What do you do when there's a drop in giving at your church?
What do you do when the giving at your church is good for 20+ years, and then there’s a sudden significant drop? In this episode of Stewardship Leader, we talk with Rob Seddon and Kirsten Schwartz from Crossroad Church in Ohio to find out what they learned and what they’re doing to address this and a much more important issue.
What you will hear on this podcast
“In those 25 years, you can define our giving as pre-2019, and 2019 and beyond because we had a major shift at the end of 2018.”
“Even though the numbers got bigger, we saw that the impact on people, their lives changing, generosity becoming an important discipline for them, the vision, all of that got muddier and muddier the bigger and bigger we got.”
“I was one of the people who had to constantly justify to people that Crossroads was a good investment.”
“Our total number wasn’t going down, but our giving per capita was definitely going down.”
“I mined everything I could find out there in terms of best practices, and how other churches have been doing this, and then attempted to put together a plan for Crossroads.”
“We were missing two things. One, we didn’t make our current givers feel known, needed, and valued, and second, discipleship; growing people in giving and generosity.”
“I think you have to decide what your core message is and then unapologetically say it and don’t veer from it.”
“We had always believed in the importance of the tithe. Brian, our senior pastor, had even thought that, but that message kept getting lost in everything else.”
“We’re still working on this two-sided plan. One side being infrastructure, making givers feel known, needed, and valued, and the other side discipleship, teaching people what true biblical generosity is.”