Wise Stewardship

It's because we're going to make time to do something that Jesus admonished us to do, and we're going to read it in Luke chapter 14, beginning in verse 25. If you don't have a Bible, listen carefully as I read from the New International Version. Luke 14, 25. Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them, He said, If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Anyone ever stumble over that verse? I mean, that is not an easy verse of Scripture. He's talking about radical love for God. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple. Now, Jesus, that's the point, that's the truth. The next paragraph is an illustration of that. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, This fellow began to build and was not able to finish. Now, all of my Christian life, I've heard that paragraph used to illustrate the point. And the point is that it costs everything to follow Christ. I mean, this whole thing in America today, well, sure, I'm a Christian, yeah, whatever, you know, I go to church. Jesus didn't paint a picture that way. He said, If you're to be My disciple, it's going to cost you everything. But today, we're not going to look into studying that Scripture in terms of discipleship. We're going to look at that Scripture and take it really, and it's parabolic meaning, and that is we're going to look at what it's really going to cost us as a church to follow the mission of Christ into the next decade and into the next millennia. And I think after today, you will be presented with information that will enable you to pray with intelligence and with understanding about what the challenge is. And I believe if the other two services are any indication, you will come away saying, I really see now what the issues are and how I need to pray about this. Now, how many of you were here just two weeks ago when Doug Anderson from Nehemiah Ministries brought the morning message? Well, you probably had enough introduction there to know Doug's spirit and heart, and I still have people telling me they're out every time they go through a field or drive by a field, they're looking for sheep that are with their legs up in the air. And let me explain to you just pastorally why someone asked me, well, you know, why do we have someone come in and explain this to us? Why don't you do it? And I'll give you a simple reason. I can't. I could not do what you're going to see Doug do today. And furthermore, we as elders all prayed about this for several months and determined that we needed someone like Doug with a heart for Christ and with expertise and understanding what something like we are proposing would really cost us. I think you'll see as an outsider, Doug's going to give us an honest view of our church. If you're like me, you're going to end this presentation and say, first of all, thank God for what he's done. And then number two, Lord, I've got to trust you for what you're going to do in the future. And that is the intent. Today is part really of a three-step process of our making a commitment. This week Doug's going to give the plan according to 1 Chronicles 28. By the way, write that down, 1 Chronicles 28. Go home and read that today, 29 as well. This week Doug's going to give us the plan as King David gave the plan to build the temple. God said, David, you're not going to build it, your son Solomon will, but David said, I'm still giving you the plan. Number two, next week I'm going to bring a message about the challenge and I'm going to talk out of God's Word, sharing with you the message, is there not a cause? Is there really a reason for this that God has put before us? And then number three, November the 1st at Community College North, for the first time in seven years, listen now, first time in seven years our whole church will be gathering in one location. I'm already just pumped about that. It's going to be exciting. And I'm going to challenge you, change your plans. If you're going to go to Youngstown to go to the discount malls, change your plans that day. Be with us. You're going to want to experience what's going to happen on that day at Community College North, so it's going to be a great day. I think I've said everything you need to say. Would you extend your love and acceptance and affirmation and give our brother Doug a welcome as he comes. We're going to be putting a packet in the hands of each household. We're hoping that you came today in the spirit of being willing to share with your spouse. So as these packages are passed, if you'll take one per household, and if you're here by yourself, you feel comfortable taking those. And I'm going to walk through this with you, and we're going to try and give you an understanding. I might attempt, while you're getting those packets, to just address the question of why are we doing this? Why are we using a Sunday morning? I think as Jay mentioned, we're on strong biblical grounds here. If you look at those two chapters in 1 Chronicles 28 and 29, you'll see that the first thing David did was he got the whole assembly together, and he presented to them the plan. And it became the basis for all of their future decision making. So what we're doing here is attempting this morning to present the first part of this three-part challenge, the plan. And we believe, like David, that all of the plan needs to be in detail, because God has directed all of the steps and all the details of the plan for you to understand. Next week we'll be talking about the challenge, and then the third week we'll be talking about commitment, as you gather for that celebration service. You know, it really is tragic today in all of the separation there is within churches. We are so fragmented because we gather in so many different services over several days. I've just finished working with some churches that have actually seven services now, on Saturday night and Sunday. And when we begin to meet that many different times as a church, we really don't get the picture of how many lives are being touched by this church. And if we ever have those times when we can get everyone together in one room at one time, it's a great celebration to begin to see what God is doing in the lives of people. Well, hopefully you've got that packet in your hand. Before you get too saturated, let me just start by telling you, I believe your church is at a kairos point in time. Kairos. And that's an interesting word. It's a biblical word, and it describes a precise moment, when at the same moment you're presented with a great opportunity, with great potential, wonderful potential that's there, but at that precise moment you're presented with that opportunity, you also are presented with great risk and great danger. That's a frustration to get to those kairos points, because we get excited about the potential, but we also become frustrated over recognizing the risk and the danger that's also there. And the best help I can give you this morning is to tell you that kairos points are decision points. It seems to be those deciding times when God takes us and causes us to pause for a moment, and look back at where we've come from, take a clear look at where we are today, and then attempt to see into the future. And it's in that pivotal time as we're looking from the past to the future, that we're going to stop what we're doing today and make some decisions about the future. And I think the understanding comes when we get to these deciding times, in the understanding that when we make the right choices, according to God's plan for us, we will go forward in the future and take advantage of that wonderful potential, that great opportunity. But if we make the wrong choices, we will not be able to stay where we are. You will suffer with the setback. It is unrealistic and naive to think that we can make the wrong choices and stay where we are today. And so I think that gives you the better understanding of a Kairos point. It means that we want to prepare you today to make the right choices, so that this church can take advantage of the opportunity and the potential that God is placing in your hands, and we don't want you to make the wrong choices and suffer a setback. And so in your hands are a lot of materials, and let me help you just walk through them by first asking you to take these cards. There are two of them in each packet. If you're here and you didn't find a card, we want you to raise your hand right away, but fill this out. That's why there's a pen in there right now. Fill it out right now while we're talking. There's a couple of hands up. If you don't have a card, fill it out. Now let me help you be encouraged to fill this out by telling you this does not get your name on a list. This gets your name off a list. The leaders of the church are committed to getting this information to every person on the list. And as soon as you've seen this and heard this, your name can come off the list. And so if you don't want somebody chasing you for the next several weeks trying to get you to a meeting, the best thing you can do is just tell us, I was there and I heard it, and your name will come off the list. So as soon as you're done filling this out. By the way, last hour we gave that same explanation and people waited until the end of the service to fill it out. They weren't sure they trusted us. And we have people who are keying this in during this service today to take your name off the list. If you will please make sure you do it at the beginning of the service, then you will not be contacted today by someone trying to get you to a meeting next weekend. But this is to tell us you were here. After you have finished that and pass it to the aisle, then look at this brochure second. It's opening the doors brochure. It has your vision statement on the front cover. We don't have time to go through this together this morning. But I want to invite you to take enough time to read this from the front to the back. The purpose of this brochure is to give you the big picture. This will help you understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. But we don't have time to read it together this morning. So please just commit to set that aside and spend some time looking through it in the next several days. The one I want you to pull out first is this handout. It says at the top it's information meeting materials. There's a staple in it. This is the material that I'm going to go through with you. It's kind of the outsider looking inside at the church, and it's what I want you to understand about where you've been and where you are. And more importantly, I want you to begin to understand the decisions of where you could go together. They did. Okay. While you're passing your cards in, let me just ask you. We've taken a little survey in the first two services. How many of you, when you read a magazine, have a natural inclination to start at the back and work your way forward? You start at the back. Do you see all those hands? I always did that, and I never told anybody because I thought it was strange. And then I read a study that said that 50% of the people reading magazines today are reading them from the back to the front. The other half are going from the front to the back, so now the publishers are trying to find a way to write magazines to be read both directions. So if you think it's confusing now, it makes no sense at all. They're written to be read from the front to the back, but half of us are going to go the other direction. I'm not going to tell you what the study said about us and our personality and our character, because I already raised my hand and told you I'd do that. But I do want to encourage you not to do it just this morning. We have a great deal to cover, a short time to do it, and the slides go from the front to the back, and we want to help you fit all of this into an understanding by the end of the service. So if you'll turn with me to page one, and if you ignore that console, I guess we'll meet you somewhere in the middle. Turn to page one, and you'll see there the first thing on page one is an overview, and at the beginning of the overview, the first thing you'll see is your vision statement. You'll also see it on the front page of the brochure. The reason for beginning there is we want to say to the church as clearly as possible that that's the objective that we're in pursuit of. That's the end that we're pursuing. Everything else we need to talk about this morning is simply a means to accomplishing that end. Now I think it's important to start with that because I've been doing these long enough to recognize that as soon as we begin to talk with people about practical things in church ministries, things like buildings or things like giving, a lot of our minds will begin to look at those things as if they were the end in themselves, and it's not correct. So if you begin to look at the materials for opening our doors and you start to think that this is a building program, I want to challenge your thinking. Or if you begin to think that this is a fundraising campaign, I want to challenge that thinking and say up front, this is what we're trying to do. This is what is moving us to action. This is what we're in pursuit of. Now if we would state a goal for this kind of a challenge, it would be stated this way. It's 100% participation. What would a church look like today if we had 100% of the people committed to those three things? Any idea? What would it look like if we had 100% of the people committed to prayer, every person in the church knowing what God had gifted them to do and using those gifts productively in a ministry through this church? What kind of a diverse program of ministry could be offered here if everybody was serving, at least in one place? What would the giving look like in a church if everybody just gave something? Now let me tell you what the giving patterns really look like in churches. They're called the 20-30-50 syndrome or sickness. 20% of the people give 80% of the money. 30% of the people give the other 20% of the money. And 50% give nothing. That's in churches across the country. Unfortunately, that giving pattern is for churches of 300 people. If you attend a church smaller than 300 people, the non-giving percentage is less than 50%. I think it's because it's harder to hide in a small church. But if you attend a church larger than 300 people, the non-giving percentage is over 50%. It tends to increase until it tops out when a church hits 2,000 people in attendance. We fully expect to find in that church today between 70% and 75% of the people giving nothing. In 1955, 20% of the people in churches across the country gave nothing. In 1991, 50% to 75% of the people give nothing, depending on the size of the church. You see, it's a small group of people today carrying all the cost of ministry and mission and buildings. And if we want to understand the way to accomplish the vision this church has, it's through this goal. Every person praying and serving and giving. If you look at the bottom of that page 1, you'll see our strategy for encouraging participation. You'll see it has five steps in it. The first step here we've been working on for several weeks, trying to help the church see the needs that are there. But today we're moving on to steps 2 and 3. The purpose of this meeting is to try and help you listen to the plan so that you can understand all of the options, the choices that are yours for the future. And then you'll see after step 3, step 4 is that each person needs to make a decision about their involvement. And finally, step 5 is you need to tell us what you've decided to do. If we get all the way through November 1st, you'll see all five of these steps. We're not asking you this morning to make any decision or any commitment. The purpose of this meeting this morning is to have you listen and understand so that we will be prepared to make the decisions that are going to be offered to you next Sunday. Now, if you'll turn in your materials starting on page 2, you'll see the first thing I've tried to do here is take a look back. Some of this information is being gathered for lenders and project managers, but we thought the church would benefit from taking a look back at the last 11 years to see where you've come from. And then we're going to pivot and go forward to see what the options and the choices are in the future. The first progress report is on attendance. And we've looked back to the 1981 time period. That's the beginning of this church. And you'll see here at 1981, you started with about 150 people. And then we get to 1990 and 1991, and we take the history, everything to the left of that vertical line, and we forecast the future, everything to the right of the line. Now, let me just show you a couple of things on this growth line that I think are important for you to understand something about your church. First of all, you need to understand that 85% of the churches in our country today are either plateaued or declining in attendance. Only 15% are growing. And when you put all churches together in the U.S., the growth rate of churches is one person per church per year. This is a very unusual congregation. You are probably in the 10% of the fastest-growing churches in the country in terms of your growth rate and your size. There's something very unique going on here, and you need to understand that. The dotted lines, you'll see there are three ranges here, one there, one there, and this is the third one. Those are the predictable growth ceilings that churches go through. The first one comes at 150 people. You didn't experience that because you started with 150. The second one comes between 450 and 500 people, and you can see you broke through that one with great momentum. It didn't even slow you down. The third one, however, comes at 1,000 to 1,200 people, and you can see clearly in this graphic that that one did level the church. So you got surprised when you hit that third growth ceiling. And then, finally, it took you 2 to 3 years to get the energy and the experience to break through it, and finally you penetrated that ceiling and you went right back to your original growth line. Now I want you to just look at this and see that the direction of this line is this. Matter of fact, both your 5-year and your 10-year trend line lay right on top of each other. Now there's one other line there. This is your 3-year trend line, and that's what's happened as of this leveling off, and I think there are three reasons for that leveling that I would point you toward. Number one, you're approaching your 12th birthday as a church. We warn every church today that the original vision of a church will not propel that ministry for more than 12 years. It would be very unusual to ever get beyond your 12th birthday with the original vision providing the power for that growth. Either a church will have achieved its original vision and it needs to stop and catch a new one, or it will give up on its original vision, and that always happens within 12 years. So one of the focal points here in this church for planning is the age of this ministry, and it seems to point to a time that says, stop what you're doing, take a deep breath, look forward and catch a new vision, because the original vision isn't going to continue to drive you for the next 10 to 20 years. The second thing I would point to is facility issues are causing that leveling off. As we've looked and studied the facility, as soon as you get through the third growth ceiling, when you penetrate this barrier here, then it seems to only limit the church by the number of parking places in the lot, number of seats in the sanctuary, and the number of times you're willing to use your facility for a service on the weekend. And churches continue to grow. I worked with one ministry that went from 1,200 people to 12,000 people in 7 years. If you're committed to continuing to offer your ministry and you can keep planning for growth, by the way, they have 39 pastors on staff in that church today. So along with this facility issue comes staffing issues. That's the third concern I'll raise for you, and I'll show you a little more as we get into it. I think your church needs to pay special attention right now to a master plan for staffing. Leadership in churches is in crisis. That's all churches across this country. We need to really spend some quality time defining who a leader is and what a leader does in churches. And your master plan for staffing needs to be from an understanding that the large church is expected to be the specialist. You are tremendously understaffed, as you'll see in a minute, and you cannot offer a specialized program of ministry by having a few general practitioners do their best to hang on to all of that specialization. And so staffing is one issue, facilities is one issue, and it comes at the time of your 12th birthday. And so all of that is a dynamic that's pushing what we're talking about here. It's not hard, however, if you look at the bottom of the page to see that this is your growth line, and if you just continue to do what you have been doing, there's no reason not to expect that you would be 4,000 people by the year 2000. That isn't to change anything. That's just to continue on the path that's brought you to where you are now. If you'll look at the next page, you'll see a page on giving. Anytime we find a growing church, we look at giving next because there's a question that we have to ask. Is giving keeping up with the growth? That's the issue. And so when you look at page 3, you'll see that we've started to write these reports for two kinds of people in the church. Some of you want all the numbers, and if we didn't show you all the numbers, you'd think we were hiding something from you. You look at the top part of the page. The rest of you don't care about all the numbers, you just want the picture, and if you want the picture of what the numbers tell us, you look at the bottom part of the page. It's the same data. If you look at that information, you'll see at the top all of what was given each year in each of the funds and areas of receipts. If you look at the bottom, you'll see the pictures. In 1981, the church gave $96,000 for ministry. In 1991, that amount had jumped to $2,071,000. That's rather remarkable growth in giving. As we looked at the next page, we looked at the source of the money that comes into this church, and we learned that the vast majority of the money, 75% roughly, comes in through tithes and offerings. That's where most of the money in the 11-year history of this church has come from, tithes and offerings. A little bit has come here in the building fund, about 15%. There's a little bit that comes in designated for specific purposes, and then even a smaller amount for non-contribution receipts, things like bookstore, or interest on deposits, or those kinds of things. But the vast majority of the money comes through people contributing to this ministry. Now, if you look at the bottom of that page, you'll see why we look at all of this. We compare the attendance line, which is this bottom line, to the top line, which is the weekly giving per attender. And it doesn't matter where you plot these two lines. It's the relationship between the lines that tells the story of how well you're doing. The question that's asked in giving, there's only one issue at stake in giving, and I think we've been badgered by so many charitable causes today. I think it's true that one of our problems is not enough people are giving. The group that's giving is becoming smaller and smaller. The other problem is that the group that is giving is starting to suffer from compassion fatigue. There are so many needs in so many places that we're starting to believe we can't make a difference, and so we're fatiguing, and the result is that we have a two-edged sword that's a problem in the area of giving. Well, when we come to churches, I want you to understand there's only one issue at stake. It's the issue of growth. Give and grow, or don't give and don't grow. That's the question. And there's two kinds of growth in the church today. One is a growth in numbers. We want to offer the ministry to a greater number of people. The other kind of a growth is a growth within an individual. It's the maturing, developing kind of growth. We cannot do either of those kinds of growth in a church that giving is not a question. So when we talk about giving, if that troubles you, then I want you to substitute the word giving for growth. And when you hear conversations about we need you to give, then read that as a message that we need to grow. We need to provide for growth. One of my favorite messages in our church was our pastor told us about a financial need, and he challenged us to meet the need. And as soon as he got done with his challenge, he said, Now, I know there are some of you sitting out there who are saying, Here's this young pastor, and he's only been here a few months, and he's already after my wallet. He said, I have one thing to say to you folks. Get used to it. And then he went on to explain to us boldly. He said, I am absolutely committed to the end that we're after, to change the lives of people. And I understand there's a direct linkage between changed lives and challenging you to give. And so it would be inconsistent for me as your pastor to stand here and say I'm committed to the end and be unwilling to challenge you to be the means to that end. So he said, I don't want to pester people. I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I don't want to beg for giving. I don't want any of that. But I do want you to get used to hearing about the needs because I'm committed to the lives of people. Well, that's the sense that I think we need to begin to confront each other and listen to giving talks today. It's because the issue at stake is not the giving. The issue at stake is the growth. Are we really committed to touching the lives of people when 70% to 75% of the people in large churches give nothing? Do we really understand that direct linkage between giving and growing? Well, here you can see that the linkage is, it's almost a textbook example of what happens in churches. You started with 150 people, and the giving was $12.35 per week per attender. And as soon as you started to grow rapidly, the giving came down. You know why it comes down? Because new people don't start to give right away. As new people come to a church, there's time lag between when they come and when they begin to feel like they're a part of the body and they begin to support it with their time and their resources. So as you started to grow rapidly, the giving came down. Then there was this waiting period, and suddenly the giving started to come. Those who had come to the church started to share in covering the cost. And when you leveled off here at the 1,000 barrier, the giving really surged. It went to a high point. And then when you broke through the barrier here and you grew fast again, the giving came down because, once again, the new people don't start to give right away. And so one of the things you need to have an understanding of in watching the relationship between these two lines is that whatever happens in the attendance line, and this is very difficult for fast-growing churches, whatever happens in the attendance line must happen in the giving line. When you go through times of high growth in attendance, you also have to go through the same period of high growth in giving or you will not be able to continue to grow. You'll have to do something overt to shut the growth down. In our church, we grew real fast for a time. We were adding 200 people a month, 50 people every week. We built five buildings in five years, and our lines crossed. The new people didn't start to give right away. The growth went wild, and the giving didn't keep pace with it. So we had a meeting with the elders, and we talked about our options, and one of the options that they suggested was possible was to send our ushers to the parking lot to greet people as they got out of their cars because if we let them get all the way to the church, we'd make them mad. So we'd go to their cars, and when they'd get out of their cars, we'd say, Have you ever been here before? If they said yes, we would welcome them in. If they said no, we would say, I'm sorry, we're just not taking new people right now. We have to wait until our giving catches up with our growth. Now, we talked about that, but we didn't do it. It seemed inconsistent with our mission statement. So instead, we did the same thing other churches do. We didn't keep up with buildings. We didn't keep up with staffing ratios. We didn't start new ministries when we needed them. And you know what? We got to the same place. We slowed the growth of the church. I want you just to see that very important ingredient because so many people are offended when you talk about money in churches today. I want you to see it is only one issue. It's the issue of are we committed to people? Are we committed to developing their lives? Are we committed to reaching out to people who need Christ? If we're committed to that, let's not be offended by talking about money. Get used to it in a growing church. If you look beyond that, you'll see where the money went. Some of you care a lot about this. Others aren't really that interested in it. But you'll see that there are several columns across the top of page 5. And they all are subtotals of what this total ministry cost is. If you look at the right-hand column, just look at that number because I want to express the cost of ministry here in the dollar cost per attender per week. So what this says is in 1991, this church invested $14.25 per person per week. That's the cost of running this ministry for every person that attends here from the tiniest baby carried onto this property to the oldest adult that attends. Now, I'm not showing you that to advocate that we start to sell tickets at the door. But I am showing it to you to defend this linkage between the cost of ministry and reaching out and offering it to people's lives. You see, if you come to a church and you don't give anything toward covering that cost, sooner or later, you can't continue to offer this ministry. It will shut down the growth of the church. And so this is an interesting number. By the way, if you're a businessman, this is not an efficiency ratio. It is not an advantage to drive that cost down low so that you can offer it to more people. That's the way some of us think. Actually, what it is is it's a measuring stick of the specialization of the ministry. And the more specialized you become, the more relevant your ministry is, and the more relevant the ministry, the faster you're going to grow. And so when I saw these numbers here, I said, something's wrong here. This church can't be this size and offering this ministry at $14. I've seen churches your size up in the $40 per week, per person. One church had 800 people in it. They had 40 full-time staff people. Their ratios were entirely different. Staffing ratios are immediately a target when we see the cost that low. And I'll show you that on the bottom of the page. When we looked at your staffing ratios, we saw that the, by the way, the blue pillar is what you should have had each year. The red side is what you actually had. And then the yellow line that runs through this is the staff shortage. And you can see that as you've moved into the last part of the decade, you've really gone to a philosophy of not being adequately staffed. As specialization becomes more of a demand in this church, you've been attempting to hang on to that specialization with general practitioners. The assignments to staff are too broad. The larger the church becomes, the more we need specialized people, either focusing on specific people groups or focusing across the church on special ministry areas. For example, a church that Jay went and visited, I had a pastor come up to me and he said, I'm the pastor of singles in this church. He said, I want you to tell the elder board how impossible this jo