"Market Share" as an Indicator of Stewardship Spiritual Awareness

Many church leaders complain that there's not enough money coming in to meet their churches' operating budgets. They wonder how in the world they can motivate their church members to be more generous in their giving.

But the problem may not be financial. One way to find out is to see whether your church is achieving its "market share" of the parishoner's dollars. The way to do this is to make a list of the giving units of the church. Then beside each name put the figure that best represents what that giving unit's annual income is. You may know it exactly, or you may have to estimate it. When in real doubt, ask two or three other people what they think that giving unit's annual income is. Chances are better than good that you'll be accurate within tenpercent.

Next, add up that column of figures. This gives you the combined annual income, or range of income, for all your church's giving units. In many middle class communities today, a church with about 150 giving units will have no trouble achieving a total annual income of something in excess of $2.5 to 3 million.

Next, multiply the total annual income by ten percent. That will give you the figure which would represent the total giving to your church is everybody gave a tithe, or ten percent. For example, if the combined annual income of your church's giving units totals $2.5 million, then ten percent of that would be $250,000.

Now, compare that "tithe" figure to your church's annual contributions from those giving units. If your church is like a lot of churches we've counselled with, the annual contributions might be a tenth, a fifth or a third of the "tithe"amount.

If that's the case for you, then you know one thing for sure: Money is not the problem. There may be many other kinds of problems that are coming together to result in lowered contributions, but you know for sure that the money is there. So it's a question of motivation, not a question of money.

Now, one last step. Take each giving unit and multiply its own annual income figure by 10%, and you'll come up with the target for that giving unit. The greater the discrepancy between their "tithe amount" and their current year's contributions, the greater the motivational work that needs to be done with that giving unit.

Stewardship is a matter of growth and maturity. Not all people reach the philanthropic understanding at the same time in their spiritual pilgrimage. And none of us reach it alone. It is a result of patient and repetitive community reinforcement. That means, in the local United Methodist Church, that the pastor has to preach it, the teachers have to teach it, the leaders have to lead out and make their gifts first, and the congregation has to celebrate it.

Whenever philanthropy occurs it does so because the persons giving has come to an awareness of being thankful for what they have, and they have a desire to “give back” to the community, group or cause that led to their having so much. But we’ll treat this set of concerns more in our next issue of this newsletter.

For now, suffice it to say that stewardship needs to be a continual theme underlying all other issues and concerns. If that is the case in your church, then you will gradually achieve more “share of market” of your members’ pocketbooks. You’ll also have a broader and more active corps of volunteers, because when philanthropy starts happening it involves the whole person.

Stewardship is a function of where someone is in their spiritual journey. It doesn't have so much to do with the size of their pocketbook as it does the size and disposition of their heart. The unique thing about a local United Methodist Church, that is not true of any other charity of a secular nature, is that the church community is avowedly about the business of helping people develop in their spiritual journey. Therefore, assisting people in learning and practicing philanthropy should be an easy task for a local church.

If the church informs and enhances the spiritual journey of the individual, and the person grows in stewardship understanding and commitment, then the person's giving to the church, and everywhere else, will increase; at least up to the capacity of theirmaterial resources. One of the ways we do this is by achieving some kind of pastoral understanding of where each member of the church is in their journey with regard to money and possessions.

Another thing we can do is regularly lift up to individuals the paradigms and examples in the old and new testaments that assist in considering where we need to be in our relationship with money and things. We can do this as a group, through bible studies and sermons and other kinds of group study. But we also need to do this with individuals. In short, we need to regularly counsel with the members of our churches with regard to their attitudes toward money and things. And we need to keep tabs on their growth to the end that we nurture them along toward ever more Christian understandings.

To complement and, to some limited degree, to testthe effectiveness of our spiritual nurturing, we have to regularly put the opportunity in front of our members to make decisions with regard to their resources. If and as they become increasingly ready to give significantly of their material resources, they will take advantage of these opportunities, and pretty soon you will find that more and more of your people are giving sacrificially.

As a pastor or key church leader one can't just "expect" the people to know how to be generous. It's not something that comes naturally. It takes a lot of overcoming of the natural and the culturally induced tendency to gather and hoard resources to one's self and one's family. Some Native Americans tribes said that strength = genersity. That's right! They felt that if one is not afraid of "lack" then one is truly strong. Jesus and John Wesley spoke along the same lines.