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1. How to mishandle money like an amateur

Over the years I’ve found that many Christian ministries are not so sharp in how we use money in our ministry budget. Consider the following approaches:

• You have no idea how much money has been allocated to you in the budget.
• At the end of the year you find that you have barely touched the money allocated to you in the budget.
• Each year you increase your ministry budget by +5% or keep it level – but without a real plan of what you intend to do with it.
• You run your ministry as cheaply as you can, reasoning that it is possible to do stuff without spending money.
• You pay for things out of your own pocket, rather than have an allocated budget.

As a result many of our ministries end up running more like a small family shop, than a serious enterprise. You can see this in the kind of approaches we take:

• money is tight so we should only spend on things that are absolute necessities
• we can keep it small, it doesn’t matter

In addition we also think quite defensively:

• don’t waste money (and so spend as little as possible)
• prevent people stealing money (and so we should double-count the collection)

And so when it comes to money, all we can think of doing with it is to preserve as much money as we can. Our efforts are only about preventing people from stealing it.

2. How to handle money like a pro

Brothers and sisters we are surrounded by people who despise the glory of God, and who happily give the love and worship which belongs to him – to created things! In Romans 1 Paul tells us that it’s because of this that the wrath of God is coming. Because of this, two culture shifts need to be made in our use of money.

2.1 The aggressive use of money

Your ministry needs to prosecute the mission of God in your area hard – and that means making smartest, fullest use of all the resources made available to us – including money. If you have money set aside for your ministry, you need to think how that money could be used to prosecute the mission of God. How could it enhance what is already being done? How could it expand the reach of your ministry? How could it build capacity for the future? Why are we just aiming to maintain numbers in our ministry – instead of making use of the money available to us to put us in contact with new people?

For a ministry to not make use money made available to them may in fact be to mismanage that money (and here the parable of Luke 19 springs to mind). Are we really saying that we can’t think of any good way to use this money that might build the kingdom?

You can see that this is quite a different from the attitude of not touching your budget as much as possible. And in fact it’s strange that even those people who work in the business world, and are used to making use of the company’s money to aggressively prosecute their company’s vision, suddenly take on the small family shop approach to money when it comes to our ministry!

One simple, but drastic way to force this kind of thinking is called zero-base budgeting. This means that each ministry starts off the budget process with a blank piece of paper, instead of a copy of last year’s budget and last year’s actuals. This makes that ministry think through what it would actually like to do in the coming year, and what is actually required to fund those activities. This reduces the laziness of adding +5% while not having a plan for how to use that money.

2.2 The risky use of money

In order to prosecute the mission hard, we will sometimes need to take calculated risks. Because not all the ventures we dream up will pay off – and in fact some will be disasters! However the job of calling people to see and love the glorious God is not an exact science. We do not know whom the elect are, and sometimes the most unpromising opportunities surprise us. But if we are to press hard on that mission it means boldly venturing out – often in ways which require money.

Which means that the goal of avoiding risks is the wrong goal. Because ultimately the greatest good for us is not the preservation of money – but that people come to love him, fear him, and worship him alone. And so it is appropriate to take calculated risks in order to see this happen.

This can be a real challenge to risk-averse people (and you can how much this is the case by the careers we choose). But this only means we have to be aware of the culture in ourselves and work hard to counteract our risk-averse tendencies.

3. Ideas for using money

I’m no expert in how to make the most of ministry money – you really need someone with a more entrepreneurial mind than mine! But here are some things that I imagine you could do with money (and I welcome your ideas in the comments):

Build up capacity

• invest in some training for your leaders
• put on a staff member / student pastor
• get some consulting work done on your ministry

Open up new fronts of ministry

• invest some money in promotional material
• hire a hall to establish another meeting place
• establish a relationship with another ministry

Level-up what your ministry can do

• buy resources such as video clips
• get someone in to run a training workshop for your fellowship group
• get a speaker to come speak at your fellowship / retreat / dialogue meeting

So be aggressive in your use of money. Don’t avoid risk. And make use of money to prosecute the mission of God in your area – hard!