5 Strategies to Increase Giving in Your Church

What would you do if money wasn’t a constraint in your church?

What program would you start? What expansion would you build? What campus would you launch? What hire would you pull the trigger on?

Isn’t it true that money often feels like one of our greatest hindrances in ministry?

If your church is like my church, everything we do is dependent on the giving of our congregation.

Everything.

So, here’s the million dollar question (maybe literally!), how do you increase generosity in your church? I have a few ideas.

1. Change Your Mindset

The foundation of growing generosity in your church starts with your own attitude toward giving. In the past, I just thought it was so awkward to constantly be asking for money and challenging people to give. It just felt weird.

I’ve had a complete change of mind and here’s why: Generosity is good for you!

Learning to discipline our lives and set aside money to give to the Church is a better way to live! I’ve come to understand that when we help people build a pattern of generosity in their lives, it is honestly better for them.

They focus on themselves less, worry less and they generally grow more generous in their hearts.

In my opinion, until we, as leaders, come to truly believe this, we’ll always have trouble raising the bar of generosity in our churches.

2. Demonstrate It

Alright, this part is awkward but I believe it is so important. We have to demonstrate and model generosity if we want to increase it in our churches.

This means that every person in leadership should be modeling the behavior we are running after — elders, deacons, and staff.

Why? Two reasons.

First, people listen to what we do far more than what we say. So much of leadership is modeling.

Secondly, there is a huge difference between telling people they should do something that you are already doing because you believe in it so much versus telling people they should do something that you also should be doing.

In short, when we are demonstrating generosity, it will drastically affect how we talk about generosity.

Here’s the tough part. Living out this value requires tough conversations. Hey, why aren’t you giving consistently? Yeah... awkward. But, I truly believe these conversations are worth the awkward.

3. Talk About What You Are Doing

Recently, we conducted a study on Millennials. Specifically, we were asking, “Where are you and why don’t you like our church?!?” That wasn’t the official title but, you know what I mean.

Anyway, one of our big findings was that Millennials want to be part of a church that cares about the community and is actually doing something about issues in the world.

Because of this learning, we have adjusted the way we talk about what we are doing. In the past, we downplayed our role in humanitarian projects in the world because it felt like we were tooting our own horn.
We value humility and didn’t want to shine the spotlight on ourselves.

What we learned, though, is that by taking this quieter approach, we inadvertently communicated to the people sitting in our chairs that we don’t really care about our city or our world. Ugh.

So, we’re changed our approach in this area and while we still value humility, we now use phrases like:

“We just wanted to let you know that your gifts matter and here’s how we are using them.”

People want to know that their gifts matter and so if you want to increase generosity in your church, help them see what their giving leads to, both within your church and outside as well.

4. Talk About Money in General

A fourth strategy for increasing generosity in your church is to change the conversation. Instead of creating sermons about tithing specifically, teach about money in general.

The Bible has so much to say about money and our society is dreadful at managing money. People need help!

In addition, when we change the conversation so that we’re talking about money in general — contentment, saving, and generosity, the invitation to generosity feels less like “the church asking for our money again.”

Secondly, I believe that every follower of Jesus wants to be generous. None of us are sitting around thinking, “I love Jesus and all... but this is my money!”

No, the problem isn’t that we don’t feel generous. The problem is that we are afraid to be generous. We are scared that generous giving won’t leave us with enough to pay our bills, manage our debt and afford a gift for a kid’s birthday.

The pathway to greater generosity in your church isn’t more challenges to be generous. The pathway to greater generosity in your church starts with equipping your people with strategies that help them live within their means and free up more income to save and give.

5. Fast and Easy

Here’s a confession: I have been working full-time in churches for nearly fifteen years and the entire time I have known I should give consistently and have desired to give consistently.

However, there was a point in my career where my giving increased substantially and it had nothing to do with my income.

What happened? Automated giving.

Yes, I realize that your opinion of me probably just plummeted but hear me out! When I set up automated giving, my giving was no longer dependent on remembering to bring a gift, what was going on in my budget that month or whether or not I was actually at church that weekend. It just became automatic. It was the best thing that ever happened to my giving.

My point is this: If you want to increase generosity in your church make it easy and make it fast and while you do this, don’t feel like you are being slick or sneaky.

Text giving and automated online giving are a great service to your people because again, people want to be generous. They often just don’t know how to make it happen or forget to make it happen.

(If you're in need of a system to offer automated recurring giving, Breeze offers this through online giving and text giving.)

Wrap Up

So there you go: 5 strategies to help you grow generosity in your church.

If you’re looking for a place to start, start with you and your leadership team.

When generosity is modeled and talked about as if it is normal, healthy and freeing, it's almost inevitable that it will result in growing generosity in your church community.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how to grow generosity as well. Feel free to leave us a comment below.