Transforming Church

The best piece of advice that can be given when approaching budgeting for discipleship is to start by scrutinizing your entire present budget against both your mission statement and vision for ministry. In other words any line item that does not fully support your mission and vision compromises your focus and must be challenged.

For almost every congregation the largest part of their financial budget relates to property and staff. By itself that does not say whether the DNA of that congregation is grounded in discipleship. And even though this in itself will not change those budget lines, it is, nevertheless, extremely important that this concern receives significant attention.

One last point needs to be made before approaching the budget itself. This has to do with the realization that budgets generally deal only with the resource of money. Huge parts of a congregation’s ministry, however, require more people resource than dollar resource, and the congregation’s leadership dare not assume that everyone in the congregation understands that. When leadership is concerned about casting vision for discipleship at budget time, those parts of the vision that lean much heavier on people resources still need to be represented in that vision, not just the budget dollars.

While we are on the subject of your vision for discipleship, this would also be the time to ask, “What in your vision for discipleship is not doing well or even not happening at all, ministry that needs to be raised up visibly with both the dollars and people resources needed for accomplishment?” For example, most congregations support modest or even fair effort at adult Bible Studies, but the bigger question is, “How many congregations are developing a comprehensive ministry for adult discipleship growth?”

Where most congregations become derailed on growing adult disciples is a consequence of an unhealthy emphasis on Confirmation. The result is most congregations have nothing for late teens, and nearly all have done absolutely nothing for 20-somethings and 30-somethings with either disciple growth or leadership development. Congregations with no vision for this, because they are groping and/or declining in membership/attendance, latch onto the idea that youth are the future of the church. What this does is press them to struggle with getting an active youth ministry program. Since that is out of context it often is with very little success.

All ages need help to grow in discipleship, and yes, some day the youth will be the future of the church, but right now the future sits in the hands of those in their 20's 30's and 40's, a group for whom most congregations are doing nothing to help them grow in discipleship or leadership. Transitioning to discipleship assumes you now have ministry teams, dozens and dozens of them, and they no longer bear any resemblance to committees. Even though budgeting no longer follows committee lines, you would not at the same time, with 75-100 teams, create for each their own budget line. Most of them won't need a budget line.

A common phenomenon with congregations where ministry is the responsibility of teams rather than committees is that besides seeking their own resource of people very often they seek their own resource of dollars as well. Ministry happens in these congregations without having to plan one or more years in advance so the money needed will be there. At the same time the potential for ministry dollars in these congregations is increased dramatically. Just as people resources do not get represented in the budget, so also are more and more of the ministry dollars not needing to be represented as well. This emphasizes all the more that vision for discipleship must be represented to the congregation with the full awareness of this.

Finally we get to look at some possible new budget lines. Mike Foss in his book, Power Surge, holds up six marks of discipleship. For a second perspective on this, the ELCA still has excellent materials in its website archive for what is presented as the seven marks of discipleship. Either of these might offer some insight into how a congregation might develop new budget lines for discipleship. The seven in the ELCA resource include: Prayer, Worship, Study (Bible), Witness, Enable (Mentor), Serve and Give. If grouping is more desired, the first three have more to do with our relationship with God, the next three with our relationship with each other, and giving has to do with both. The last four might also be grouped under the theme of Mission. The first three, while it might be advised to maintain sub-groups, could be grouped under Growth. The umbrella for this entire section of the budget, though, could be titled Discipleship.

Equally important in the perspective of discipleship is what the congregation is planning and carrying out for adult leadership growth. Rather than assume the options already offered in the previous paragraph, where disciple growth includes leadership growth, one might want to title the categories in the previous paragraph Disciple Growth and still have another budget section for Leadership Growth, possibly breaking that down somewhat further as well.

Yet one more time we would like to hold up to you what was previously identified as our best piece of advice in this resource. Your budget has to reflect your mission and vision, and yearly that will likely change your budget lines more than they have in the past. On top of that, every congregation and leader needs to give the Holy Spirit free rein in showing them how that should happen in their place, and where they need to look for dollar and people resources to make that happen.

And a parting thought: Normally we would be the last to suggest any specific program that smacks of a canned solution. The reason is because congregations tend to put a strangle hold on those as a quick fix solution that is not to be. Only if you already have some sense of what is at stake here would I as author ask if you have looked at Natural Church Development. It can be an excellent tool to stay true to discipleship ministry. There are already a few articles about it on our site, just as there are numerous other articles there that have helped many congregations and pastors as well.