The Biblical Way to Get Church Freeloaders to Give

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Pastor Foley

A blog site for ARDA–the Association of Religion Data Archives–sounds about as exciting as a visit to http://www.watchingpaintpeel.com. (Oddly, by the way, that URL is still available.)

But trust me: RSS the feed. ARDA’s David Briggs posts every two weeks, and he never hits a clunker.

His post this week, ‘Free riders’ and the recession: Churches face hard economic choices attracting new members, talks about the drag created by “free riders,” who Briggs defines as “individuals who are content to enjoy their services without making a significant commitment to their upkeep and mission”:

The issue is most problematic with new members, scholars say, particularly in an age when more people are choosing churches based on the services they offer as opposed to denominational loyalties.

Part of the success of megachurches is that they generally offer more services from sports teams to Bible study groups to multiple worship times than smaller churches, some scholars say.

For newcomers who find a good fit, the initial low cost gives way to a higher price in terms of expected giving and volunteering once the quality of the experience is known, they state.

It can be a risky and costly investment in newcomers, McBride said at the religion and economics meeting.

But congregations “must allow non-contributors today to help them become committed affiliates tomorrow,” he said.

Somewhere down the line, enough free riders have to be persuaded to become contributing members of congregations, to pay their share of the private costs of offering public goods.

But getting people in the door is still a necessary first step. Offering an electronic invitation that assures newcomers they will be welcomed without any financial obigation may not be a bad place to start.

Or, as we talked about in our post earlier this week on the North Korean underground church, it may be exactly the wrong place to start.

Alternative proposal for avoiding the “freeloader” problem:

Stress, even in your advertising, as a distinctive of your church, giving.

Just not to your church.

That’s our .W church practice, as detailed in this prior post:

Rather than taking an offering each Sunday, we as a congregation prepare to make our offering once a month, on the last Sunday of each month. A month’s preparation has a way of keeping the offering from being a tip for services rendered (literally).

But what I’m most excited about with regard to our offering is that each member commits to offering a tithe, of which 30 percent is given to the church (with a third going to the church, a third going to our denomination’s regional conference, and a third going to the denomination) and 70 percent is consecrated at the altar…and then immediately received back again by each member, to be disbursed personally by that member as the church’s minister within his or her own sphere of influence.

70 percent of the tithe, in other words, is not tax deductible because it doesn’t go through the church. It’s consecrated at the altar and then given directly by the church member to those to whom the members learn to personally minister. (Training in giving embedded in service is a key part of what the church program is all about, even for the congregation’s children. Giving and serving should be done by the family jointly, after all.)

Make sure the message to potential congregation members is this:

Of course this Jesus discipleship stuff is going to involve a radical change in the way you spend your money.

But you can trust us to guide you in it well, since we’re not the beneficiaries.

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Advice from the North Korean Underground Church: Stop Making it Easy for People to Become Involved in Your Church or Nonprofit

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Last week we had a handyman, Jeff, at our house giving us an estimate on some home repairs. We quickly learned he was a Christian seeking a deeper experience of church. I spent more than two hours with Jeff talking about our .W congregation. He was clearly fascinated, and we ended our time with him pledging to come on Sunday.

Of course he never showed up.

On Sunday, however, I read the following excerpt from the third century document. The Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus. It sheds light on the practices of the young, underground, persecuted church in the generations shortly after the apostles. The following section in particular caught my interest:

Let those who will be brought newly to the faith to hear the Word be brought first to the teachers before the people arrive. And let them be asked the reason why they have given their assent to the faith. And let those who have brought them bear witness as to whether they are able to hear the Word. And let them be asked about their life: What sort is it?

It reminded me of how underground NK Christians respond even to family members who express an interest in learning more about Christ. In NK, as NK scholar Marcus Noland notes, “Newlyweds will not be informed about their spouse’s family’s religious practices for some time until sufficient trust has developed.”

What a far cry from how I approached handyman Jeff! Imagine how different our conversation would have been had I said, “Jeff, in the early church, before individuals were invited to worship with a particular congregation, congregation leaders would visit them and talk about their lives and why they wanted to follow Christ. If you are interested in getting involved in our church, the first step would be me dropping by your house to meet you and your family and to learn about your lives and your interest in Christ.”

  • How might our churches change if instead of begging people to come, we treated attendance at the assembly as a precious privilege and examined those professing an interest to ensure they were really serious about following Christ as part of our congregation?
  • How might our nonprofits change if instead of begging people to give, we published a gift acceptance policy that said, “We only accept donations that arise out of a larger discipleship process you are undertaking in this cause – either with us as the nonprofit or through your church”?

This post originally appeared in the Prayer Partner Update that Mrs. Foley and I do bi-weekly for the people who donate to our Seoul USA nonprofit for North Korea. If you want to get added to that list, of course, the next step would be for you to email me just so I can verify with you that this e-newsletter will be fitting into a wider discipleship process for you related to the Work of Mercy of visiting and remembering, either with us or with your church…  

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Don’t Settle for Getting People to Give; Instead, Help People Become Habitually More Giving

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Best book I’ve read so far this year–Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, a gem from 2004 by Church of England priest and Christian ethicist Samuel Wells.

(As usual, the best books on giving, discipleship, and fundraising are never the books on giving, discipleship, and fundraising.)

Writes Wells:

Virtue ethics has become a shorthand term for all the writers in the field who have grown tired of the conventional emphasis on decision and the neglect of the character of the person or “agent” making the decision. The emphasis on virtue in Christian ethics has shifted attention from the deed to the doer. It is the agent who matters, more than the action: ethics is about forming the life of the agent more than it is about judging the appropriateness of the action.

As I noted in Monday’s post, this is the shortcoming of fundraising–even Transformational Giving. The focus is on getting individuals to give rather than on helping individuals grow into more habitually giving people.

Wells isn’t writing about fundraising, but his take on moral formation has everything to do with giving. As you read Wells, you recognize that the decision of whether or not an individual will give in response to your request has already been made long before you ask:

In every moral “situation,” the real decisions are ones that have been taken some time before. To live well requires both effort and habit. There is a place for both. But no amount of effort at the moment of decision will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

Question: When do fundraisers engage in pre-ask moral formation of their champions?

Answer: Mostly never. Which is why they mine churches for givers. Churches do less pre-ask formation than they should, of course, but odds on there is a weekly ask of some sort, and the topic of giving comes up now and again to buttress it.

Re-read that last sentence from the Wells excerpt above: No amount of effort at the moment of decision will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

Prescription: Don’t settle for getting people to give. Instead, help them become more habitual givers. As Wells notes, for Christians the place that happens is worship:

For Christians, the principal practice by which the moral imagination is formed, the principal form of discipleship training, is worship. Worship is the time when the conventional rules of the fallen world are suspended, when God is at last addressed as Lord, when time and heart and voice and posture are directed toward knowing God and making him known, toward experiencing the glorious liberty of being his child, when need and expectation are focused on their true source…

If you haven’t been trained through worship to be generous, then no amount of effort at the moment of decision (of whether or not to give, for example) will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

That ought to be equally sobering news for our trinity of churches, Christian nonprofits, and individual Christians. If in our worship all we’re doing is not talking about giving but hoping people give, or raising particular needs to meet but not teaching generosity as a general virtue–and if a growing percentage of Christians are forsaking the assembling together of themselves for worship altogether–then is it any wonder that getting (habitually less generous) people to give is getting harder and harder these days?

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