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| Photo courtesy of Aresauburn at Flickr.com |
by Tim H. Swanson
"The money you spend paying staff members is choking your ministries." Is what a consultant from Saddleback church told my boss in a meeting a few months ago. He went on to recommend that we reduce our staff, which evoked immediate panic in me. He explained that the proper distribution of church giving should be roughly this: 25% facilities, 25% ministries, and 50% staffing. My church’s finances are not split up that way. Our budget allocates significantly more than 50% to staffing, and significantly less than 25% to ministries.
My stomach settled as my boss explained to the consultant that he was aware of the standard budget split, but that our elder board has chosen to put extra money into people because that’s what our church believes in. Relieved, I moved back from the edge of my chair, and enjoyed the rest of the meeting with only moderate anxiety.
My job was safe for the moment, but the consultant was right. Our high cost for staffing doesn’t leave a lot of money for individual ministries throughout the year. That leaves our over populated staff in meetings together trying to figure out how to create an excellent church experience with not enough money. Ultimately, it’s been a blessing in disguise for me and my team. About eighteen months ago, we began talking about creating a worship album full of original songs written by our own volunteers. Since my budget for the music ministry is already relatively low, I generously gave my team $0.00 to make the album. Fortunately, they are a bunch of people who are undeterred by little things like lack of funds.
We got right to work writing and rehearsing music. Since we couldn’t afford to get into a proper studio, we had to record the thing live in our auditorium with next to no equipment. So that’s what we did. We spent months rehearsing all the songs that we were going to record. Then one day we went in and recorded all of them. Our recording engineer, Mario Rossetti, who is a genius and self proclaimed specialist in obsolete equipment (which makes him a treasure for any church’s music ministry) mixed and mastered the whole thing. Since it was our first one, we titled the album New Song and threw a night of worship/party to release the album for our church. That was last February, and in just seven months we have made enough money to increase the music ministry’s budget by about 30%. That left gave us something that I have never had before - discretionary money to do church ministry.
1. It can’t be about making money. After releasing our worship album, we began leading worship for Celebrate Recovery meetings around phoenix. I will tell you, as far as a market goes, recovering addicts typically don’t have a lot of money. But that didn’t bother us. When we led worship we would give our album away for a suggested $5.00 donation. But I always tell people this, “if you don’t have any money right now, please let a copy of the album be our gift to you as a thank you for having us out tonight.” Even by giving away a lot of free CD's (and maybe because we give away free CD's) God has blessed our efforts.
2. What skills do people have that you can leverage (not exploit). None of my team members see a single cent from the music that we make, but that doesn’t bother them. That is because when they write music here, they are leveraging their skills. Unlike spending or investing skills, where a person hopes to get value out of the deal, leveraging involves, “The use of a small initial investment, credit, or borrowed funds to gain a very high return in relation to one’s investment.” When my team members give freely of their time and talents, the return is not just financial. It’s spiritual. They are making a small investment when compared with the massive return that comes in the form of changed lives and saved souls.
3. Don’t sell product, sell vision. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard worship leaders promote their worship album from the stage. They usually say something like, “Thanks everybody. Good night! Grab a copy of our worship album in the back.” But if you want to connect with people, even people in your own church, you have to connect your vision with their purchase. My team leads people in worshipping the Most High God. Now that’s worth buying into. So when we are getting ready to wrap up a set, I’ll say something like, “We love worshipping with you. If you loved worshipping with us, we’d like to invite you to continue doing that with a copy of our worship album, New Song.” Does that sound salesy? Well it is, remember the goal is to get people to buy our worship album. But we didn’t make it so that people wouldn’t buy it. We made it hoping people would buy it, and spend more of their time worshipping God through it.
4. Celebrate wins with your team. Once your team leverages their skills to produce something that’s connected to your greater vision for growing God’s kingdom, make sure you celebrate with them. I do this a couple ways. First, I give gifts to everyone who worked on the project at the night of worship where we release the album. Then I keep people informed about what is happening with the album throughout the year. When we play at a church and somebody shares how our music has impacted them, I tell everyone on my team that I see. This keeps people charged up, and it helps them see the big end of the leveraging process.
When we set out to do our second album, Heritage, I didn’t set a budget. I didn’t have to. We were able to make improvements to our system, build a basic studio for future recording, and much much more. When one of my songwriters mentioned the idea of having a brass section come into our new studio to record on a couple of his songs, I didn’t have any second thoughts about the cost. Because of a simple move to make little bits of money over a long period of time, we can carry out our weekly responsibilities better. And more than that, we can carry out the vision that God has placed in our hearts of connecting people in our community with God through music. When it comes to church ministry, I like making extra money, but I love spending that money to advance the kingdom of God.
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