate what my family will be able to give to the church next year. That's one action in discipleship.

Frank: As I think about what I can do between now and the end of the year, whether that be to stay on track and finish what I committed for this year, or let's just say maybe I had a really good third and fourth quarter of the year, right? And I got a nice bonus that I didn't anticipate. I would like to reframe my giving for the end to reflect the fact that God had, you know, prospered in a way that I hadn't anticipated when the year started. And so all of that comes under the banner of discipleship, right?

Frank: Not just giving to meet the budget.

Jim: That's so good, right? Because that's the one thing that both of those elements have in mind is meet the budget. Meet the budget for next year, meet the budget for this year, which is transactional. Yes.

Jim: Perspective. We want to introduce the transformational perspective of what my gift before the Lord for next year needs to look like for me to call it worship, for me to give from my best, from my first fruits. And likewise, the same question could happen between now and the end of the year. Not how much money does my church need for me to balance the budget.

Jim: That's the wrong question, right? And that's what we talked about in the previous episode when we talk about getting false signals from your church as to whether you're actually doing well or not. Yeah. In developing generosity, a false signal is, oh, we met the budget.

Jim: It may be that the real potential of your church is one and a half to two times what you're taking in annually. Yeah. And if you're measuring against that, you're getting a false signal. So likewise, we wouldn't want the false signal of a personal commitment to be what does my church need from me at this moment.

Jim: That's good. There's a tool that we created a little while back called the generosity potential assessment, the GPA. I love that tool. We'll make sure we link that tool to this.

Jim: It'll give you a snapshot of how people are giving, how your congregation is giving based Census Bureau data, attendance patterns and data, how they're giving in comparison to a tithe or what that could look like just to help you understand current state of the union and what it could look like to improve just a little but have significant growth and impact.

Frank: Yeah, it is. That part of why I love that tool is if you just move a little bit percentage-wise for most congregations. It's a lot of money. Significant.

Frank: And the percentage shift is not transactional language. It's all discipleship. Right. You know, one of the things we talk about in and and and and one of our team members has really just brought this up to us over and over again is the two original givers in the Bible are Cain and Abel.

Frank: Because right after Genesis 3, which is the fall of mankind, we get Genesis 4, which is the rest of the Bible after the fall of mankind. And in that fourth chapter, the very first story is a giving story. And both of them give. Cain gave some of his crops.

Frank: Abel gave a firstborn animal. And we see very clearly in the text that God saw one of those gifts as worship and the other one wasn't.

Jim: That's good.

Frank: God saw through to the hearts of both men based on the gifts that they made. And so what we would say is kind of paraphrasing, you know, Cain's question was, "How much can I afford? How much does my church need?" Yeah.

Frank: Right. Abel's question was what does the Lord require of me that I might worship him well that I might bring glory and honor to his name through the gift that I would make and those are you know maybe we could think of those as the two oldest questions about giving and they're very very different and that's where the transactional approach and the transformational approach are very different one of those men was transactional the other was transformational and you've done some great work in unpacking that idea in a previous episode so I'll make sure We link to that in the show notes as well. Because that whole idea of processing this and getting our heart and mind around it can be transformative for our church. It can be really powerful.

Frank: And and so to tie this together, that's where your annual stewardship campaign and your year-end giving would find common ground. Not different ground, but common ground.

Jim: Yeah. And that leads into guys, you're one church. You're one church with one budget and one message, and your congregation is just looking for guidance. So when we're saying, "Hey, make this a priority now.

Jim: Make this a priority." They need to understand how it all fits together, which means also starting the year strong. And so, hey, we've made these commitments together. What does it look like for us to move forward?

Jim: What God would call us to do this year? Each of us locking arms and doing our part to bring this vision to life. And so, you're kind of drawing that, making it fit all together in a cohesive way rather than three different moves. There's the annual fund giving, there's the year-end giving, and then there's the start of the new year in all the ways you need to build better habits, including giving.

Jim: And then that leads to the single most open piece of communication you will have each year, which is the annual giving statement.

Frank: Wow. Right. Wow. And I'm convinced that nothing else is as open as that.

Frank: First of all, everybody needs it. They don't just. We don't just want them to have this information. They need this information for their taxes and whatnot. Most of us put a letter in there.

Frank: If you do anything at all, there's a letter in there that says, "Last year was awesome and next year's going to be even better with no clarity on inviting people to respond or get more involved in light of what we just said. So, there's no call to action. It's the IRS that made us send this to you. So, let's throw a cover letter over top of it that says last year was awesome. next year's even better with some stats and information.

Jim: What would it look like for that to be part of that cohesive plan to say, "Hey, so many of you rallied together. We built our plan going into the fall. We're excited about what God's going to do." It's going to take all of us growing in the area of generosity.

Jim: For those of you that have given sporadically, start to give consistently or if you've been giving your faithfully, what does it look like to grow in the area of generosity this year? Having some invitation and saying, "Hey, this is part of it." So right there at the end of January, early February, there's this tremendous opportunity to draw it all together to bring that story, say, "This is what God's called us to. This is a transformation that's going to be in your heart and life and what it's going to look like in our city in light of our faithfulness and rallying together."

Frank: Yeah. Yeah. So good, Frank. And you know what I see all too often is a church will run really hard if it has both the annual campaign and the year end.

Frank: They'll run really hard and get to the finish line and like wow I'm out of breath. Yeah. I'm going to take a rest here. And the next time you hear from them about anything with regard to giving and money is, you know, somewhere well into the year.

Frank: Yeah. What we're saying is this is your opportunity. September, October through January, February, all one motion, all one consistent emphasis, all one consistent theme. This is not about how much your church needs.

Frank: It's about what you need to do on the basis of what God has put under your hands to manage. When you do that, I want to add one last thing. When you do that, you will fix one of the other issues that people have strategically and practically in that church was so hard leading up to Christmas that there's now this little lag that happens between the 25th and the 1st. Okay?

Frank: and or 25th and the sixth depending on if you have a Sabbath Sunday in between where we just kind of throw in the guest preacher or whatever it may be. Guys, here we are ending the year. Many churches end the year on the 25th, not on the 31st. And yet part of the end of year giving strategy is to invite people from a tax standpoint, incentive to give this fiscal year, whatever it may be.

Frank: And yet we stop communicating with them, right? And so it's like we've got to have when you build a comprehensive plan, you see that there's this weird gap that happens that first week of January, last week of December because you don't have the full plan together. We've done it in multiple segments and along the way we've skipped key kinds of milestones practically. So it's just evaluating and you're going to catch little silly things that we do that you're like, I would never do that.

Frank: When you build it as one comprehensive plan because you start to see the gaps and where they're going to show up.

Jim: I love that. I love that. So you can discuss this in the workbook. Dig in.

Jim: Hopefully it's helpful to you. Guys, we're not trying to market you with the workbook or anything. We're just trying to give you a free tool and resource that helps you. So this has been another episode of the next Sunday summer session and we'll be together again very soon.