10 Ways to Dramatically Increase Giving in Your Church

7. Change your Easter and Christmas Eve special offerings.

If you don’t have (or massively promote) a church-wide Easter and Christmas special offering, you are robbing your people of some really special opportunities to do something life-changing with their money. Here’s what we do:

  1. Pick a compelling need. Find a need among the international missions you support that people can rally around. We’ve recently started churches in India and El Salvador and built homes in Haiti and Guatemala. We always like to pick projects that our own people can be a part of by actually going to the mission field and building the house, or helping start the church, etc.
  2. Set the goal. Make it realistic, but a stretch.
  3. Set up your online giving webpage. Six weeks before the offerings, we set up the giving tab “Special Offering” in our online giving options.
  4. Start casting vision six weeks in advance. Progressively cast vision from the stage, in emails and in a letter with a special envelope about why this special project is worthy of their support. Share the need and point people to the webpage where they can give. Here’s the first video we showed to promote a recent year’s Christmas offering.
  5. Get commitments from your staff ahead of time. This past Christmas we had our staff make commitments two weeks before our Christmas offering to fund two houses for families in Haiti. I announced that on Sunday morning.
  6. Tell people they can give any time leading up to that day. Don’t make people give on that day alone. Have them give immediately. We’ll have people give for two to three weeks afterward, as well.
  7. Make a special video and/or presentation to show that day. On Christmas Eve and Easter, we’ll show a specially prepared video about the need. We’ll play that video, talk a bit about the need, then collect the offering.
  8. Tell people where money given in excess of the goal goes. Our people know that if money is given beyond the offering’s goal, it goes straight into our capital campaign, which funds really meaningful projects, as well.
  9. Record and celebrate later in the year. When our high schoolers went to Haiti in August 2015 and built the two homes funded by the 2014 Christmas Eve offering, we showed a video of what happened two weeks later, in mid-August 2015. If you do something similar, your people will love seeing the fruit of their offerings first-hand.

8. Change your stewardship teaching.

Change the way you preach and you’ll change the way people give. I teach on stewardship once a year, three to four weeks max. I always include everything that God teaches regarding financial freedom: debt, savings and tithing, as well as issues of the heart and worship. Recently, we’ve implemented what we call our “90-Day Tithing Challenge.” We challenge people to sign a card committing to tithe for 90 days, with the guarantee that if they don’t feel God has kept his word regarding how they would be blessed, we’ll return everything they gave during that 90-day period. And no, I’m not a health-and-wealth preacher.

9. Change the way you connect giving with life change.

Focus on connecting giving with changed lives and watch how that affects your giving culture. At our church, people regularly hear me say things like, “I’d like to thank those of you who give on a regular basis. We had 700 middle schoolers here last night, and it was a life-changing time. You were a big part of making that happen. Thank you for your sacrifice.” Always look for ways to connect people’s giving with the fruit of their sacrifice.

10. Change the way you talk to leaders.

When you meet with potential leaders, do you challenge them to tithe? I don’t spend too much time one-on-one with a leader before I dig into their life, and look for ways to challenge that person to be more fully committed to Christ. Family, biblical knowledge, evangelism, relationships, sexuality, health, time, work and money top the list. When appropriate, I lovingly challenge people to get out of debt, tithe and save for the future. I do that with the same focus and intensity I talk about their marriage and work. I won’t know what that person gives, if anything at all, but I’ll “go there anyway” just to reinforce “you can’t love both God and money.” Because I don’t do it in a creepy, manipulative way, people appreciate me bringing it up and pushing them towards maturity in Christ.

Do you have any best practices you’ve gleaned that have helped your people become more generous?

Brian Jones is a church planter, author and the founding and senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in Philadelphia. This article was originally published on SeniorPastorCentral.com.

Brian Jones
Brian Jones

Brian Jones is a church planter, author and the founding and senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in Philadelphia.

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