Spiritual Giving

Stewardship Conversations

In our previous blog, we spoke about creating a culture of giving. We recommended that leaders create an intentional plan to explore the meaning of giving. We suggested that by initiating conversations about giving, you can introduce the topic and reinforce the concept until it becomes a part of your congregation’s life. In this blog we will talk about initiating these stewardship conversations.

Conversations about giving can be initiated in many ways. Use the pulpit, guest speakers, the newsletter, the website, the worship service, and committee discussions. Convene small groups before or after the Sunday service for several weeks. Invite the finance committee to participate in a conversation with congregants about the meaning of spiritual stewardship in contrast to the meaning of fundraising. Make “giving” a major theme at annual budget drive orientation workshops. Prepare visiting stewards (the term we prefer instead of canvassers) to discuss the concept of giving during their conversations with donors.

You may also want to invite a fundraising consultant to facilitate a Mission and Giving Retreat. Focus on these questions during the retreat: What is the difference between stewardship and fundraising?

  • What relationship can we construct among giving, compassion, and community?
  • In what ways can we grow and invest the gifts we have received?
  • How can we return and restore our gifts?
  • What does generosity mean to us? How do we define the term? How will we know if we are being generous? What will it look like?
  • What will we do with increased giving? What difference will it make?
  • How can we make spiritual stewardship a year-round conversation?
  • How can we frame conversations to focus less on the need for money and more on giving as a way to implement our mission?
  • How can we help our society move away from an increasing culture of materialism?

Helping congregants discover their own personal generosity will create joyful givers. Joyful givers will help create healthy congregations that view spiritual stewardship as a vital component of their ministry and that believe that sharing one’s gifts, call, and spiritual vocation is an act of worship.

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Annual Budget Drive, Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Thriving, Capital Campaigns, Endowment, FORTH: A Stewardship Development Program, Fundraising, Generosity, Giving and Receiving, Long-Range Stewardship Planning, Money, Myths, Resources, Spiritual Giving, Stewardship Education

Creating a Culture of Giving

People are not born with a giving gene. Because joyful giving for the sake of the giver is a worthy goal, faith communities want to help their congregants discover their own personal generosity. This discovery process requires focusing on the joy of giving, on being self-giving rather than self-serving. Recruiting volunteers and raising money can be almost incidental to creating a healthy culture of giving.

In Giving and Stewardship in an Effective Church, Kennon Callahan writes that the purpose of stewardship is giving, not fundraising, and that stewardship actually provides a service to the giver. The role of those leading a stewardship campaign, he believes, is to help people discover their own generosity.

Callahan proposes a four-year program to increase giving. He suggests that a congregation focus on growing the donor base in the first year and increasing the number of volunteers who work on the annual budget drive in the second year. He recommends that the third year be devoted to increasing the giving level of specific current households. He believes that the cumulative result of the first three years should create a quantum leap of giving during the fourth year.

While Callahan’s plan offers a well-conceived sequence, I believe that the first step is to find a way to talk about giving. The conversations can’t be specifically about money. They must include talk about call and spiritual vocation. A person might share his call (willingness to proclaim the good works of the faith community) by talking about his passion for one of the congregation’s programs or ministries at a new-member reception. A congregant might demonstrate her spiritual vocation (willingness to take up the spiritual work of the faith community) by participating in a Habitat for Humanity project or volunteering to teach English to a group of recent immigrants.

If your congregation is entrenched in a culture of scarcity, develop an intentional plan to explore the meaning of giving. By initiating conversations about giving, you can introduce the topic and reinforce the concept until it slowly becomes part of the congregation’s way of life.

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Are you telling stories of transformation or just asking for money?

William G. Enright, executive director of the Lake Institute on Faith & Giving at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University says that evidence suggests American congregations can be divided roughly into three categories:  one-third who haven’t been affected much by the recession, one-third whose budgets have remained the same, and one-third whose budgets have shrunk.

And, Enright notes, even those congregations that are faring well should be careful, as trends show that religious giving has declined as a percentage of overall philanthropy and that “devout donors” may be motivated by faith but don’t necessarily give to religious institutions. The lesson, Enright believes, is to tell a story of transformation rather than just ask for money. “Increasingly, people want to know, ‘What difference does my gift make?’” he said.
                                                                                                                                                                                  You can read the entire article and respond in the comment section with your thoughts.

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Reflections on “Personal Best”

I came across an article in the New Yorker magazine a few weeks back written by Atul Gawande, an expert surgeon who engaged a fellow surgeon to serve as his personal  coach with the goal of keeping his skills sharp and helping improve his performance and results.    See Personal Best at The New Yorker online. Dr. Gawande calls attention to coaching analogies from sports and the arts, noting that elite athletes and singers often have personal coaches to help them be their best.  They observe them in action and suggest small or large adjustments in preparation, strategy, or technique.  Now as you might imagine it’s pretty rare for professionals like doctors and lawyers to enter into a formal coaching relationship.   The same is true in my business of management consulting.  Well as the New Yorker article indicates, the coaching experiment was quite successful, and Dr. Gawande is convinced that both he and his patients have benefitted.

This got me musing about the work that I do as a management consultant and more specifically as a congregational stewardship consultant.   I have never been hired explicitly to be a coach, but surely that is a large component of what I do – observe leaders in action, offer suggestions to help them do their work more effectively, and then work collaboratively to implement the suggestions.  This is true whether the engagement is to improve the services delivered by the information technology department of a large non-profit or to help foster a culture of generosity in our UU congregations.

So now I’m pondering what it would mean for me to think of myself as a coach and my clients as generally skilled leaders interested in improving their skills and effectiveness.    I wonder how my work would be different if I embraced the coaching spirit more fully and openly.   And how might I benefit from personal coaching?

Well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten with my musings.   I’d love to hear from others who have experience either as coaches or being coached.  I’m convinced that there’s something useful in the coaching model and would love some ideas about digging further into it.  Please comment and share your experience and wisdom.

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Why we give to charity

Thank you to Congregational Stewardship Consultant Aggie Sweeney for sharing this article about generosity and the holiday season with our office.

“The urge to give that is awakened around this time is an important one: Philanthropy plays a crucial role in American society, providing funding for a vast array of services. Giving also connects us as a culture: According to a study by the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, nearly two-thirds of all Americans gave to charity in 2008. American charities took in nearly $300 billion in 2010.” by Leon Neyfakh

You can read the rest of the article on The Boston Globe website.

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First Unitarian Society in Madison & Microfinancing

Stewardship efforts are highlighted in so many unique ways, and First Unitarian Society in Madison in Wisconsin is no exception. This congregation, with over 1,600 members, wanted to give back in a meaningful way. They decided to raise funds to contribute to microfinancing, which can provide individuals in developing countries with loaned money to start small businesses. An article in the Wisconsin State Journal details how the congregation approached raising money for this justice project.

“At First Unitarian, task force members bypassed traditional fundraisers and went to the congregation with a direct pitch to donate money. The church’s foundation pledged to match up to $10,000. The total amount raised would then be invested in microfinance organizations that would pay returns to the church on the money.

This approach, similar to socially responsible investing, made for a more sustainable, longer-lasting program than a one-time donation, said Scott Andersen, another task force member. It also made for an easier pitch — donors would be strengthening the church’s financial health while helping to reduce international poverty.

‘It was a one-two punch,’ he said. ‘There were benefits on both the local and global level.’

About 50 families donated a total of $13,000. With the church foundation’s $10,000 match and a $10,000 grant from the national Unitarian Universalist Association, the church had $33,000 to invest.”

First Unitarian Society also has highlighted information about the microfinancing kits on their website.

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Annual Budget Drive, Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Thriving, Capital Campaigns, Fundraising, Generosity, Giving and Receiving, Money, Myths, Operational/Organizational Aspects, Resources, Spiritual Giving, Stewardship Education, Uncategorized, Volunteer Management

A New Definition of Generosity?

I have been thinking a lot about the definition of generosity. Recently, my colleague Ian Evison wrote:
 “I think we are going to enter into a time when the idea of getting people to be more generous is going to need to be much more balanced by focusing on sustainability—even what people will be generous about will be more about sustainability.”

Seems to me that since so many congregants have lost jobs or are currently under employed, that our congregations may be faced with flat annual budgets that reflect the new generosity.

For example, if a congregant had previously contributed $1,000 to the annual budget, and that same congregant is now unemployed, maybe a $250 annual pledge is even more generous than her previous pledge. Maybe you have a dozen other congregants, or more, facing the same dilemma.

By extension, it is quite possible that your annual budget might even be smaller than the previous year and could reflect even more generosity than the previous year.

Maybe a new definition of generosity is needed. Maybe we need to correlate generosity with sustainability. Maybe the idea of getting congregants to increase their generosity means that we focus on sustaining those most important aspects of congregational ministry, rather than expanding into new programs.

The Coming Death Tsunami, written by Lovett Weems and shared by Rev. Brian Covell of Third Unitarian Church in Chicago, pursues this issue. Take a look and see what you think. I would love to begin a conversation about this issue.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

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Annual Budget Drive, Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Thriving, Capital Campaigns, Fundraising, Generosity, Giving and Receiving, Long-Range Stewardship Planning, Money, Myths, Resources, Spiritual Giving, Stewardship Education

Helpful and Amusing DVD on Stewardship

The folks at the Eno River UU Fellowship in Durham, NC have produced a DVD of skits about financial stewardship called Dramas to Provoke Generosity. It features members from the Fellowship in 6 skits. Some of the skits touch on religious beliefs and giving and others connect our UU values to our financial giving. They are amusing and provocative, and try to get at some of the considerations that our members may have about financial stewardship in our congregations.

The producers provide the scripts for the skits, in files on the DVD, so your congregation can adapt them and produce them in your own congregation. They are all brief enough – perhaps you have some talented folks in your congregation who would present one skit each week during your annual budget drive period? Or maybe you could invite congregants to read the scripts together and discuss them as an adult spiritual development series? They might also be useful as a starting point for exploring other religions and their approaches to stewardship.

If you are less adventurous, you might consider just showing the skits as a starting point for consideration or discussion. Because the DVD is well produced, the acting fits the material, and the scripts are broadly humorous; they are engaging but not likely to offend anyone. Click here to purchase the DVD.

Here is a video preview of the DVD:

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Culture of Abundance versus Culture of Scarcity

The Law of Enrollment Meets the Ask
By Laurie Herrick, Kathleen Dowd, and Rachel Kuhn

In this article, Laurie Herrick, Kathleen Dowd and Rachel Kuhn make a compelling case for focusing on the reality of abundance, instead of the myth of scarcity.

Herrick, Dowd, and Kuhn believe in something they call the Law of Enrollment. They describe it as a natural law in which it is easy for donors to become enrolled in current conversations about scarcity and what we do not have or cannot do. They believe that fundraisers must be present to the enrollment ‘dance’ and enroll prospective donors in how they can make a positive difference in your organization/congregation.

Read the article in Quantum Jump for a wonderful example of a conversation between a fundraiser and a potential donor where the fundraiser helps the donor to understand the importance of making a difference.

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Appreciative Inquiry, Fundraising, Generosity, Giving and Receiving, Money, Spiritual Giving

Book Review: Reach Out and Give by Cheri J. Meiners, M.Ed.

“The World is beautiful. There’s so much to notice and be grateful for.”

Reach out and Give is a short, easy-to-read children’s book that is uplifting, positive, and a useful tool in teaching children how they can be generous and reach out to their community. At only thirty pages with bright and cheerful illustration, follows one young boy in his journey throughout his community where he learns how he can give his time and talent to those in need. Moreover, Reach Out and Give highlights how good it can feel inside yourself when you help others and are generous.

The message conveyed in this book is one that every child should understand, and while the story itself is a useful learning tool, so is the four pages of resources for parents and teachers located in the back of the book. This section of resources begins by defining important words that a young child might not yet understand, but will be essential to know when learning about giving: generous, grateful, relief, service, talents, and volunteer. There are questions provided that can help stimulate a conversation about generosity between a parent and/or teacher and their young child. Lastly, there are a number of games that are highlighted to utilize during “teachable moments” related to generosity.

One great idea the author has is for children to create a “We’re Grateful for” Journal. She writes what the teacher will need to prepare this journal and what kind of materials are necessary, and then she writes how to effectively use this teaching tool: “Talk with children about what it means to be grateful, using discussion questions for pages 1-3. Explain that you will be keeping a journal-a daily record- of things everyone is grateful for. Each day, you and the children can each draw a picture or write a journal entry of something you saw, something that happened, or something you realized you are thankful for. Invite children to date their entries and add them to the book each day. Continue over several weeks, noticing from time to time how full the journal is growing and how much there is to be grateful for.”

Whether you are a parent, teacher, or religious educator in your congregation, this book is extremely useful in helping a child to understand the importance of generosity. To learn more about the author and the text, you can visit Free Spirit Publishing for details.

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