Midweek Podcast Ep 1 - Church Money

Are we rolling?

You want to have like a thing?

We look at the camera.

Hey, hey.

We're here.

How are you, Madison?

Good.

How are you?

I'm good.

I've got a little bit of a sinus thing.

So I slept this weekend on a couch in Alabama in a house with 13 high school uh eighth grade boys.

Is everything okay?

I'm very tired.

I actually had a moment where I had to go to them at two o'clock in the morning on Friday and be like, guys.

Guys, I just want to sleep.

I'm exhausted.

I have to drive y'all places.

And they were like in that mode where everything you said, one kid just does that like laugh thing.

And they can't.

Yeah.

Liam was texting me, like, Dad, it's not me, I promise.

It's this other guy.

And I'm like, I don't even care.

So I'm a little tired.

Yeah.

I was out of town this sun this weekend, wasn't there on Sunday.

Like I only miss maybe one or two Sundays a year, but had a great trip with my son.

Nice.

And now I'm sitting here talking to you.

Yeah, and you wanted to have a conversation about church and money.

Money, money, money, money.

We we had talked about this a while ago, and you're like, do you know any money songs?

And I was sitting in my car actively trying to think of songs that had to do with money, and I couldn't think of any.

Well, I just know that.

Do I just not listen to music?

Well, I mean, the only songs that come to my mind are I don't even know who is it Pink Floyd?

I think I'm looking at Zach or Camp.

Pink Floyd has the money, money, money song.

Money.

And then that's my falsetto.

There you go.

Sinus affection too.

And then there's like the classic Beatles song, the um, which I think was a remake of another song, actually, from someone else, but like the best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees.

I want money.

That's what I want.

Maxwell Silverhammer?

No?

I don't know who that is.

But the Beatles.

That's a Beatles song.

Oh, okay.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I can't think of it.

But anywho, that's something called Money.

That's the name of the song.

So you wanted to talk about money.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about money, and here's why.

Why?

Yeah.

Because uh a lot of times money in church collides in a really messy way.

And there have just been a ton of there have been a ton of churches, especially I think as churches get larger, um, where the money stuff just gets weird.

Either you've got it seems like an exorbitant amount of money being spent by people in leadership, and people are like, there's private jets, there's you know, there's state of there's facilities that are like state of the art.

I mean, you're talking like you guys have equipment that that is that's like it's like industry standard.

It's the latest and greatest of that thing just came out and it's a quarter of a million dollars.

That's not necessarily sinful to have a nice it's not sinful to have a nice thing if you can afford it and whatnot.

But it's the very least a lot of people kind of go, huh.

Um we have a very nice facility at our church, and so that like someone could do that to us as well.

Um but I think especially the way that churches tend to go about talking about money, uh and trying to inspire people to give money, it just gets messy and gross.

And I actually think at his hands we have a very different approach to money.

Yeah.

And uh and I think it's not something we really talk about that often because of our approach to money.

So I thought maybe it'd be cool if we had a conversation about sort of the culture of money here at his hands, um, in case anyone at our church uh wants to understand that more deeply, or maybe someone even outside of our church wants to see a different perspective.

And I think it's uh fair to say that it's it's hard to avoid the money conversation um entirely because like let's say you start a church with your 12 friends and you're all gathering in your house.

Like eventually you might outgrow that house.

Right.

And we need to pay a rental fee for so how do we ask people for the rental fee for that facility?

Correct.

And then as it escalates, it gets yeah more and more intense.

But you still have to talk about it.

You have to talk about it.

Money's not wrong, it's a it's a reality of life.

Uh things cost money.

Jesus talked about money, he talked about money very matter-of-factly.

Um and so giving has and giving has always been the way that churches have operated.

It just is what it is.

Um and so, but in our current world, it can just go off the rails, it can go to the extremes in all kinds of ways.

Um, and I guess I'll say this and then we can talk about uh we'll move on to like how money can get weird and I'll maybe expand on that.

Um but at his hands, the approach we have to money is pretty simple.

Um we trust God to lead our people to give, uh, and then we trust our people to respond.

So we we say this from the stage sometimes, we will never tell you how much you should give.

Um we do believe in percentage giving, like we see that as a principle in scripture.

Tithing means tenth.

We don't tell people you have to tithe, that's more of an old testament thing.

Yeah, and that comes from the temple tax.

From the temple tax, all that there's a whole lot there.

But there is a uh biblical principle of of your first fruits, of a percentage, whatever language you want to use.

We believe in that.

We encourage people to do that, but we will never tell you you should give X percent.

Right.

Um, that's between you and God.

So we just ask our people, hey, if this is your church, pray, ask the Lord what He wants you to contribute, and then do that.

And we trust God to speak to you and lead you in that way, and we trust you to respond.

And if we can trust God and trust each other, it's great.

When we don't trust God or we don't trust people, we're going to, if either of those is off, then you're gonna start marketing, manipulating, manufacturing, selling, you're gonna try to make it happen in the flesh, so to speak, like just the human way.

And um, you know, that's where things it starts to get really just nasty, yeah.

I think.

And what's I think really cool about being at his hands for so long, I've been here since I was in the fifth grade, and I think the entire time, correct me if I'm wrong, the entire time that that has been our philosophy of money, it's been something that the church as an organization has kind of lived out of like, yes, we're we're asking you to pray about a percent, to give a percent, and the entire time we have of all of the money that's come in, 10% is that is allotted, and sometimes more is allotted to go back out into the community.

Yeah, so we've kind of joked internally, we don't say this on the stage, but internally it's like we tithe the tithe, so to speak.

Sure.

So we commit 10% of our incoming funds to give away.

Um and that happens in a variety of ways.

We've got a lot of organizations that we give to on a monthly basis.

Sometimes uh over the course of you know several months or or a year, we'll even have like kind of an abundance grow where it's like, oh, we have a chunk of change we need to figure out what to do with.

And then that becomes like, well, let's pray.

Are there any organizations that we want to give something a little extra to?

Um, we're actually talking to our accountant right now about really like where exactly are we on that to make sure that we're we're giving what we're committed to.

Correct.

Um and so helping people out in times of need, there's all kinds of different ways that we do that, and that doesn't even count the fundraisers that we do with events like Canvas is this big event we do every year.

100%.

So that's just like a baseline, but that's us living out.

Like, I don't think it would be right if we said, hey, you should give a percentage of what God has given you to support the church.

And and look, trust God, you can live on 90%, you can live on 93% or whatever it is.

I mean, we we need 100%.

Like, we actually we can't afford no, like let's let's do, let's actually put into practice what we're asking everyone else to do, what we think scripture says, and let's see how God blesses it.

And I feel like he always has.

Yeah.

So so I've again I've I've been here, so I don't have a ton of context for other churches.

Is that different from the way other churches operate?

And and if so, how?

I mean, I mean, I'm sure there's lots of faithful churches.

I mean, oh, tons.

And I think that's one of the that's one of the negative things about money because in church, because uh the the churches that happen to become the largest, biggest, right, have the most eyes on them, oftentimes that's where money gets really messed up.

And then everyone just sort of takes that and goes, that's how churches are.

Sure.

Like I saw uh okay, I saw we've talked about this a little bit, but there's a church that I actually used to go to in college, and they've had quite a bit of media attention for a variety of different reasons that we won't get into.

Um but they they have this big men's conference every year.

And like last year they had it kicked off with like a tank, rolled over a bunch of cars, and there was this video of that that went out there and we're like, this is tax exempt.

Yeah.

It was like an anti-church sure, you know, like church, it's time to tax the churches.

If churches have enough money to rent an M1 Abrams and they're destroyed vehicles, and yeah, it's in a huge arena.

And so people see that and they go, Well, that's how churches are.

And that's not how Right.

Or they see the the TV pastor with the private jet or the TV pastor that wants a new private jet.

The TV pastor fill in the blank.

Yeah.

And so then it just becomes that's the perception of how money is in church.

And I don't think that that is accurate, but it becomes the perception.

I do think, though, there is a I do think there are some tendencies that a lot of churches um do operate under, especially as they get larger.

Okay, because then the reason is as you get larger, the costs go up.

Yeah.

You need a bigger one.

Capital campaign for a building is not gonna be the same as your operating costs for that past year.

Yeah, even for us, it's like the reality.

We have 32, I think I might be wrong, but it's like 30-ish commercial air conditioning units on our roof.

Okay.

And most of them are pretty old.

They're from when this was a Kmart, and a lot of them are at their lifespan.

And replacing each one is somewhere in the ballpark of like 30,000 to 50,000.

Right.

But you also have to rent a crane to even get it on there.

And renting a crane is like 10 grand.

So it makes sense to do it when you have multiple, but to do it to replace all of them would cost two million dollars.

We don't have that.

Right.

But if we replace them bit by bit, we have this weird sort of like this part of the building works, this part of the building doesn't, they don't communicate with each other.

They don't communicate with each other because that one's 20 years young older than that one, and so it just becomes and so what what do churches do when they have those legit needs?

And the bigger the church, the bigger the facility, the the more those needs are.

And what I have seen a lot of churches do, um, like truly, is basically I guess I put it like this if you have something you really need in your family, if your family needs a new car, okay, the typical way you're gonna go about that is you're going to either save for a number of years to to buy that, you see that coming, you save up for it.

Or B, you sacrifice, say, hey, we're gonna we're not gonna eat out for a while, we're gonna cut way back in this because we need to apply that money somewhere else, because this is something that we we think we need or or we want.

Maybe it's even a want.

We're gonna take a nice vacation.

Sure.

What you wouldn't do is just call your friends.

Contribute to the my family's vacation fund, please.

Correct.

In advan in advance, because in a last-minute situation, I saw that I had a week coming up and I wanted to just spend that by going to Ireland or whatever, whatever it is.

And and I I'll say this on the front.

I admit that this is probably a little bit of an oversimplification, but I do think a lot of larger churches have a tendency to sort of have this we want a thing, we want it now.

We have not saved for this.

We're not gonna sacrifice anything for this, we're not gonna make any cuts or any reallocation.

We're just going to tell you guys we have a big vision.

And this is the cost.

Isn't it cool?

Right.

This is what it costs, and it's on you to give it.

You know, and so a lot of churches get to where there is a constant, it's like there's it's not just giving campaigns is the language in church, like you're gonna do an extra season of giving.

So give what you normally give and then go above and beyond that because we we got to do this thing.

We've done that one time in almost 20 years.

Now, our church started a little different, right?

We had two very wealthy benefactors that launched this church.

Gifted the facility to us.

Yeah, the I think about 75% of the facility costs were gifted.

So that I get that.

That's a different situation.

Um But we've still had lots of big needs.

Like, we don't have tons of money in the bank, we're healthy, right?

But we're never we've never once in the time I've been here, 17 years, been like, what are we gonna do with all this money?

Right?

It's not like that at all.

Um we're an actual nonprofit.

And so what I say about is we're not a nonprofit that is buying tanks, right?

We're not putting away millions of dollars or anything like that at all.

Um, it's very common for us to have an overage at the end of a year, but it's not crazy amounts of money, right?

So And that's not just skimmed off the top and given to the leadership.

Not at all.

No, no, no, not at all.

And so things like the air conditioning units and stuff, like we we we buy those when we need them, we save up and we buy those.

Oh, hit the mic.

But anyway, um so a lot of churches, especially as they get larger, it's just this sort of constant giving campaign all the time.

Like, and it never ends.

We complete one giving campaign and launch another one.

And to to be fair on that too, I I imagine that a giving campaign breeds a lot of excitement in your church to see this was a goal that seemed impossible at the start.

We accomplished that goal, and now we're seeing fruit from that goal.

Like that's a that's an awesome thing.

It's an awesome feeling, and and it's and it goes to that sort of marketing selling when the church shifts away from trusting the Lord and trusting people.

And, you know, like for us, we don't talk about money hardly at all.

You in the announcements, you say I'm the main person.

What do you say?

Hey, last but not least, we just want to thank all of you who give financially here at his hands.

Uh, we wouldn't be able to do what we do week in and week out without you and what we do in the community.

So we just want to say a huge and sincere thank you.

Uh there are a couple of ways to give.

We try to make it as easy as possible.

So if you're here in person, you can go to the back four columns of the room.

You can text any amount to 84321.

You can go to his hands.online or our mobile app, or you can mail a check to 550 Molly Lane.

Again, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for doing that.

Uh we've got a great morning plan, so let's get started.

How many times do you think you've said that?

Probably under 100, but pretty close.

Oh, I bet it's over a hundred.

You think so?

Well, yeah, we've been doing announcement videos for four years.

Yeah, but we've doing it for like four years.

Okay, yeah, so 400-ish.

400 ish time, yeah.

Like who knows?

A lot.

Yeah, so you do that every week and you tell people, hey, thank you.

Well, and if you want to give, here's how to give.

And it's recognizing a reality.

Like I think having it be in that announcement video spot is to say, like, this is a reality, and it is a genuinely a sincere thank you.

I know I was being facetious kind of as I was doing it.

We are super grateful.

We are part of a really generous church.

So those that do give, it's like we do recognize the sacrifice, and I think uh want to acknowledge that and respect that.

Yeah, no, it's and it's and we couldn't function the way we do without that.

Now, on the flip side of that, and again, this is all just sort of like it's not wrong.

And we've actually done this.

Like, we've had a giving campaign.

We've had one giving campaign in the last 17 years.

We had a bunch of stuff in our building that was in a state of disrepair.

Our roof was a mess, it leaked like crazy.

You remember those days where every time it rained, we'd all be like, go to your areas.

Or it'd be like, go to the church if you're not even there in the building.

If there was a bad storm, like, can someone get to the church and start putting buckets out now?

Yeah.

And it was everywhere.

So we needed that.

That was like$350,000 for a new roof.

That was crazy.

And then we had a lot of other stuff too that was like just equipment, things were at a really kind of critical place, and we didn't have the money in the bank to do that.

Right.

And so it was like we've and we felt like those were actual like needs.

So we we had a branding thing.

We actually called that.

Do you remember what we called that giving campaign?

Our turn.

Our turn.

Yeah.

But that's funny, is that actually came to me at least, uh, from I was reading scripture.

Right.

And the couple that started our church, Steve and Susan, they gave tens of million dollars to start the church.

And I always felt like like almost felt felt bad that so much of it was on them.

You know what I mean?

Like it wasn't the commute the church community.

Yeah, so many people are being blessed by this, but then they're the ones sacrificing for it, right?

Because they truly sacrificed.

I mean, people, it's easy to look at rich people and be like, ah, but they they sold a company for like$30 million and they used like 25 of that here.

They tithed to the other church they were going to before this started, before they started this building.

And it's not easy to be like, oh, they still had a million dollars.

It's like, okay, you're saying if you got 30 million, you'd be like, I'm gonna give most of it away.

I'm gonna give 28 million of it away, whatever.

And there's taxes and all that.

So I was reading my Bible.

This was but when I was the youth pastor, before I was the lead pastor, and I was reading the story about uh when the temple launched in the Old Testament, and David gave like a massive fortune of his own money to start the temple, to put Solomon built it, but David funded it, right?

But then the people of Israel came and they actually collectively outgave David.

And I remember reading that being like, that's gonna happen at his hands one day.

It'll be our turn to say, Stephen Susan, thank you.

So when we had these, we hit this point in like 2019, 2018, somewhere around there, where we had all these huge financial things happening, very much way over what we could possibly afford.

Right.

Things are at a state of disrepair where we're talking like catastrophic the roof, right?

I was like, it's our turn.

We've got to we've got to say thank you, Steve and Susan, for what you did.

We've got this now.

This is our church.

And so we had a giving campaign that had a logo and it had a theme.

And no thermometer.

No thermometer.

We didn't do a thermometer, but we updated people.

Here's where we're at.

Um, and then we we actually canceled that giving campaign halfway through because God provided all the funds, about half of it was given by people, and then we had some cool things happen that provided the rest of those funds, and we were like, well, we don't need to keep going to our people asking them for more when we have felt wrong to go to everyone and say, give, keep giving, give more, but we actually have the money for it.

In the bank, just sitting there.

So we had a crazy year where there was like a government rebate for payroll taxes that was like, what?

That had never happened before.

A bunch of stuff happened.

So we canceled that giving campaign.

So there's nothing wrong with that in the right context.

But I have seen churches and actually been a part of churches in the past where giving campaigns are constant.

Yeah.

There's and almost I almost sometimes wonder the skeptic in me is like, are you just coming up with new things to do for an excuse to have a giving campaign?

Because that is what contributes to the momentum of the church.

I was at a church in college that had a giving campaign called Because.

That was the name of the giving Why should you give and it was a year-long video testimonials?

It was the big because campaign.

So you should give above and beyond.

Right.

Why?

Because and I was like, and at the time I went I I gave a significant amount of money for my college self to that.

Right.

That was a little bit of a story.

I got like pretty jaded.

Tell the story what happened.

So I think it's important.

I mean, as this isn't about bashing or self-aggrandizing, it's more about recognizing the dangers of money when it comes to someone like in your position where you're in leadership making the decisions on how we approach this sort sort of stuff.

So the because campaign, okay.

I'm a college student.

I'm living with my parents in between my freshman and sophomore year.

I I I went to college four hours away from home, came back that summer to live at home while school was out and work as much as I could.

I was working toward marriage and all that.

And the church, I and I by the way, that church, whole different we'll talk about that another time.

That's the church that, you know, the tanks and all that stuff.

So gotcha.

Yeah, that's the same church.

It was not there at that point.

No tanks yet.

No tanks.

They didn't have but they were headed that way.

Um Do you think any of the dollars that you gave were spent on the tank?

Like, do you think?

No, no, no, no.

Those dollars were spent way before.

Okay.

Um, no, no.

So, like, and it's a growing, seemingly thriving church that's always adding new stuff, doing so.

It's very like momentous feeling, right?

So, what got me was the because campaign was for a gym.

They wanted to have like a You love the gym.

Dude, oh, I I I love the idea of the gym more than I've been going lately, but I do love playing basketball.

You do play basketball at the gym a lot.

So, and it was a basketball court, and the way they pitched it, great marketing, by the way.

Videos, you know, uh architectural drawings, like all that stuff.

And they said, like, hey, we're gonna build this gym and we're gonna bring kids in from the community.

They're gonna come here to play basketball, they're gonna come here, you know, to to have a like a community center, and then we're gonna get to share the gospel with them.

And I was like, that's right up my alley.

Are you kidding me?

Like, can we take Jesus and basketball and put them together?

I'm in.

Yeah, and so that summer, it's funny.

I worked at Chili's and uh we would always get our pay in cash out the door because you basically get your your tips, and I would fold 10% of whatever if I made$80, I would take$8 and fold it in half in my wallet.

When I got home, I would take the folded money, set it aside.

That's how I did it.

It was a really easy system.

And I was giving that to the Because campaign, or a good portion of that.

So a year later, I go back to college, right?

Do that.

I didn't ever live with my parents again after that in the summers, but I did come and visit.

So I come back the next summer, and my brother and I, he's younger, we're like, hey, let's go play basketball.

And he's like, through the gym, they finished it.

So we're like, oh yeah, I I contribute this.

There might, my name might be in a brick on the wall or something, you know?

I I didn't give that much.

But uh, but like let's go.

I was excited because I felt invested in it.

So we show up and we walk through the doors.

It's nice.

I mean, it's nice.

And I'm like it's not the Lego floor gym.

No.

I my school had that.

Two full basketball courts, weight training.

That's cool.

Um, really nice lobby area.

There's probably other stuff that I didn't notice, but like we should do a gym.

We should get one.

We should, yeah.

Yeah.

Why is it a really nice?

Because.

Because um, so we show up and they're like, hey, uh, do you guys have a membership?

And I thought they were talking about like, are you members of the church?

This is my where my brain went.

And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, we go here.

And they're like, no, no, do you have a gym membership?

And I was like, what do you mean?

And they're like, well, you have to have you have to buy a membership or pay the daily rate to use this.

And I was like, well, that is not at all how this was pitched.

This was like, we're gonna reach kids in the community.

And so I actually asked the lady, I said, Hey, I thought this was kind of like a community thing.

And she goes, Oh yeah, every Thursday, or like one night of the week, right?

We have, or a couple times a week, we have like a two hour block where it's open gym.

But it's a membership.

So it's a paid membership.

That's very different.

Like we want to start a paid membership fitness center.

That's just a business.

It's a business, it's a revenue stream.

Yeah, right.

It's a revenue stream.

And that is again, that is where a lot of churches get.

Get to and it and I it's the way of the world.

Like in his hands, we don't have any other revenue streams.

When we sell t-shirts, we sell them at cost.

We're actually going to have to do something with an EP with our worship teams album.

And that's like It costs what it costs.

Yeah.

We're going to sell these like uh vinyl versions of the but at cost.

Right.

Whatever we cost to do it.

Um and granted, we're not a church that's like so big that our YouTube channel is a revenue stream or even our music is like Yeah, I think the only other revenue stream I could think of is the building rentals.

We've got like spaces in the building that get rented sometimes for community stuff that's free.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, I'm glad you said that.

I'm glad you said that.

Yeah, we actually have a church right now, the second church in the matter of a few years, that's using our building on the afternoons because they had a building issue.

Right.

So yeah, I'm glad you so we do rent out our building for events, but then we use that rental money to pay for the building.

So like the air conditioning units that we've had replaced the last year, that rather than go to our people all the time, we're like, well, let's use the building to help pay for the building.

So that is true, that's a different revenue stream.

But we segment that off for building units.

But my point is like our operation cost, that is 100% just people's generosity.

Right.

But the membership gym, that's a that's a fully functioning that could break apart from the church, right?

It'd be its own independent business.

A person with money could come to the church and be like, hey, could I buy this from you and upgrade it?

Here's the thing.

I remember thinking this, even at my 20, like I was really offended for 10 minutes.

But I remember thinking even at like 21 or whatever age I was.

Well, I felt like God blessed me in a lot of ways, just giving.

So I wasn't mad about that.

But I remember thinking, man, I wish the church had just like come out and said that.

Sure.

Because I don't, if they said, hey, we have this opportunity, we want to create a really nice membership-driven gym.

We're gonna make the prices low, but this will actually be a really huge revenue stream.

Then we're gonna use the cost of the gym to yeah.

Right.

We're gonna like that would have made and maybe that was the goal, and maybe somewhere along the way, it was more expensive than they thought.

Yeah, trick was like coffee shops operate that way sometimes.

It's like the top line stuff that comes in goes toward XYZ.

But it was totally pitched.

Like you have a spiritual responsibility to fund the vision that we have because the vision that we have is for the gospel.

Right.

That's not the same as a two-hour a week free play.

It's a membership-driven.

Yeah.

And so it was such a disconnect.

Yeah.

And it can go really, really wrong and be really sour like that.

Um we've seen you mentioned that we uh had to cancel that.

I I feel like there's a better way to talk about it.

I don't know.

It just like it sounds like something went horribly wrong, but it's like it went so right that we had we uh Yeah.

So what happened was we prematurely stopped asking people for money.

So what happened was we started that giving campaign.

It was like$1.7 million, the total cost of everything, something like that.

Um and uh and honestly, for a church our size, that's not like for all the the space we have, like that's like I said, the air conditioning units alone would be two million dollars.

Right.

So it was like 1.7 million.

We raised right at half that over the course of like a year and a half, and then COVID hit.

And we paused that giving campaign because we did not feel right about asking people to like contribute to this extra thing when everything was so uncertain with the economy, like stock market crash, it was all kinds of stuff.

So we said, hey, don't worry about it.

Um and then about a year later, we had a board meeting going, okay, is it it's time for us probably to restart the giving campaign and finish this.

And that was where we realized that over the course of that year, while we were not, it wasn't even on our minds, we didn't talk about it, and we just whatever.

Over the course of that year, other funds had like just blessings had come in in different ways.

And one of our board members actually said, Hey, well, how much was that?

It seemed like last year we had a big overage from normal.

We were like, Yeah, it was out of this world.

Normally we're you know a little bit over our budget and or like in terms of giving, but it's pretty close.

But that year we were like, wow.

Right.

And I was excited because we had a cushion in our bank account for the first time, and that felt nice.

I was like, I don't have to stress.

I don't have to stress as much.

But our board member said, Well, can't we just use that extra to finish the giving campaign instead of getting and once that person said that all of us in the room were like, Yeah, yeah, we should do that.

That's great.

And so that's how that happened.

Yeah, and I will say too, like, I think it might need to be said that for personal um your personal relationship with God and your personal relationship to money, I think as long as you're being obedient to the Lord, even in the wake of seeing like, yeah, I'm really not happy with how that that gym turned out, like that doesn't really have a bearing on your relationship to the Lord.

That's that's 100% something that they're dealing with and need to be accountable for.

On that note, I think she'd be okay with me saying this.

So like my mom continued going to that church, my mom and dad, for I don't know, 15, 17 more years after that, and only recently left that church because some other stuff is it's that church has been in like it's been in like social media church buzz world for a while, last like two years with some pretty interesting stories.

But you know, they gave, that's where they tithed.

Right.

And not just that, like above and beyond gave to a lot of giving campaigns for years.

And so my mom was even talking to me not that long ago about like, man, I just gave that church so much money.

But the Lord like that that was between my mom giving was between her and God.

Right.

My mom and dad giving.

Right.

What the church did with it was between them and the Lord.

Right.

And you can trust that God will make that right.

Like if a church is if a church is unwise or deceitful or whatever with their funds, the Lord will hold them accountable to that.

But a lot of people do feel jaded, and then it makes them it's hard to trust, you know, it's just hard to trust churches, and you're like, you're given to it.

What is this going to?

And I think that's the it's like obviously there needs to be a certain degree of trust between you and the church to.

Yeah.

But I think it it is more about you trusting the Lord and saying, like, am I willing to part with a certain percentage of my money, or is it something that I hold really tightly to?

No, I I would tell any group, you should give.

Right.

Because.

Because just because Yeah, no, you should give be because it is an acknowledgement that you trust, that you recognize that everything you have is a gift from God, it comes from the Lord, and that He will continue blessing you.

Like the idea of giving your first fruits in the Old Testament, like it's not your last bit that's left over.

It's not your leftovers, right?

That makes more sense.

Yeah.

I'm gonna use my first fruits for me and my family, and then whatever's left over, God, I'll give that to you.

But God's like, no, give me your first fruits and trust that more will come.

Yeah.

I was having uh uh lunch with some college-age guys, and someone's like, Hey, can I get a bite of that?

And he's like, You can have the first bite.

And he like gave him the first bite.

And I don't share food, so it was also kind of weird, but yeah, it was like it was like a sandwich.

Yeah, it was I think it was something like a burrito or something.

It's like you guys are close, I guess.

But it was like, how generous would it be to give someone the first bite of your burrito?

Totally.

And so it just kind of is like it's like that of like here's all the things that come in.

There's my kids eat ice cream at the if I always take the first bite and go dad tax.

And they're like, dad, right.

But it's like a small bite.

But sharing the last bite, it's still a generous thing, but it's not the same.

Yeah.

So giving is a we should give.

And we I think we also should give to our church because that is how churches function.

And if you don't trust your church enough to give, it's like you gotta figure that out, maybe go to a different church.

Right, right, because you know, and churches should be wise and accountable to how they spend that money.

Um now, like I I would tell anyone churches are accountable to the Lord with how they spend that money.

I think that's like the reality.

Like, but they should also be accountable to the people to a reasonable degree.

And what I mean by that is that to a reasonable degree, there are gonna be people who give who just don't have any understanding of like how much things cost.

And they're like, well, you shouldn't.

I can't believe we spent you know, X, Y, or Z on like we we bought two shuttles in the last year.

We got them used.

Um, like as wise of a purchase as you can when you're buying shuttles, but shuttles are still expensive.

We had to buy two shuttles because we've outgrown our parking lot.

We have people parking across the street, we've got to shuttle them over because it's a five-lane road.

You can't just be like, good luck.

Um so you know, but there could be people who go, well, we could have used that money for well, okay.

If you're at a church and you trust the leadership, there you should trust that they're making the best decisions possible.

And in hindsight, yeah, maybe I'm sure over the years it's like, wow, we probably could have saved that$5,000 if we would have known what we know now.

Sure.

Um but when I say churches should be accountable, I mean if if you're going to a church and you can't see what the budget is, that's not a good thing.

We don't like or post that out there, but if anyone ever asks and says, hey, can I see what the budget is?

Absolutely.

If they want to see a breakdown of like the categories of how expenses break down, what's payroll, what's sure, you know, what's operating cost, what's yeah, whatever.

That's that's there, you know.

Um but we don't at the same time, there's like a level of transparency, but there's also yeah, it's like a level of trust.

Like yeah, the leadership has the authority to give somebody a raise without going to the church and everybody's gonna be able to do that.

Yeah, we're not putting it.

So some churches operate in this like vote, like it's a we're not like that.

Um we have a board, then there's myself and the staff, and so the I'm accountable to the board.

The board sets the budget, we we agree on that.

Like we propose a budget, the board approves the budget, and it's always reasonable and all that kind of stuff.

And my basic belief on how that should all ultimately function, because we don't actually have people ask for the budget very often.

Sure.

And if we do, it's like sure.

Um I've always found that if we operate on like a low budget compared to other churches our size, we're in a good spot.

So we always try to operate like on the low end.

Like here's what the average church that's this size well, let's let's be under that.

Um and let's make sure we're really actually strategically using the money.

I think too, like you're saying And we're being generous.

And we're giving.

People can't see the um budget, that's an issue.

I think if you can't see the impact of the giving, that's an uh an issue too.

Like if min if ministry seems to be suffering, whether it's in kids or missions or uh whatever it might be, like if you see this, like there's this huge gap in your church, and um it might be like for you to step in and fill in that gap, but it also might be like that's a sign that something else is going kind of wonky.

A hundred percent.

If the ministry impact of your dollars is another version of that place, if if like you know, we do work to like wisely save money, right?

But if all you're doing is contributing to a bigger bank account.

That's true.

Well, where's that why is that money at what point you can use that?

So the shuttles are a good example because the other side of that is wow, okay, we wouldn't have been able to buy those shuttles if people hadn't given.

And those shuttles are allowing us to grow and reach more people, and we're being able to bring them across the street.

Right.

And so people, that's like a hey, you you give, your giving allowed us to make those perks.

Allowed us to keep having ministry impact.

Ministry impact, yeah, 100%.

So like you've got this road trip, uh, this student camp coming up.

Sorry, old language.

That's fine.

You've got this camp coming up with students, and I called you because I was just sort of aware of a family that might have a need.

And I was and our thing there is if any family can't afford it, we're like, yeah, right, it's fine.

We'll cover you.

We want you to go to camp.

We want you to go to camp.

We want the kid to have that experience.

We we like we don't upcharge the camp, like the camp cost.

Yeah, it's not like everyone that's paying for camp is also paying for those.

It's it's not a subsidy, right?

Right.

So we're literally here's the cost, we don't make any profit on that.

And then, but if there's a kid who needs it, we just cover it.

Right.

And that's like only possible because people give.

So there's results of that.

Yeah, you're right.

You should see those results.

Um, and those results shouldn't just be the the pastors have really nice cars.

That shouldn't be like the only result you see.

No, um, and I think that but your Lambo, your Lambo is nice.

Hey, listen.

And I know you needed that.

People believe that God will bless them if I'm driving a normal car.

Right?

No, so I drive a Toyota Corolla, and it's the nicest car I've ever owned.

So there you go.

You were like, you told me you were like, at one point I was gonna give Liam my 2006 Scion, and then I drove a car from the 2020s, and I was like, there's like features.

Like, well, yeah, it's like late assistant.

A backup camera.

I was like, he probably needs some of this as he starts driving.

Um yeah, no, no, no.

I mean, maybe all that to say, kind of to move forward.

You know, when I when I look at how we've operated financially, certain things pop up.

We've we've never passed the plate on a Sunday.

We've never had a moment of this is and there's a lot of churches that do this, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying this is how we've done it at his hands.

We've never had a time in the service that is set aside for you to give.

So we tell people, hey, you know, thank you for giving, here's the ways you can give, but there's never a moment during the service like now it's time.

Right.

I grew up in churches where that was a big part of it.

Yeah, or like people come to the front and place money on the stage.

Yeah.

And again, that is not wrong.

Right.

But we've just never done that.

Um so we've never passed a plate, we've done one giving campaign in almost 20 years, you know, finished it halfway, let everyone off the hook, however you want to call it, canceled it halfway through, giving 10% of our giving to people in need, and above and beyond that, raised money and all kinds of other stuff for you know different causes.

And there have been some seasons where money was super tight here.

I mean like uncomfortably tight.

And in those seasons, there was always the temptation to like push it a little harder.

Um but it's amazing how often God has has really truly been faithful in ways that you know, I always tell the story um about the the mortgage payment that we had that jumped up to$20,000 really fast, and how for six months we had donations that we didn't even tell anyone about it that matched the exact I mean I could go on to stories about that.

But but it's not just like these crazy miraculous stories.

Like I do have those, but we've just seen it's always worked.

You know, we've trusted God, we've given.

Um, we've tried to be wise and generous, and we've resisted the temptation to market, to push, to to take scripture out of context.

Like even a lot of people I used to use this verse years ago.

The kind of like standard verse for giving is you should give, but you shouldn't give out of like compulsion.

Right.

You should give cheerfully.

God loves a cheerful giver, that verse.

Um but that's actually not talking about giving your church, it's talking about giving to people in need.

So I stopped using that because I was like, well, that's not really the context.

The manipulation of that.

And I didn't even realize it when I was doing it.

That's always the verse that I had heard.

Yeah, God loves a cheerful giver, and he does.

But Paul wasn't talking about funding your organization.

He was talking about giving to people in need, so I stopped using that.

And now we just have this very matter-of-fact.

Let's make the church worth giving to.

Let's make sure that we're doing things in a way that is worth giving to, that people do see lives being changed and the community being impacted.

Um, and the gospel going forth.

That's the most important thing.

Uh because the word church.

And then on top of that, let's trust God and let's trust people.

Yeah.

So is this episode of this podcast a secret ploy to get people to give?

Nope.

Like I I I guess to kind of wrap it all up, it's like I think it is.

Yeah, we're not doing this because giving's been low.

No, right.

And we really need to like No, but I think it's just important to say lots of people have questions about this and um questions that go either unasked because it's uncomfortable, or questions that are asked, you know, just in the context of newcomers gatherings and stuff.

So we just felt like it was important to kind of have the discussion in a way that we could even point people to this conversation.

And that's what this podcast is going to be for is opportunities for us to talk about things at length that like on a Sunday, I'm not just gonna contribute this time to talking about money like this.

Yeah.

You know, I I might every year, twice a year at most, maybe have a little update, right?

Hey, a little bit of extra.

Those of you who give, you know, this is what's going on right now, we're doing this and this.

But I'm just never gonna devote this much time on a Sunday morning talking about money.

Yeah.

So this podcast can give us something where we can go into a little bit more detail about stuff that is really interesting and does very much speak to how we operate as a church, but wouldn't uh we just wouldn't be worth everyone's like we show up on Sunday to worship God.

Right.

HB.

Before we jump into the message, I want to spend all this time talking about.

Like we gotta get into scripture and we gotta and you know, yeah.

So that's the So that's uh how we approach money at his hands.

It's uh ways things can go wrong at churches.

Money, money, money, money, money.

Yep.

What was that?

That's uh it's the song's called Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, but it's not about money.

Oh anyways, sorry.

Who's that song by?

Uh some early 2000s indie band.

Okay.

Well, that was a deep cut.

I can't, yeah.

I love it.

Um, but anyways, thanks for listening.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And thank you, thank you for hanging out and talking about this for whatever amount of time we've talked about it.

Because you could be doing other things too.

That's true.

All right, all right, all right, let's go do other things.

Let's do other things.

Bye.