How do we make people more generous with their time and their money?
It is a question many Pastors grapple with. Volunteering in churches has been declining for decades as culture has shifted and life has become both individualised and frenetically busy. Financial giving hasn’t had the same drop off as best I can tell—though we talk about it so little I’m not sure if we’d know—but Christians in the UK have something of a reputation for being tight-fisted (according to some American friends, at least) and the cost of living has risen so sharply in the last couple of decades that people struggle to see how they could manage to give money to God.
Of course, churches still need to do some things even when their volunteer base is small. Churches definitely still need money to balance the budget. We can’t just shrug our shoulders at the world and assume we just have to make do with it as it is.
How do you motivate people to give their time and their money?
The same way you do anything else: with the gospel.
What I mean is that the old adage ‘what you win them with is what you win them to’ is true in regards to all the things you really want people to do as well. If we get people who are already drowning to volunteer to do the thing that’s likely to break them through a combination of emotional manipulation and arm-twisting then we are guilty of heinous sin.
I don’t think anyone thinks that what they’re doing. I don’t think it is how anyone starts out. There is a risk though that when we start to motivate people by essentially asking them to step up because it needs doing, we start on a long road that ends up in manipulation as the only tactic we have.
What am I suggesting we do instead?
Two things. First, clarity. We describe the problem accurately, perhaps we even describe other ways we are attempting to do something about the problem, we invite people to participate, we’re clear about what we will do if they don’t. That last point—clarity about what we’ll do if they don’t give their money or time—can sound like emotional manipulation; it could well be that in some people’s hands. What I mean instead is a clear, sober assessment that we have considered alternatives, that however stark they must be we are willing to go down that road if need be. We present the idea that we might close that ministry not as manipulation but because honestly maybe we should if we can’t manage it without burning all of our people out. We assume—out loud—that volunteers not coming through is God’s way of saying ‘it’s time to close this,’ or whatever the scenario may be.
Second, we make sure that the people we’re trying to motivate are full of the gospel. Then we use that to motivate them. What I mean is that ‘the church needs more money’ is a terrible reason to give your money. ‘Jesus, who was rich, became poor, so that you might receive all the treasures of the heavens’ (2 Corinthians 8) is a very good reason to give your money. Remembering that your money itself is not earned by you but a gift from God that he allows us to dispose as we choose is a helpful tenet to help people to give. However, these too can become emotional manipulation if they aren’t grace-filled and given to people who have the gospel in their bones. Instead, you want people who understand that they don’t have to give a thing but that instead, Jesus invites them to partner with him as far as they would like to.
About 15 years ago the church I was part of at the time had the opportunity to make a bid to purchase a building. It all came together very quickly and an emergency meeting was called to describe the opportunity to the church and to prepare them for an offering. The turnaround time was fast, something like two weeks, allowing time to set up an offering but due to various reasons no time to even preach into the subject. The Pastor explained it all, laid it out for us to consider and then told us ‘you don’t have to give a thing.’ In fact, he got us to joyously chant it over and over again, ‘I don’t have to give a thing.’ He got grace under our skin, then we opened our wallets and somehow bought an old labour exchange in downtown Nottingham. Grace Church still meets there, in the building they call ‘The Ministry,’ preaching the gospel, worshipping the Lord, and strangely enough, running a series of businesses that provide jobs for those who wouldn’t be able to get them otherwise.
The Church would still have done some of those things without that building, inevitably. Of course, they have been able to do lots in their people and the city they love because they bought it. They can do so much of what they do because a group of around a hundred, including a large number of University students, sat and chanted that they didn’t have to give anything because Jesus had freely given them all things.
Was all that just another sort of gimmick? Am I just suggesting a better way to manipulate Christians? I imagine that would work in the short haul, but its not sustainable for that long. Instead, if we truly get the gospel into us, we’ll find that we want to be generous for Jesus’ mission.
We’ll still find that sometimes we need to close things or not do things that we really wanted to do. This isn’t a magic bullet that makes people more generous. To be honest, I could believe that it doesn’t get a penny more out of some churches. That doesn’t matter, the grace of God is still so good that you don’t have to give a thing.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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