The Myth of the Giving Problem

The call almost always sounds the same.

A pastor gets me on the phone, clears his throat, and says some version of, "Our giving is down. Can you help us fix it?"

I have taken that call hundreds of times. I have also *made* that call, back when I was on a church staff and the numbers were sideways and I was quietly convinced that if we could just get people to give a little more, everything else would settle down.

Here is what I have learned since then, and it took me longer than I would like to admit.

Giving is almost never the problem.

Giving may just be the smoke, not the fire.

The most honest number in your church

I do not say that to be cute. I say it because the offering is the most honest number in your church.

Attendance can be inflated by a great weekend, a guest artist, or good weather. Engagement can be spun. Social media reach can be bought. But giving is a lagging indicator of something much deeper, and it is very hard to fake.

When someone gives, they are answering a question they will rarely say out loud: *Do I trust this? Do I believe this matters? Am I actually part of this, or am I just attending it?*

So when giving softens, the temptation is to treat it as a math problem. Send another email. Add another push. Run a series in the fall. Put a stronger ask on the screen. And sometimes those things move the number for a season.

But you have not fixed anything. You have just cleared the smoke out of the room while the fire keeps burning somewhere behind the wall.

What is actually going on

In our work at Generis, when we get underneath a giving decline, it is rarely a stinginess issue. It is usually one of four things, and none of them are about money.

Clarity. People cannot fund a vision they cannot repeat. If your staff cannot articulate where the church is going in one sentence, your congregation certainly cannot. Generous people do not give to organizations. They give to outcomes they can picture.

Trust. Somewhere along the way, something got wobbly. A decision was made without explanation. A promise was made and quietly abandoned. A leader left and nobody said why. People do not stop trusting all at once. They stop trusting a little at a time, and then they stop giving a little at a time.

Discipleship. We have somehow decided that generosity is a fundraising category instead of a formation category. But Jesus talked about money constantly, not because the ministry needed funding, but because He knew exactly what our wallets reveal about our hearts. If we are silent on generosity, we are not being neutral. We are still discipling people. We are just discipling them into the default culture, and the default culture is not generous.

Plumbing. And then there is the boring one. The giving page that takes six clicks to find. The recurring gift that failed when a card expired and nobody followed up. The first-time giver who gave once and never heard from a human being again. This one is not spiritual, but it is real, and it is quietly costing churches a fortune.

Notice that not one of those is solved by asking louder.

Why we keep chasing the smoke

I think we chase the smoke because the smoke is visible and the fire is not.

The giving number shows up on a report every single week. It is in front of you. It is measurable. It creates urgency in a board meeting. So it gets the attention.

Meanwhile, the things underneath it are slow, unglamorous, and hard to put on a dashboard. Nobody stands up in a staff meeting and says, "I would like to propose that we spend the next eighteen months rebuilding trust." That is not a strategy anybody applauds. But it is often the truest one.

There is a line from Jethro to Moses that I keep coming back to. Moses is exhausted, sitting from morning until evening solving every dispute in Israel personally, and his father-in-law looks at the whole scene and says, "What you are doing is not good. You will only wear yourself out."

Here is the part I love. Jethro does not tell Moses to work harder at the thing Moses is already working hard at. He tells him the approach itself is the problem.

That is the conversation most churches need to have about generosity. Not "how do we do more of what we are doing," but "are we even working on the right thing?"

A better first question

So before you plan another push, sit with your team and ask a different question.

Not how do we increase giving?

But what is the giving actually telling us?

Then get specific. Look at the whole picture, not just the total:

• Can a first-time guest find your giving page in under thirty seconds, on a phone, without logging in?
• How many of your recurring givers lapsed in the last twelve months, and did anyone notice?
• When was the last time someone on your platform told a story about generosity that had nothing to do with a need?
• Can your staff, all of them, say where the church is going without reading it off a card?
• If you asked your most generous families why they give, would they say something about the church, or something about the kingdom?

That is not a fundraising audit. That is a diagnostic. And a diagnostic is not a demand. It is an act of stewardship.

The hopeful part

Here is why I have fallen in love with this work.

Every church I have ever walked into is already sitting on more generosity than it is currently seeing. Not because people are holding out, but because nobody has helped them connect what they have to what God is doing.

The number on the report is not your ceiling. It is your feedback.

This is why we built Generosity 360 the way we did, as a way to look at the whole picture at once rather than obsessing over the one number that happens to be easiest to see. Clarity, trust, discipleship, and the practical ground game all feed the same thing. Pull on one, and the others move.

Your giving problem is probably not a giving problem.

And that is very good news, because it means the thing you are actually being invited to work on is the thing that mattered most all along.

Cheering you on,

Frank

If you'd like more edifying content, here's more for you: Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session and The Summer Work of Generosity