Stewardship with Susan Ranous
Thursday, February 1, 2024
BE CREATIVE YEAR-ROUND #3
For the past two weeks, I have been looking at Vanco’s creative list as a year-round stewardship idea. This list is part of the last of eight rules for effective church leadership laid out in the booklet put out by VANCO, titled The Complete Guide to Church Stewardship. It was to BE CREATIVE. In being creative,
My breakdown of their list is below. For the third quarter of the year (July, August and September), I am providing some additional ideas below.
January First Fruits
February The Gift of Love - Our Brothers and Sisters Keeper
March Ministry Team Spirit
April Miracles and Wonders
May It’s our Anniversary (heritage Sunday)
June Planting Good Seeds
July Virtual Messages/Social Media Sunday/The Conversion
August College Alumni Day
September The Unexpected/ Brick Layers
October Financial Testimonies
November A Praise of Thanksgiving
December The Christmas Gift
The third quarter of the year would include Virtual Messages/Social Media Sunday/The Conversion; College Alumni Day; and The Unexpected/Brick Layers
Virtual Messages – During COVID, many of us started offering live-streaming or virtual messages. Now that some people have returned to the worshipping in the pews, there is conversation whether virtual messages should continue. I believe they should. There are people that cannot return to worship because of health and distance. Many people are more comfortable online then off-line, it seems. What if our virtual messages were more than people “watching us” and more worshipping differently? These messages can be live or recorded. Attention-grabbing graphics are important; a “talking head” alone probably isn’t enough. What if offsite Bible study were offered? This conversation came up for me recently in a discussion when a church that had traditionally offered a Lenten series realized that some of those classes had had to be cancelled in past years because of weather (Upstate New York—who knew?). Virtual worship would allow every class to occur.
Social Media Sunday – This is a continuation of virtual worship. What if people who have worshipped virtually were invited to come to church in-person for a special occasion. It could even be offered outside in the summer, so people might be more comfortable!
The Conversion – Virtual worshipping also brings up the idea of online giving. People who are in the pews also give online, of course. But, how are we asking/encouraging/helping online worshippers to participate in worship through their giving? There are websites, texts, chats on Facebook; simply providing the ability to respond to a moving message or a call from God by giving is a way to encourage online giving. This, of course, goes back to the virtual messages paragraph above. We need to change from watching worship and instead worshipping virtually.
College Alumni Day – When it’s summer-time, college-bound students are getting ready to depart. Churches can provide scholarships to help those students. Maybe a way to encourage giving toward support of colelge0bound students could be a college alumni day, where people wear their college jerseys. The church could be decorated with college pennants; youth ministry its placed in charge of the service. With education, every dollar counts. Seeing the youth in action, and hearing about future plans well help people understand how those scholarships are used.
The Unexpected – This is one of those topics that doesn’t really fit anywhere, but anyone who has been in the church for any length of time knows that there are often issues with the physical plant: leaky roof, broken pews, worn carpet, broken windows. We need to maintain our church buildings; but sometimes there isn’t enough money for routine maintenance, which can lead to greater problems down the road. We can’t become slack in our giving, because the buildings need to be maintained; when maintenance is delayed, the costs go up.
Brick Layers – In addition to maintaining the current physical plant, sometimes we have to raise capital for an expansion, or an education wing. Making it memorable can help with the giving: engraving bricks, giving trees or something that gets people’s attention.
So just a few more ideas; next week, I’ll visit the last quarter of the year!
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