Comments on: Does your church give you money?

By: Josh (iFalconr)

Josh (iFalconr) — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 23:28:27 +0000

That’s a great story to hear. Thanks for the post!

By: Paul Derham

Paul Derham — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:14:41 +0000

I think that’s a great idea. I was once part of a church leadership team. We were put in pairs and given $100. However, we weren’t allowed to “work” or “gamble” to make it multiply – we had to think outside the box an make the money multiply itself. One of the pairs just gave their $100 to an investor and said it was for charity and, knowing that he fancied himself a good investor, they just said they wanted the investment back – he could keep a percentage of the profits. Well, after 6 months, we’d raised an awful lot of money for the church. I’m part of a new church plant now (www.kingdomlifechurch.com.au), and am looking for creating ways to raise money for the church. Any other interesting ideas?

Paul

By: mbhunter

mbhunter — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 01:14:22 +0000

Nickel and Sarah — it was a combination of both entrepreneurship and charitable giving. Some of the “enterprising” activities were as I mentioned — spaghetti dinner, etc. The church leadership was very careful about not turning it into a “stewardship superstar” competition. The people who put on the spaghetti dinner, for example (the pastor’s family) explicitly would not say how much they made, because they did not want to foster competition or make people feel like they were not doing a good job. (I suspect they did quite well with the dinner, BTW.)

It’s also possible that some people just “turned their $200 into $300″ by adding $100 of their own. I don’t know, and it wasn’t really the point to find out.

We (my wife and I) used our seed money to do some crafts and to buy things to re-sell on eBay and in yard sales.

Sarah — glad that you like the layout!

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:43:38 +0000

Interestingly enough, a good portion of the sermon yesterday at church was on that same passage in Matthew.

I like the way your church thinks… that’s a very gutsy thing to do and I’m glad they value the members’ spiritual growth enough to do it. Like nickel, I’d also be interested in seeing more details if you have them.

Love the new layout, by the way. Very fresh!

By: nickel

nickel — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 15:22:33 +0000

I wonder how many people actually used the $200 to make additional money to give back, versus those that just dug a little deeper in their own pocket. I’d be curious to know how enterprising the people were, as opposed to be simply charitable (not that there’s anything wrong with the latter).