Why Staff Giving is NOT Optional

Frank: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Next Sunday Podcast. I'm here with the one, the only, the incredible Jim Sheppard.

Jim: I keep waiting for a game show host to show up when you do that. I like it. I like it.

Frank: It feels like the introduction to a game show.

Jim: It is. It's... Steve Harvey or something.

Frank: I don't know. I just know every time I do it, it makes you smile real big. You love it.

Jim: I love it. I love it. Just messing with you a little bit.

Frank: Hey, so today on the podcast we are talking about a hot topic called "Why Staff Giving Is Not Optional." We see that most churches trying to build a culture of generosity are focused on the congregation, the sermons, the campaigns, the pledge cards. But for most churches that are struggling in the area of generosity, the pattern we keep identifying over and over again is that the issue may be starting with their staff. Their staff aren't participating in giving. They don't understand their role. There's a lack of clarity, lots of issues. But you wrote an article recently called "Why Staff Giving Isn't Optional," and it caught some real traction, got some real attention. I think people had thoughts. Some were reading it trying to prove you wrong, probably. Others were reading it going, "Yeah, this is what I've been saying." So where did you go with this?

Jim: Two things influenced this, Frank. I have a client, not current but within the last few years, that, by what I was looking at from the outside, their current giving and everything about them, they should have been able to easily raise the amount that was their goal. It was not even one and a half times. It was like one and a quarter times their annual income. The church is strong, they're fairly large. You'll know that when I give you a couple of indicators here in a second. But they only hit like 60% of their goal. And I was like, wait, what's wrong here? I've been around for a minute, so when something like this happens, I'm just like, wait, what happened here? I kept scratching around in the dirt and couldn't figure out what it was. So then I said to the CFO, "Hey, would you just check something for me? Would you take a look at how many staff people actually committed to the initiative?" He texted me a couple of hours later, "OMG!!!" They have 109 full time staff. Forty three made a commitment. Now, this was not a one fund, it was an over and above campaign, so in my mind I thought, okay, well, I guess that could happen because these are people on ministry salaries and maybe the margin for an over and above gift wasn't significant. So I said, can you double check and let's just look at their regular giving and see what that looks like. Forty seven out of 109 were actually giving to the church at all.

I've known for a long time this is an issue. It may be bigger or smaller than that in an individual church, but I've known that this was an issue. I see it when I sit in the rooms. I see it when I look at the numbers sometimes. There are churches that send me all of their giving information with names, and I'm not looking for staff, but I see where they show up on the list, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah." And then I note the people who don't show up on the list at all. So I've known this was an issue, and I haven't known exactly how to speak about it in public. I can speak to it individually, but speaking about it in public is different.

I'm just reading through my Bible study plan for this year. I use a plan called Five Day a Week Bible Reading, which normally takes me at least six days because some days are heavier than others, and then I can take a rest. It goes through the Bible, so I'm reading Old Testament, New Testament every day, and a Psalm every third day or so. I'm in the book of Numbers. Now, maybe your Bible reading plan goes to Leviticus to die. I can actually make it through Leviticus, it's not a problem for me. It's gory enough in places that I can get excited about it. But it's Numbers. I mean, Numbers, and I'm a numbers guy, but it starts off with numbers and numbers, and then you get through to the good stuff.

I get to Numbers 18:25 and it says this: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying." In the first part of chapter 18 he's going over all the duties of the Levites. We've got the Gershonites, the Merarites, the Kohathites, and they've all got various duties. Aaron the priest, one of the Levites, has duties too, but he's like the senior pastor. So we've got the church staff and the senior pastor, that's basically what was just profiled. In verse 25 the Lord says to Moses, well, there's their duties, and then he says, "I want to talk to you about this piece. Moreover, you shall speak and say this to the Levites: when you take from the people of Israel the tithe that I have given you from them for your inheritance, then you shall present a contribution from it to the Lord." In the ESV it's actually very specific, "a tithe of the tithe," leaving nothing to the imagination, Frank. How many times have I read this and never stopped and pondered it.

Then it says, "And your contribution shall be counted to you as though it were the grain of the threshing floor and as the fullness of the wine press." So you didn't earn this from working, but it'll be counted to you as if you'd earned it from working. Isn't that powerful, that your people worked to give it, their tithe, and you get credit as if you had raised the crops or crushed the grapes.

Then he says, "So you shall also present a contribution to the Lord from all your tithes which you receive from the people of Israel." He's restating what he's already said. "And from it you shall give the Lord's contribution to Aaron the priest." So Aaron gets a portion of the tithe, he gets paid from it as well. "Out of all the gifts you shall present, every contribution due to the Lord, from each its best part is to be dedicated." What's the best part? The first part, the firstfruit. That's exactly the lesson we learned from Cain and Abel. Abel gave a firstborn, so it's a tenth. "Therefore you shall say to them, when you have offered from it the best of it, then the rest shall be counted to the Levites as produce of the threshing floor and as produce of the wine press." Again, saying the same thing, you get credit as if you had earned it. And now listen to this, Frank: "And having done that, you may eat it in any place, you and your households, for it is your reward in return for your service in the tent of meeting." This is your pay for being on church staff. And when you do this with the tenth, you now have freedom with the 90%. Do you see that? And then he says, "And you shall bear no sin by reason of it." So what he's also saying is the integrity of the offering is protected by the way that you handle it. Not the congregation, the staff. The integrity.

"When you have contributed the best of it, but you shall not profane the holy things of the people of Israel." I was like, Frank, I'm not a Bible scholar, I don't pretend to be. I know the Bible, I've read through it a number of times. But when I see something like this, I'm like, is this saying what I think it's saying? So I'm reaching up in my little place where I read my Bible every day, getting my commentaries down. It's exactly what I think it is. It's the exact thing I've been looking for to speak in public about this issue that I know is an issue for every single church, and hardly anybody knows how to address it, because there are arguments, and there is just no argument from this.

This whole idea, well, "our people feel like the tithes of our people are supporting them, so it's making it circular," there's no circular argument here. What Moses is saying is it's not only not circular, you're giving integrity to the offering by the way that you treat it, by what you're doing with it. I was astounded. And that church is just one of many. It's just the most recent one I could think of, and it's a pretty extreme one. I don't know that everybody has it to that degree, but all churches have this as an issue. I'm hardly aware of any that don't.

I've looked for a way to speak about this in public, and now I have it. It doesn't start with the congregation, pastor. It starts with you. Generosity culture starts with you and your church staff and how you handle the tithe that comes into your hands. You don't get to be a spectator, you have to be a participant.

Frank: Have you gotten to share this with any pastors and leaders yet? This is fresh.

Jim: I have.

Frank: How have the responses been?

Jim: Speechless. I've never seen anything like it. I have yet to review this broadly, my sample size is relatively small so far, but I've made it part of our Generosity 360 rhythm when we're talking about theology of giving and then your giving story. I now have a slide deck built around this very idea. I did it with a client of mine two weeks ago and they sat there with their mouths open. "I've never seen this. I've never understood it this way." Now they have a framework.

Frank: Let's step back for a second. What are the justifications staff give for not giving? Let's go through some of the big ones you hear. I know it's not on our list of things to discuss, but what's a pastor going to hear? What's the feedback if they do a presentation or they're talking about this? What's that initial feedback or justification?

Jim: Let me not get carried away and say a whole lot about this. How about if I just read directly from what I wrote in the blog post, because I address it: "Service is not a substitute for generosity." I want to address one more objection I hear regularly. It sounds like this: "My team already gives so much of themselves, their time, their energy, their nights and their weekends. Isn't this enough?" Numbers 18:29 answers this directly. God did not say to the Levites, "Your service to the temple is your offering." He said, "You must present as the Lord's portion the best and holiest part of everything given to you." So Numbers 18:29 doesn't give you an out for that. It actually strengthens the argument that it's something different. And then I concluded: service and generosity are not the same thing. They are both important, and they are both acts of worship, but God requires both. He was not willing to let the Levites trade one for the other. Your staff's dedicated service to the church is a beautiful thing, but it does not replace the spiritual act of giving.

Frank: That's clear, that's powerful. We'll make sure to link to this article on the podcast episode page so people can read it as well. How do you help the staff member who says, "Listen, I'm all in, but it's my spouse. My spouse has been hurt, my spouse is whatever, we're navigating it, it's been a journey to even get here, to even be a part of a church staff. I don't know what to do. I feel stuck"?

Jim: That does happen, Frank, and we have to address it. Had this happen two weeks ago, this is very real for me. Had a worship pastor look me in the eye and say, "I'm figuring it out." He was so gracious and kind and honest, and it was a powerful conversation, but it was still very real.

Frank: So that's an opportunity for the pastor, or someone on the staff, maybe the executive pastor, to guide that person in a spiritual conversation.

Jim: This is, at that point, not a matter of compliance. It's never a matter of compliance, it's a matter of the heart. And because it's a matter of the heart, that makes it a spiritual conversation, not a financial conversation. God doesn't want us to tear up the marriage covenant so that we can come over here and make a tithe to the church. He wants us to regard the marriage covenant as primarily holy and sacred, and then work the other matter out incrementally as it's allowed. You're not going to force your spouse to go to a place they're not ready to go. You want to pastor their heart. "Sweetheart, what do we have to do? How are we doing? Is it a point of origin? Is it a church that handled the matter inappropriately? Is it bad theology? What are the issues we have to deal with?" Sometimes it might take a while for them to get over that, and you have to be patient. Spiritual growth sometimes happens in a microwave, but mostly happens in the oven, a little slower bake, a little longer time.

Frank: If a church just decides this is awkward and they don't want to really address it, or they kind of talk around it, we've seen plenty of churches do this. How does it practically play out, not spiritually but practically, in those staff members who aren't giving, who don't agree with this or have justified a reason why it doesn't apply to them? How does this show up in their language, in their words, in their demeanor, when it comes to a generosity initiative, whether we're teaching Gen 360 or Ground Game of Generosity or a more comprehensive campaign? How does this affect things?

Jim: I think what happens, Frank, is that their nonverbal, and sometimes even their verbal language, is going to be hindered. You can't speak with authority if you know that you yourself are not doing it. Maybe the staff doesn't know, maybe the congregation doesn't know what it is, but they know something is off. Just like the church I used earlier, there's nobody in the congregation who has line of sight to the information I had from the CFO, and yet they know something is off. The culture is off there because you don't have staff people advocating for it, because they themselves are not supporters of it. I'm not trying to make them bad people, I'm just trying to explain how this stuff happens. Here's what I want you to understand, and I want to say, Frank, this is going to be one of the sound bites from today: reluctance is more dangerous than resistance. Resistance doesn't show up very often, it's not outright resistance. It's a reluctance to do something. It's not "I'm opposed to the tithe as an idea." It's "I'm just reluctant to do it at my house because I'm not sure we can make that work. I'm not sure we can pay the bills. I'm not sure we can go on the vacation we want to. I'm not sure we can keep the kids in the private school we've got." It's reluctance. So reluctance on the staff in particular is more prevalent and more dangerous than resistance, because I don't see resistance very often. That's what gets in the way. That's where it's so important for us to see this as an issue: if they're not on board, it's going to get into the congregation. I said it at the end of the blog post: generosity culture spreads from the platform, but it begins in the staff meeting. It's not from out there to in here, it's from in here to out there. If our staff don't get it, it's really hard for us to impress it on our congregation. It's a culture matter.

Frank: It is a culture matter. What do you do? I want to target churches that live in really expensive cities. They're trying to piece together a staff, and it's almost impossible to live in those cities. They've ended up with staff members who have moved, uprooted their families, whatever, to get there, taken a pay cut, and made all the adjustments. They've basically factored their tithe in as part of their lost income, from their marketing job, now that they're on the comms team at a church in a very expensive area to live. How do you help course correct that justification, to help get them on a path toward progress in the area of generosity?

Jim: To me, Frank, I think that would be an onboarding issue. I think I would be reluctant to hire someone and move them to a location they might not be able to afford if they had to compromise their commitment to giving. I would handle that conversation before it even happens. I remember some years ago when I went through the Entreleadership class at Dave Ramsey, brilliant class, his stuff on hiring and HR was so good, but he talked about the fact, I don't know if they still do this, that one of their final questions to a potential hire was, "We need to see a budget, a household budget for your family." What people thought was that they're looking to see if you have debt on there or not. They actually didn't care, you don't have to be debt free to go to Ramsey. Dave said out loud, "We love it if you've got debt, because we're going to help you get out of debt." What he said is, "We're not going to hire you to a position with a salary that we know in advance is not going to work for your household budget." It's setting you up for failure. I remember hearing that and thinking, gosh, what a great idea, we're not going to set you up to fail. I would say the same thing to a church: if you live in an area like that, probably you have some way of helping with assistance. I have a church client in California, they actually have some houses they've bought to help people, and you're a staff person, you live in that house for a while and you're able to afford to live there because probably you couldn't otherwise. So make it an issue before they come on board, not after. Maybe the family budget question is the question to ask: "Will this pay package work with your family budget without you having to compromise your giving to the Lord's work here?"

Frank: That's so good, that's great. How would you like to wrap up this episode? Is there something you want to say to the pastor who hears this, agrees with everything you just said, but has a million other things on their plate and is like, "Now I've got another thing I've got to go deal with"? How do I categorize this, where do I go with this, knowing they're slammed, they just got a phone call about something altogether separate a few hours ago, and now they just got some windshield time, and here we are heaping some additional responsibility on them to carry. What do you say to that pastor?

Jim: I'm going to go to my answer, this is going to be my answer on a lot of things as it regards giving, Frank. I'm going to go to two passages, Luke 16:13 and Matthew 6:24, two completely different stories, not the same situation, two different observations, two completely different contexts. Luke and the story of the shrewd manager, and Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, when he said, "No one can serve two masters. You'll either hate one and love the other, or you'll love one and hate the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon." The reason I go to that text is two reasons. It's the only place where Jesus says the exact same thing in two different places, nowhere else. In the words of one of my early mentors: if Jesus says it once, that's enough. If he says it twice, that ought to really get your attention. It's also the only place where he defines money as a spiritual power. That word "mammon" is a deistic term, it has godlike authority in your life. When he says you can't worship both God and mammon, what he's saying is you're going to either worship at the altar of the one true God, or you're going to worship at the altar of mammon. And what that makes it is spiritual warfare. Most pastors never think of giving as spiritual warfare. Here's what I would say: pastor, this is spiritual warfare for your staff. If you have something more important than that, I'd like to know what it is.

Frank: Oh, there we go, that is how we're ending the episode right there.

Jim: That's because if you're not going to protect your staff from spiritual warfare, what are you going to do? What is more important than that? There might be something, but it's not a big list, it's a lot fewer things than you think it is. And so that would be my argument for that.

Frank: That is really good, Jim. It's been another really good episode of the podcast.

Jim: It's amazing that a Georgia graduate and a Tennessee graduate can come together and things like this can happen. Let's just kind of fumble through this, the Lord's humor in bringing hopefully something here. I know this is a hot topic, I know it's an elephant in the room, I know it can be awkward. Our hope, Frank, in all seriousness, in wrapping this up, is that we're shaking up the status quo in a way that could be redemptive, so that you can be better, so your people can be better. And in this case, that you can have this better shot for you and your people to hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant," in accordance with the parable of the talents. That's what we're here for.

Frank: That's so good. Hey, this has been another episode of the Next Sunday Podcast. We'll see you again real soon.