What Your Giving Campaign Is Accomplishing

The year-end planning meeting is on the calendar, and you already feel the weight of the ask. Finance brings the numbers needed to meet the ministry plans. Exec leadership brings the timing and the framework for the ask. Someone pulls up last year’s letter to see what the tone was. Every question around the table is about the ask: the church’s financial needs, how to frame it, when to send it, which communications channels to use, and whose story to feature.

That’s careful work by people who care deeply about keeping your church on track financially. The campaign is also going to teach your congregation something about what giving means, and sometimes, that part isn’t on the agenda.

The Question That Changes the Planning Meeting

How does this year-end giving campaign also help form our people into Christlike people who joyfully reflect the generosity of God?

This question isn’t aimed at disrupting the plan with a goal to abandon explaining and presenting the financial ask to support the Kingdom work. Finance still needs a number to plan ministry around, and that’s what stewardship of ministry planning requires. Exec leadership still needs the timing to work around Advent and year-end calendar planning. This question gets to the intent that sits alongside those and changes the ultimate goal for the campaign even if the outcome measures remain the same.

Giving Is a Ministry Function

Giving is one form of worship by which we reflect the generous nature of God Himself. It’s how we release control over our own lives and give God the throne of our hearts. A campaign that gathers money but forms no one has done only half of what it was capable of.

Financial goals are good, and you need them to plan ministry projects, expand vision, and fulfil the needs of your community and beyond. But the goal of a giving campaign is obedience, and a congregation grows into obedience the way it grows into anything else, by being led there over time by people who keep showing them what generosity looks like.

That reframes your part in the planning because of the nuance in communicating that call. You’re one of the people leading this congregation toward Christlikeness.

Where the Ask Turns Into Guilt

There are two ways to frame the ask for financial support that do damage to the campaign and distract from the discipleship and worship part of joyfully giving.

The first makes giving sound like money you hand over to fund an institution you’re obligated to fund through membership. The second suggests the church can’t do God’s work unless you give financially to maintain the ministry functions. Framing the giving campaign around either of these will probably get people to give. But both teach your congregation that giving is a bill for services rendered, and that lesson perpetuates the consumer mentality plaguing most postmodern churches.

Softer language around the ask doesn’t fix this issue. Giving people a reason that transcends Earthly desires and understanding of what happens when we give to God does. December is already crowded, and your appeal is competing with Christmas presents the kids need, travel that has to get booked, and a hundred other things with January deadlines attached. If the appeal reads as one more task to compete with the family budget, it slides down the list.

Setting Up Next Year Before This One Ends

Ask your finance folks whether they’ve heard any stories this year of people growing in faithful stewardship and generosity as a part of discipleship. They hear things nobody else on staff hears. The goal is not to highlight someone who has given the most, but to look for those who are growing the most.

Begin planning now for next year’s campaign. Talk to finance and exec leadership about building toward next October by telling generosity stories all year long. You’re asking them to flag what they see when they see it.

Then next October the campaign gets assembled out of a year of celebration instead of looking for stories at the last minute. Now the giving campaign ask sits inside that celebration of what God is doing rather than standing alone in front of it.

The goal is to show people the way to become more like Christ through obedience, releasing control of our lives, and reflecting the generosity of God by giving joyfully. Seek these first instead of just a financial number in your communications efforts.