Tag: tithes and offerings

By: Generis Team

If the only time your church talks about money is when you need money, you aren’t leveraging the worship service to create a generous church. There is a place for honest dialogue about the state of the church budget, but it is not healthy for pastors to speak about finances only when the church is in need. This is why it’s important to regularly preach about generosity and stewardship as an essential aspect of discipleship and following Christ.

Sometimes the way we approach the connection between ministry and money makes people uncomfortable. We should view money not as a necessary evil to be reckoned with but as a partner for ministry. No ministry thrives without needed resources. If ministry is the vehicle for accomplishing our mission, financial resources are the fuel. (more…)

Huzzah! Another New Year begins. New calendars. New seasons. New starts. And – of course – new goals!

My wife and I were on a jog last week and we decided to use that time as an opportunity to go over our 2016 goals. We tried to think of at least one for five key categories (aka The Five ‘F’s’): Family, Friends, Faith, Finance, and Fitness.

Most of the ones we came up with will be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in calendar- based resolutions. Run two half-marathons. Save a chunk of money for our first house. Get plugged into a small group at our new church. All the staples. haha.

What we lacked in creativity, we tried to make up for with specificity. By picking measurable activities and goals, we’re hoping to have more success this year than we have in the past with our more general resolutions. (e.g. Get into shape! Make some new friends! Eat less(ish) candy! etc.)

Maybe you have some resolutions you’re working toward in your own life. Or maybe you’ve got some goals that you’d love to see your church accomplish in 2016. Expanded ministries? New outreach opportunities? Maybe adding an additional service or breaking ground on a new facility? The opportunities are endless. (more…)

Can I tell you a quick story? It’s a story about giving. More specifically, it’s about a giver. Even more specifically, it’s about me.

It was late 2010, and – for what seemed like the 50th week in a row – my pockets were empty as I watched the offering plate come down my row. If it was a good week, maybe I’d have $10.00 I could toss in. More likely, though, I just let the plate pass by while making silent promises to do better next week. But then next week came, and…well…you can probably guess how that turned out.

It’s not that I didn’t want to give. It’s just that I – like so many of my peers – was still figuring out how to manage bills, student loans, savings, and a social life. All too often, it was my giving that got shortchanged. On top of that, I never carried cash, and I hadn’t seen my checkbook since college! So my giving habits ended up being determined by “whatever I have leftover.” This was hardly the life of faithful stewardship I had imagined for myself. (more…)

The Internet has been many things over the past two decades. At first it was a novelty. Then it was a super highway, a boom, a bubble, a bust, and a new frontier. Along the way, it became wireless, social, lightning fast, and mobile. And now, as we start another year, it has become a few other things as well. Indispensable. Ubiquitous. Inescapable. As essential to our daily lives as automobiles and electricity.

And yet despite all of this, many churches continue to treat the Internet as if it is a fad or inessential luxury. This is especially true when it comes to engaging with online and mobile giving tools.

Despite the fact that less than 7% of transactions in the United States are conducted via cash and check, over 75% of American churches still do not offer any form of online giving. That’s right. Three out of every four churches in America are staking their financial health on the hope that their members will give consistently using payment methods they only use 7% of the time. In 2015!

If this describes your church – if you and your team have relegated digital giving to a “we’ll get to it one of these days” type of conversation – then I have a challenge for you. I challenge you to make 2015 “one of those days.” Make 2015 the year you take online and mobile stewardship seriously. (more…)

A quick glance at the “Recent Posts” column to the right makes one thing immediately obvious: we talk a lot about giving on this blog! And it’s not hard to figure out why. It’d be silly to call ourselves “Mogiv” if we weren’t passionate about mobile and online giving.

It also doesn’t hurt that we have so much to brag about! With Mogiv’s embedded giving forms, integrated mobile giving, and endless campaign options, we believe that we have created the most effective digital giving solution for the church and we want to shout about it from the rooftops!

BUT…we also understand that churches do not live on giving alone. There are dozens of tools and resources you require on Sunday mornings and throughout the week to make your church run. While we can’t provide all of these tools for you, we want to help direct you in the right direction whenever and wherever we can.

With that in mind, we want to let you know about a brand new integration we’ve just completed with Proclaim Church Presentation Software. (more…)