The Money Series (Part 2)
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Feeling uneasy when it comes to church finances? You’re not alone. In this week’s episode, Sean and I dive deep into something that’s close to my heart—creating a funding plan that actually supports your church’s vision. We’re not just talking spreadsheets and budgets here (though those are important!). We’re talking about aligning your resources with God’s mission for your church.
We’ll explore practical ways to evaluate your current budget, identify gaps between your financial reality and ministry strategies, and make meaningful adjustments—even mid-fiscal year.
If you’re wrestling with questions about church finances or feeling stuck in your current funding approach, this episode offers the guidance you need to move forward with confidence. Plus, we’ve included a helpful tool for subscribers to put these principles into practice right away.
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Transcript
Sean:
Hey, podcast listeners, before we get started, let me tell you about this week’s podcast sponsor Planning Center. Are you struggling to keep your church organized and connected? Planning Center is an all-in-one church management software that solves your administrative challenges. You can effortlessly track first-time guests, manage volunteer schedules, and create easy ways for your congregation to get involved all from one single platform. Whether you need a check-in system, event signups, or an online giving solution, Planning Center helps you nurture your community and keep people connected. Visit planningcenter.com to get started for free.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean here again with my teammate Amy Anderson. Last week we kicked off a new series. We’re calling the Money Series, and Amy, we flipped roles. Are we doing the same thing this week?
Amy:
As we say in Minnesota, You betcha we are. In fact, let’s just jump right in. These podcasts are a little bit shorter because there’s lots to think about after you listen to it, so, yeah. We are in a series focused on helping church leaders develop a healthier relationship with church finances. Last week, we covered wise and foolish approaches to church budgeting.
But today we’re gonna get more tactical. We wanna talk about how wise churches design a funding plan that supports their vision and ministry strategies. Now Sean, we often talk about how every church needs to find strategies to both reach people and to disciple people. So, Sean, can you just briefly talk about, why it’s important that we have both and how this actually relates to church finances?
Sean:
Well, you know, this, Amy, I mean, what we’ve observed in our work with the, in the year, over the years with hundreds of churches now, is that the healthiest churches have clarified both how they will reach people outside the church and faith, and then how they will help everyone take steps to continue their discipleship growth. And this makes sense, right? I mean, when we think about the great commission, we understand we’re go into all the world and to make disciples. That’s why we exist as churches. That’s our mission. And when it comes to ministry finances, you need to be taking both of those things into account when you plan. And as we started the series last week, I asked listeners to stop and read through second Corinthians nine, six through 15. And I hope you had a chance to do that between last week’s episode and now. Because that key thought that we’re focusing on throughout this series is that if we are faithful stewards of God’s resources, then he will generously provide all that we need to accomplish his mission, both of reaching the world. And making disciples.
Amy:
Yeah. So, Sean, when a church wants to evaluate their current budget against these strategies, what are the first steps they should take?s
Sean:
Well, I would start by doing an analysis of your current operating budget through the lens of reach and discipleship. Look at from that perspective, ask yourself just very simply, how much are we currently investing into each of those strategies. Now, you know, often questions will come up about ministry areas that could be considered both reach and discipleship. You know, churches will ask where does the weekend service budget land since you can consider it parts of both, really. I want you to think about the principle here. The principle is that we’re trying to assess is if we are giving appropriate resourcing to both sides of the Great Commission, and you’re not just assessing your ministry budget specifically, you’re also looking at personnel. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But just start by getting a baseline of where you are today. Where are we when, as we think about allocating resources to reach and to discipleship?
Amy:
Yeah. It’s funny, Sean, this kind of really came to the surface for me during the Covid season when churches couldn’t gather, couldn’t meet. I just remember it really exposed on the personnel side—sorry, that’s where I spent a lot of time at Unstuck.
Sean:
Sure.
Amy:
It really exposed on the personnel side how, less the resources were on that reach side. Once, you know, once everyone took a big pause and a big stop, it was a big topic. So I’m glad you’re going here. So I wonder from you, what common misalignments do you see between church budgets and those ministry strategies?
Sean:
Yeah. Well, here’s what’s true. Most churches budget for much more for discipleship than they do for reach.
Amy:
That’s what I saw in Covid.
Sean:
I think what we saw during covid, right? That’s, it was funny at that time, you know, reach essentially looked like anything we were doing online. And most churches didn’t have a focused either personnel staff person or really any budget dollars going to that. And there was almost an overnight shift and it was: Where can we find a digital ministry leader at that point. So, the budget gap here shows up both on the ministry side of the budget and in the personnel budget. And Amy, again, you know this from your work with dozens of churches on staffing and structure, the majority of churches don’t have personnel that are responsible for those reach strategies. And that’s often one of the key misses that we see.
I also see areas like tracking new people are often underfunded. A database or a technology is either just completely missing or it’s very under-resourced. We haven’t designated staff or personnel hours to understanding and following up with brand new people who are connected to the church. And those are the kinds of misses that churches, I think will wanna assess through this process.
Amy:
Yeah. Last week, in fact, listeners, if you didn’t hear the first message in the series, I’d go back cause it was really a challenge to start with a 10% drop in budget so that you actually have a surplus to do something with. And you talking about the database, that’s for sure. You know, I think, it’s common when a church is about a thousand people, that’s when we really need to have a full-time person focused on our database.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
That’s often the time when an executive pastor comes in. But I think many churches are hiring other things and they’re letting that database just be a shared responsibility. They’ve got an, they’ve got old technology, but can’t find a way to afford it. And when you were talking about, wouldn’t it be fun if we had a surplus that we could do something with, this is an area a lot of churches, I think have the opportunity to invest in on that database side. You suggest churches, Sean, I’ve heard you say this should design a vision-minded budget from scratch. What does that process look like?
Sean:
Yeah, it’s a great question and there’s some resources in the content if you, subscribe to our podcast show notes in the content that we’ve sent out. But, first I think that churches need to start this process with a clean slate. So imagine you’re building the budget from zero. Let’s just start from zero. Okay. In other words, if you had a clean slate and were building the budget from scratch, what, based on your current reach and discipleship strategies, what would that budget look like? I would just, simple exercise here. And if you have someone in your church that’s great with finances or just with spreadsheets, I would pull together a simple spreadsheet and compare what’s current to what’s vision minded.
You can use the tool that we’ve developed. It’s in that resource in the podcast show notes. If you don’t have that, essentially just create three columns in your spreadsheet. I’m gonna get really practical here, okay? So for the non-spreadsheet people, don’t let me lose you at this point. In one column, write your current budget figure. So current budget on one side, and the next column I want you to write your vision-minded budget figures. So if you think about how you might reallocate resources around reach and discipleship, I want you to write those down in the other column. The total of those columns really needs to be equal. So I don’t want you to go over what your current operating ministry budget is in the vision-minded column. I want both outcomes of those total columns to be equal.
Once you have those numbers in front of you, ask yourself, how well does your current budget actually reflect your budget for reach and discipleship strategies, which strategies there are under invested in?And then secondly, ask yourself in, in looking at the vision that we’ve developed, are we confident that this budget is actually gonna help us get there? And if not, what’s holding us back? One of the kind of key areas that we see hold churches back from vision accomplishment is just not having the resources. And actually think it’s a good thing to have more vision than you have resource for. I think vision for our church, God’s vision is always gonna be bigger than what we would have financial resource for today, but the resources are gonna follow the vision. So, if we don’t currently have a budget that is gonna help us accomplish our vision, what’s holding us back right now?
Amy:
So what I heard you say is in the current budget. So you’re listing out your strategies, your ministry strategies, and you’re putting down what you currently spend in them. And that, let’s say that total equals $5 million. And then you would go, all right, if I could start from zero, here’s how I’d actually like to allocate those dollars in order to accomplish the vision that God’s set for our church. Is that correct?
Sean:
Exactly. And that total also should equal 5 million. Yes.
Amy:
That’s right. So then we get, we get to see where we feel like we’re over or under budgeting for various ministries. So, how can churches, once they do this, identify where adjustments need to be made?
Sean:
Well just look at those numbers in your vision minded budget and your current budget and ask that question, where do you see significant gaps? Again, this is why the spreadsheet is helpful cause you get those, those numbers right in front of you. I would recommend you focus on reallocation. Rather than increasing the total budget again. Going back to last week’s episode, we don’t want to just, create a faith-based budget expecting those extra resources are gonna come in that we don’t have any precedent for in the past. So in looking at your spreadsheet or looking at, however you’ve written this down, where are the gaps at? How do we reallocate and do that in a way so that we’re not increasing the overall total?
Amy:
Yeah. Based on what time it is in the year right now. I don’t think anyone’s just about to start their new budget cycle. Maybe they are in June or July.
Sean:
Typically not.
Amy:
So most of our listeners are probably in this mid-fiscal year in some ways. Should they just wait to make these changes? What would you advise there?
Sean:
No, you don’t need to wait. You can make strategic adjustments anytime. And depending on who has decision rights in your church over the finances and the process, this may look different for you than it does for another church. But the first thing I do is just identify those key stakeholders. Who do we need to have involved? Is it the elders, the finance team, the executive staff, maybe all of the above. And then identify what changes need to be made and communicate the why. Take that spreadsheet in, talk through the ministry strategies, talk through the shortfall in accomplishing the vision, and then make sure everyone is clear that this is about better aligning resources to your ministry strategy. And then the last thing I do, and don’t miss this, create an action plan for implementing those changes. You can do this mid-course mid-year, make sure that you document, write it down, who needs to do what by when, so that the urgency of all the other things in ministry. Don’t derail this really important work with your finances.
Amy:
So Sean, that’s on the budget-budget, what about the personnel budget? How should churches approach that?
Sean:
Yeah, so I’d apply the same exercise to your staffing investments here. Ensure that you have the right people focused on your strategic priorities. And, you know, remember, your personnel budget, it represents a significant stewardship of resources. In a typical church, personnel that’s about half of your total budget. I think this is one of the areas where our team can really help Amy. And you’re great at this. We can work with the church to make sure that you have the right staff aligned to the right ministry strategies. And then once you have that work accomplished, the personnel budgeting becomes a whole lot more clear and a whole lot more objective and less subjective, which is really, really helpful for pastors and for churches. The other thing I’d say as part of that process, you also need to make sure you don’t have more staff than you should, right? Overstaffing not only leads to ministry related challenges, but financial challenges as well. So sometimes, and, and a lot of times there are a lot of churches that we’ve been working with, especially in recent months where, there are staffing adjustments that need to be made because of overstaffing. So as you look at your personnel budget, look at some of the other correlating metrics and just ask, are we overstaffed with where we are today as a church?
Amy:
Yeah. And Sean, I just wanna make a quick plug, to our podcast listeners, you should be receiving an email for our next unstuck church report, quarterly report. And this one is specifically focused on staffing. And so we would love for you all to participate. The more of you that participate, the better data we get on these. And what it will provide—you just reminded me, Sean—when we did our podcast a few months ago on being both overstaffed and understaffed. You might feel, you know, you’re overstaffed, but there may be key teams that are actually understaffed. And this data from the Unstuck Church Report that will get out, later this quarter, I think will really help you look at some comparative, is that a word? Comparable? Yeah, comparative data. I’ll just say comparative data. You can see how you’re, how you’re spending your FTEs compares with other churches your size, and that’ll be another great data point as you do your personnel budget.
Well, super helpful. Sean, any final thoughts that you have before we wrap up today’s conversation?
Sean:
Yeah, so first of all, let me jump back to the key thought for this series. And that is this, if we are faithful stewards of God’s resources, then he will generously provide all we need to accomplish his mission. Remember this just, this isn’t just about moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. It is about aligning your resources with your God-given vision for reaching people and for making disciples. And when you do that, you’re practicing good stewardship and you’re setting your church up for healthy growth. Just a resource to kind of help you dig deeper on this topic. We have a free PDF called Funding Ministry in Uncertain Economic Times that we’re sending out. Again, it’s free, and it’s in our email to podcast subscribers each week of this series. You can get that resource if you don’t have it already by going to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Amy next week, we’re back with week three of this series. Looking forward to that conversation with you. Until then, everyone, have a great week.
