Why Focusing on Financial Decline Ensures Financial Decline

Just last week, I spent a few hours with a pastor who’s key leadership is feeling immense pressure around the church’s rapidly declining financial situation. Before I share the story, raise your hand if your anxiety levels are already on the rise. My hand is up too! My guess is that everyone reading this blog on church revitalization has experienced some significant amounts of stress around money and their church.

I learned from this pastor that the church’s leadership is struggling with a $300,000 proposed deficit budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Driving leadership’s fear around money is a building in desperate need of some repair work. Heavy rains have produced leaks and caused mold problems. With their budget situation, they wondered how they could possibly take care of these facility needs.

I’m sure they must have kicked around every idea in the book: a fundraiser, going after denominational grants, letting go of church staff, cutting programs, renting parts of the facility out to community groups, etc. I’m also sure they felt anxious and stressed because the truth is, very few things cause anxiety quite like a lack of financial stability. 

After sharing about the anxiety of the leadership team, the pastor wisely pointed out that to focus solely on declining finances and meeting a deficit budget was a sure way to continue down the road of decline. That was music to my ears. What exactly did this wise leader mean when he said that? And if they shouldn’t be focusing on meeting a deficit budget and fixing the broken building, what should they be doing?

No Cohesive Sense of Being On Mission

It’s very likely that the last few years of ministry have been really difficult for your church and probably really hard on you personally. I know it has been hard on the church I serve and on me as a leader. I want to ask a series of questions that may require a long pause and perhaps even some note-taking:

• What have been the top 3-5 areas of focus in your church over the past few years?
• What is your church’s mission (the reason for its existence)?
• Now, how many of the focus areas reflect the mission of your church?

Something that we are hearing consistently in working with churches in various states of decline is that they no longer have a cohesive sense of being on mission together. Could it be that their list of focus areas contains too many things that do not touch the core reason for their church’s existence?

Make One Bold Move On Mission

We now fully recognize that our churches are not our pre-pandemic congregations and that the mission of the church is not just a statement above the door leading into your sanctuary. Fixing a roof may be necessary, but it is far from motivating. Removing mold from a classroom may be essential, but it is a far cry from engaging people in the mission of the church. Stress over money is real, but collective anxiety will not produce the change that God desires in our churches.

I was recently on a webinar put on by The Unstuck Group during which founder Tony Morgan threw out an idea. It wasn’t a main point in his presentation and didn’t even make the outline they provided, but it resonated with me big time. I wrote it down and bolded and underlined it. Tony said something like this: “Focus on the next 12 months by choosing 1-2 bold moves that your church can take on mission together.” This sentence for me made the whole webinar worth watching. When I heard it, my brain switched on, my heart rate quickened (in a good way), and I even shared it with a friend. I immediately started thinking of the bold moves our church might dare to make. Personally, I find this idea highly motivating–after all, isn’t faith more about bold moves than it is about financial planning?

Wonder Questions 

We can (and often do) spend countless hours fretting over our finances. This can be so consuming that we have little time left to strategize how to live the mission of the church. Not only that, but we run out of time to figure out how to re-engage our people in the mission of our church. But working on a bold move or two just might help us disrupt the cycle of decline and focus on something positive. I want to leave you with some “wonder questions.”

1. What might happen if we harnessed some of that financial anxiousness and redirected it to following Tony Morgan’s advice? 
2. What would happen if we spent the next leadership meeting coming up with a vision for the next 12 months of our church where we consider taking 1-2 bold steps on mission together? 
3. What might your team learn while doing this?
4. How might God show up?
5. What might God do?
6. What might this do to engage more people? 
7. Might this even help solve your financial problems?