The Money Series (Part 5)
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In this episode, I sit down with Doug Turner, President of GenerosityOS, to talk about how church giving strategies have evolved (spoiler alert: episodic capital campaigns are so 2004). Doug brings decades of experience helping churches like Willow Creek and Redeemer Presbyterian fund their vision, and he’s got some fresh insights on why year-round generosity and vision clarity are the new power couple in church finance.
If you’re tired of the same old “pass the plate and pray” approach, this conversation is for you. Doug unpacks why traditional capital campaigns are shifting, how to build a culture of generosity that doesn’t feel like a permanent fundraiser, and why churches need to stop trying to fund unclear visions (seriously, stop it). Plus, he shares practical first steps for church leaders ready to level up their generosity game.
Whether you’re a pastor who breaks out in hives at the mention of money talks or a church leader looking to build a more sustainable funding model, this episode delivers the straight talk you need about modern church giving.
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Transcript
Sean:
Hey listeners, are you considering adding a second or third campus to your growing church? Do you need help telling your church’s unique story across every location? Well, PlainJoe, a Storyland studio has you covered. Their team of creative storytellers, talented designers and innovative architects are passionate about helping churches tell their stories through spatial, interactive and strategic storytelling. You can reach out to them and learn more at plainjoe.net.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host here with my friend and teammate, Amy Anderson. Amy, how you doing?
Amy:
I’m doing great. You know what I thought of as you started this podcast?
Sean:
What’s that?
Amy:
Obviously, we used to do this podcast with Tony Morgan. And I remember we would give one another feedback when we recorded the podcast together. And one time I said, Hey Tony, can you just say that again with a little more energy? And he said, “Nope, this is all I got.” I was just talking with my friend Carey Nieuwhof last week and was telling that story, so you always bring such a nice energy as you kick off our podcast.
Sean:
Thank you. I’ve had some days like how Tony felt that day too, where it’s like, no, this is all the energy I’ve got.
Amy:
But he just cracked me up that way.
Sean:
Yeah, I love that. I am excited though. I’m not excited that this series is ending, but I’m excited for the conversation today. And I think this has been a great series. It has for me. I hope it has been for our listeners as well. Today, we’re going to share a conversation that I had recently with Doug Turner. Doug is the president of GenerosityOS, which is a new endeavor that helps churches fund their ministry strategy.
But Doug isn’t new to church generosity or capital campaigns as many people know them. Doug is a pastor and many years ago, he personally experienced his first campaign in his church and just recognized how that campaign really galvanized people around a shared vision and brought a sense of momentum to their church. So Doug has spent many years helping churches really fund their ministry strategy. And he served churches as large as Willow Creek, Redeemer Presbyterian and Menlo Park to name a few. So, he knows his stuff when it comes to funding ministry strategy.
So Amy, I connected with Doug on what he sees working and changing when it comes to church generosity strategy, as well as his new endeavor that he’s in now. And I think you and our listeners, you’re gonna have several new insights after listening to our conversation today. Here’s my interview with Doug.
Well, Doug, thanks a lot for being part of our podcast series on money, where we’re focused on helping church leaders develop a healthier relationship with church finances. 20 years ago for me, I was a part of my first church capital campaign. I know things have changed a lot since then in how churches approach financial projects. What are you seeing as successful now?
Doug:
A lot of things have changed through the years. I think number one, what we recognize and starting to GenerosityOS is that oftentimes, our work and folks who did what I did, we just kind of went alongside churches at a capital campaign season. So it became episodic, kind of thing that they have a need or there’s a pain point, if you will. Quick story, even about Willow Creek Community Church. I went to a conference there in the 90s when some of the Willow staff on the platform made fun of people who did capital campaigns.
And so it was like, well, I don’t think you’re coming here anytime soon. And yet, and yet then like three or four years later, they came to a pain point and the biggest challenge they had ever faced financially. And so they started looking out and finding that not only were churches raising money doing this, but it animated vision in a way that was really unique. So that opened the door, worked with Willow Creek, which back then in the year 2000, they were like the 500 pound gorilla in the church world. And so it opened the doors to a lot of other places.
So you start with campaigns back then. Now we’ve started something we call a Generosity Operating System. And we want it to be a holistic, integrated model of helping churches wrestle with generosity, regardless of what contextually that looks like. It may be a capital need. It might be a year-round generosity approach, which we’re finding, frankly, more and more churches feel that as an issue that they need to address. And plan giving, frankly, even for some churches. I used to think plan giving was one of those things that only mainline traditional churches did. But we’re seeing now that it really moves. And look, we’re seeing the largest generational shift in wealth in the history of mankind. So, planned giving becomes a necessary conversation for people.
What we do is we try to discover where they are and we go through an initial kind of assessment period to kind of figure out what does generosity look like for them? What are their greatest needs? What does the struggle look like for them right now? How can they proactively start to address it? And then we come into a very specific recommendation in that season, whether it’s growing in the grace of giving and a culture of generosity, whether it’s capital needs, whether it’s financial leader discipleship and what that means, which is again, something a lot of churches have sort of resisted, but kind of see the value of it now. So all of those things are coming into play.
Sean:
Doug, you know, we help churches at the Unstuck Group here on the church strategy side, and we’ve had a number of churches that reach out to us prior to a campaign, prior to a generosity initiative, where they’re really just trying to determine what are we focusing on funding? What is the vision for our church and the strategy to accomplish that? I’m just curious, how often do you run into churches that haven’t clarified that yet? So they don’t fully know what are we trying to fund? What are we putting our resources behind? And then how often do you run into churches that have great clarity around that? And they are just really looking for how they resource ministry going forward?
Doug:
That’s good question. And I think that how often do we come into a situation where they need greater clarity. I would say, without giving you an exact percentage, a significant number of times, right? That we walk in and we can see that there’s still some murkiness, some ambiguity around direction, vision, what that looks like. And because ultimately, when we walk through the process with people, we see God animate vision into reality. And so it just comes to life. And so there’s gotta be some clarity around that. So we certainly see that from time to time. We certainly know that there are times that folks like Unstuck need to get in there and help them get some clarity around where they’re moving in their direction.
Sometimes they don’t talk to us until later because they think, well, we won’t need a capital campaign for three years. So it’s the old fallback assumption that that’s the only thing we do. And yet we know that the earlier we connect, we can introduce them to thinking through strategic planning, get some clarity around vision, beginning to build a generosity culture already in year round giving before they ever start to think about what the capital vision might look like. So, every once in a while, we go to a place that is pretty buttoned down. It’s pretty clear.
Sean:
Good for those churches. I think we’ve had that similar experience and really, I think for us, what we’ve learned is that as we help churches develop vision and strategy, that it coincides with the question around resources. Well, how do we accomplish this? And I’ve heard it said many times, throughout the years, it’s better to have more vision than you have resource for, but man, is it nice to have some resource to accomplish your vision as well, right? So, yeah, that’s good. Doug, we’ve mentioned throughout this series that some church leaders really hesitate to talk about money in their church. How does GenerosityOS help churches to talk about money, to broach this subject with their church?
Doug:
Yeah, think number one, we tried to build in a discipleship model. So if the only thing people are giving money to is to meet a need, then we’re missing the real understanding of what the gospel-centric idea of stewardship is. And so we believe that people discover something about God through generosity, they don’t discover any other way. So they don’t pray their way through that. They don’t study their way through it. There’s something about sort of the faith journey that says, I’ll trust God to be extravagant in generosity in a way that grows my faith significantly. And that’s not a health, prosperity thing at all.
Sean:
Sure.
Doug:
It’s just simply saying that there is a connection between my spiritual growth and my identity in Christ and what it means to be a generous steward of what God’s entrusted to me. We try to help people understand it’s a holistic conversation. When it’s all said and done, you’re not gonna feel like you gotta take a shower because you feel dirty for having talked about money. But it’s going to be something that people will appreciate your transparency and authenticity around the issue and what that looks like.
I remember working with a church in South Florida years ago that the pastor really struggled with just talking about money at all. As we went through the process, just watching God pull down the barriers and him see that he didn’t have to compromise anything to do this. In fact, he could be true to his leadership and really have an authentic approach to what they were trying to do.
I worked with the church also in Franklin, Tennessee, years ago, Scotty Smith, Christ Community Church, back when they were still downtown Franklin before they moved out. And I remember in that campaign, I was there on a Sunday when Scotty was preaching. And he said, I came to the conclusion that I needed to repent that I would never talk about money. And I love the language of it, right? It was a repentance for Scotty. He realized that there’s a false set of assumptions that we often bring to that conversation that says, I’m not going to talk about money. And we’re missing an opportunity because it’s an idol in our culture as much as any idol we have.
Sean:
Well, Doug, if church leaders listening today want to start to just kind of shift their approach, what are some of the first steps from your perspective that they can take?
Doug:
Well, look, if you want to begin a journey, you got to know where your starting point is. So at some point, our Generosity Operating System is this overarching kind of approach that the very first thing we want to do is help you get a real inventory about your generosity culture. What does it look like? Where are you? What’s working? Unfortunately, most churches don’t even know what’s working. They’ve done such a one size fits all kind of approach with this thing that they don’t even know how to go back and evaluate efficiencies, processes, all those kinds of things that say that’s working, that’s not.
And so as a result, when they run into headwinds on a financial challenge, they have a tendency to kind of be paralyzed because they don’t know what step to take. So we believe the Generosity Operating System starts off with let’s evaluate or assess what’s going on in the generosity culture of the church. What does that look like in your giving conversations? What are people hearing? And we actually sit down and talk with the people who are sort of stakeholders, if you will, in the life of that church. We all know that there’s some people that are higher stakeholders than others. It’s the old 20-80 rule where you got 20% of people who give 80% of the money or give 80 % of the time and talent.
So we start to have a conversation with them to make sure what are they hearing when you talk about financial challenges when you talk about resourcing vision, what does that look like? So don’t presume that you know what they’re hearing. Let’s ask them, what are you hearing? And so the very first starting point is that kind of evaluation. And then we can start saying, okay, here’s where we think you are. Here’s where we’re starting from. Here’s what we think is the most pressing need or needs.
In one sense, we really encourage churches to have a theology of generosity that you communicate to your congregation. It gives you something to say, this is the Biblical position behind what we’re doing. Look, I’ve been places where I have to, I felt like I have to tell them, look, we’re not using God words to do an in run to get to your wallet.
Sean:
Right.
Doug:
We believe that this is the, the parameters around which we think your generosity culture thrives. And so, that makes sense. We try to help them to sort of, what’s your theology of generosity? What does it look like for you to have engagement knowing that you have people in your church that engagement will not look the same.
I’ve talked about for years, a thing called the one, the few and the many. And what I mean by that, Sean, is that Aristotle coined that phrase related to democracy and the idea that democracy is exercise and experience in the one, the few and the many. And I have found that through the years that people process generosity in a very similar fashion. So in other words, the one being, what’s the individual aspect of generosity that some people in your church really engage around that? That they engage around a conversational model and not a presentational model.
And churches have a tendency to think, well, let’s just stand up on the platform and talk about this forever. And you and I know that that only seeps down so far into the collective sort of spiritual consciousness of the people. So bottom line is, we wanna create some conversational moments. Those are normally people that we sort of understand are financial leaders in the church, but they have high ownership. With high ownership, they wanna make decisions based on relationship and not simply someone who’s detached talking about giving, but someone who will answer questions and interact.
You probably see this in your work. Here’s what I found too. That in a conversational thing, you’re wanting people to ask hard questions because if I want deep commitment to vision, I need to give people permission to disagree with my vision to start with. Otherwise, I may acquiesce and support it half-heartedly, but I don’t go to a deep place of commitment unless I can kind of get in there and dig it out and wrestle with that. So that conversational one-on-one kind of thing, the few meaning small group, what’s life and community life together like for people? How do you create a discipleship model in that setting where they’re interacting with each other. There’s accountability, there’s transparency, all those kinds of things going on. And the many meaning, the 80% of the people who are coming maybe once a month, sitting out there, how do you connect with them in some way to get them to take the first step, baby steps, maybe crawl, walk, run even in the process to get moving into a generosity direction.
So those are the kind of things that we’re sort of trying to help churches think through and strategize uniquely related to their culture and what it looks like.
Sean:
That’s good. Doug, I get this question often in the work that we do, but is this something that churches could do on their own?
Doug:
Do on their own? Yeah, I apologize because it’s not like I haven’t been asked this question a thousand times. So the answer is no, but I think there’s a facsimile of this they can do. So they can do sort of an outward, sort of element of it. But to really go down deep and really make cultural shifts, you’ve got to have someone holding you accountable. And you’ve got to have someone that looks at this all the time and doesn’t just simply come in and say, “You know, I think we all do this. I saw this fundraiser happen in this nonprofit that I worked with. Why don’t we do that?” And so I think you need an outside source. I think you need someone who can see you objectively. Because, know, I don’t see myself objectively as a person half the time.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Doug:
Organizations don’t see themselves objectively. We all sort of have a preferred kind of image that we’re trying to pull together. And we can help you to see that sometimes give you the prescription around the painful things that might need to change to get there.
Sean:
That’s good. Yeah. This area of church finances is not an area that you want to get wrong, and having someone who is data-informed, best practices-informed, and objective outsider to look at that and help you plan. I’ve just found in my work with churches who have done this type of generosity initiative along with the vision and strategy work, they have the healthiest, best results of churches because they have focused strategy, not just around their ministry, but also around their finances and how their resources align to the ministry. So, Doug, thank you so much for your time, your insights on this. This is a really important aspect of the work that a lot of church leaders are doing. But I think in my conversations, a lot of them feel ill equipped to lead through this. And so your insights were incredibly helpful. Thanks for your time today.
Doug:
Hey, thanks for having me, Sean. Look forward to connecting with you guys again sometime down the road. Thanks.
Amy:
Well, again, that was a great conversation, Sean. I loved hearing Doug’s perspective on how church campaigns have changed over the years. I remember, I think we were in back to back campaigns for 10 years as we were launching into multi-site. But I’m curious what stood out to you from what he said.
Sean:
Yeah, well, first of all, I don’t book the guests for our podcast, but whoever does, does a fantastic job because this has been, we’ve had three great guests in a row. I was really curious to hear from Doug’s perspective on how church campaigns have changed over the years. We used to call them campaigns. Most people don’t even call them that anymore. But Doug pointed out how campaigns used to feel more episodic. And I experienced that too. They were more focused on whatever they needed, the churches needed to kind of fund at the time. Maybe you’re funding a building project or some kind of capital replacement or a new campus.
Churches now are more focused on year round generosity initiatives, along with, he mentioned, more planned giving. Because of the shift of wealth between generations that’s happening. Think of it more as starting with what’s the vision God has for our church, and then how do we fund that vision year-round? And he actually mentioned that was his experience when his church had their first campaign. Like I mentioned before, it galvanized people around that shared vision. So I think it really starts with vision. But churches are looking to engage that resourcing year round rather than just in these kind of separate installments over time.
Doug mentioned in his experience, more often than not, churches are still unclear on their future vision and ministry strategy when he engages with them. So developing a funding plan actually becomes really difficult. They don’t really know exactly what they’re trying to fund. And Amy, we’ve certainly experienced that in the work we do with churches. You know, we’ve seen that churches try to develop funding without having that clear sense of exactly what they’re trying to fund. And it seems more often now that people give towards purpose, right? If your purpose isn’t clear, it’s gonna be hard to generate funding around that purpose. And if vision clarity for your church is an area where things still seem murky for you, that’s an area that we can actually help, and we’d love to do that. You can reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com.
On the practical side, I thought it was helpful that Doug mentioned starting with an assessment. You we do the same thing also when we work with churches. And he recommended just asking questions like, where are we struggling right now? What’s the current state and culture of generosity in your church? Amy, when we talked to Jason a couple of weeks ago, he said that exact same thing. Just assessing the culture of generosity within the church is a key starting place.
Doug pointed out that most churches don’t know what’s working when it comes to generosity in their congregation. So really just taking time to connect with the key stakeholders in your church and understand their perspective and experience in giving and generosity and engaging to fund the ministry there.
I thought this was really fascinating. Doug has said that in his experience, again, people engage more around a conversational model than they do a presentational model. So when you can kind of sit together knee to knee, and have these conversations with each other, rather than stand on stage and present, people are more likely to engage and more likely to be connected to generosity in your church. So on the practical side, I thought that was really helpful.
Last thing, Doug pointed out that this whole conversation around generosity is actually about discipleship. And this has shown up several times in our series over the last five weeks, we’ve talked about that, but he said, you know, if the only thing people are giving money to is to meet a need, we’re really missing a discipleship opportunity. That people discover something about God through generosity that they don’t discover any other way. There’s a connection between their spiritual growth and what it means to be a steward of what God has entrusted to us.
So one thing that he encouraged churches to do is to develop a theology of generosity that you communicate to your congregation, just kind of that biblical position behind what you’re doing financially and why you’re doing it that way, being transparent, being scripturally driven, and having a clear theology behind it. In all of that conversation with Doug, I just thought there were so many great practical things, ideas for churches to take away.
And again, we’ve talked about through this series, a lot of times churches or pastors feel hesitant to approach the subject of finances within the church just because of, again, the lack of confidence that they feel. So Doug’s conversation, George’s conversation last week, the conversation with Jason, hopefully all of these conversations have brought some more practical steps and a higher sense of confidence for the pastors who have tuned in.
Amy:
Yeah, I think the series overall, there’s been a nugget in there for every ministry leader. And today’s conversation, I think was a helpful way to end our series. So as we do wrap up not only this podcast, but this entire series, Sean, you’ve had a lot of passion around this as we came into these five weeks. Any last thoughts that you’d like to share?
Sean:
Yeah, well, I want to take us back again, to where we started, and that’s what the scripture we kicked off the series, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15. If we are faithful stewards of God’s resources, then He will generously provide all that we need to accomplish the mission. And I think that that starts with us asking, what does being a faithful steward really look like? And engaging in the resources and the topics that we covered in this series, that’s maybe a first step or a key step for many churches in being a faithful steward. So, again, like we’ve said, hope this was incredibly helpful for our listeners.
Just a reminder, if you’d like to dig a little deeper on the topic, we’re sharing our free PDF, Funding Ministry in Uncertain Economic Times. That’s coming out in our podcast show notes every week. So if through this series you haven’t gotten that yet, you can subscribe for free at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast and get that resource.
Amy, next week, we’re back with a brand new podcast series. I’m excited about it. I’m not going to share what it is yet. Listeners are going to have to come back to hear what we’re going to discuss for the next several weeks again, but it’s going to be great. So until then, we hope everybody has a great week.
