But why should you care?

Because the folks were born in those years are now in their 70s and 80s. These are the ages when we begin to benefit from bequests, or gifts left in the wills of our members.

There have been lots of stories about the onslaught of baby boomers and the impact they will have, but this tail end of the Silent Generation is worth our attention.

Many of our churches have become used to what are called “over the transom” bequests.  These are gifts that walk in the door on their own, without anyone soliciting them.  In the last decades, with the GI Generation and early Silent Generation still in our churches in large numbers, we could count on these gifts.

But as the number of our members in these key age groups declines, it only stands to reason that the number of these gifts will decline as well.

So what is a church to do?

I think we need to be more intentional about promoting these gifts:

• Lift up these gifts when they come in.  Announcing in gratitude that when Mrs. Jones passed away, she left a generous gift in her will that will be placed in the general endowment fund, will encourage others to do the same.
• Have a planned giving educational event.  The Foundation can provide these or perhaps a member of your congregation can do so.  Make sure the emphasis is on education and not strong-arming potential gifts.
• Be sure you are ready to receive these gifts.  How long ha it been since you have dusted off your endowment policies?  Do you have a planned gifts acceptance policy that outlines what will happen if your church receives an undesignated bequest?  These things can help give your members confidence that their gift will be handled properly and will help streamline the process once a gift is received.

Your East Ohio United Methodist Foundation is here to assist you with any and all of these issues.

Fewer bequests will happen by accident, we need to respectfully encourage our members to help secure the ongoing financial stability of our churches.

It was the most frustrating meeting of my career.

A few days later I was debriefing with the pastor who had invited me in to face this firing squad.  It was clear that for the last several years she had been beating her head against this wall and was hoping that if I beat my head against it for a while it might start to crack.

As we talked more she made what I thought was a sad but astute insight:  “Our problem is our leaders are more interested in running the church than they are in doing the ministry of Jesus Christ.”

Sound familiar?

Our United Methodist Book of Discipline gives the pastor the role of chairperson of just one committee:  nominating.  This means the minister has significant influence over who the other leaders in the church are, which I think is critical to helping a church run smoothly and have everyone pulling on the same rope.

Jettisoning an ineffective or even toxic leader in a church can be a terribly difficult task.  No man or woman is an island and the repercussions can come from a variety of corners.  But it is often far more dangerous to not make this leadership change.  There is no shortage of churches that have found themselves in serious financial trouble after a long-serving treasurer finally retired, long after everyone in the congregation seemed to know she was in over her head.  A worship committee chair who insists on a narrow variety of hymns or a youth director who still believes kids wear poodle skirts and bobby socks to school can be equally damaging.

Very few pastors will see eye to eye with every single committee chair in their flock, and this is to be expected (unfortunately).  But if there is a real weak link in a critical leadership role, you need to carefully make that change.  A year from now you and your congregation will be better for having done it.

Because if all they’re doing is running the church, they’re not really doing the ministry of Jesus Christ.

(Company Name)  is a full-service global logistics, translation and consulting company that uses technology-driven solutions to integrate and simplify complex global operations. (Company Name) provides solutions that deliver measurable value to customers. Our innovative thought, experience, affordable solutions, and proven dSEC principles provide our customers with a competitive advantage through operational excellence.

After reading that statement I knew one more thing about the company than I had known before:  they had obviously hired a consultant to write the mission statement because only a trained profession could squash that much jargon and gobbledy-gook into less than five lines of text.  But I still had no idea what they do.

But is the mission of your church any more clear than that?

The mission statement of the United Methodist Church is pretty straightforward:  “To make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”

I like it because it includes two critical pieces: making and maturing.  In the making, we are called to go out and find people who need God and bring them to him.  We are not just to serve our members, but to be in mission to the community and the world.  When is the last time more than 10% of your congregation was involved in some outreach?  No, delegating this to the designated do-gooders on your missions committee doesn’t count.   What if half of your members went out into the community for a day or a week?  Could you build houses, teach VBS, pick up trash, mend hearts?  You know, be the hands and feet of God like we’re supposed to be?

And the maturing tells us that once they go through the new member class and are assigned an envelope number we’re not off the hook.  Does your church have an intentional faith development program?  Are there small groups where people can ask questions, discuss their faith and be held accountable?  Connecting in a sanctuary on Sunday mornings where we’re expected to sit in rows, face forward and not talk during the sermon is tough.  It really does take small groups for those connections to happen.

In spite of the cynicism expressed over misison statements in the Dilbert cartoons, mission statements can be very helpful.  But sometimes we say we have one mission statement when in reality the mission of the church is to keep our own members fed and happy. 

A church in mission is going to get dirty.  We’re going to make people uncomfortable as we stretch them in their faith and deeds, we’ll need to repaint the walls and replace the shovels and someone’s funeral might be delayed a day because we’re feeding the community on Thursday night.

The logistics company (I really don’t even know what that means) above can afford to have jargon for a mission.  Your church can’t.  I’m not saying you need to spend countless committee hours writing a mission statement.  I’m saying you need to make a statement that you’ll be in mission.

Then go follow up that statement with action.

Many of you are familiar with the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, a 5k (3.1 mile) walk each fall that last year attracted about 25,000 people to downtown Cleveland and raises about $1.5 million.

That’s a lot of people and a lot of money.  I don’t know of another “athon” that involves nearly that many people and is as universally respected as the Komen events.  They could have easily sat back, patted themselves on the back for a job well done and been satisfied.

But when you think about it, 3.1 miles isn’t very far (afterall, my dad used to walk that far to school every day, uphill both ways, without shoes, in the snow, and had to hurry to beat the train) and there were those who were able to do more and wanted to do more. 

So this past weekend about 1,000 of these brave souls walked together and camped together, enduring the heat and humidity, blistered feet and port-a-potties all in the name of raising money for breast cancer research.  And another 300 people volunteered four days, from Thursday through Sunday, to make it all happen.

Oh, and along the way they raised almost $2.5 million.

A group 5% of the size raised nearly twice as much money.  There’s a really valuable stewardship lesson in this.

How many of our churches take the approach that the Komen folks could have?  In our fall stewardship campaigns, we raise enough money to run the church, so we sit back and say “well done good and faithful servant.”  Sure there are people who could do more if we asked, but we’re doing OK, so why bother?

There are those in your church who can give more than they are giving and are willing to give more.  We just don’t give them the opportunity to do so.  If you want to drag them around your county for three days and 60 miles to get the money out of them, that’s up to you but I would suggest you take a more simple approach. 

Develop a vision for how additional investments in your church can make a difference in people’s lives and invite them to participate.  Sit in their office or living room and make the case, explain the need, the solution and how their gift can bridge the two.

Focus on a handful of your members, maybe 5 or 10 percent of your giving units and ask them for a one-time gift, perhaps doubling their commitment to the church this year.

Not everyone will say yes and you need to be OK with that before you get started.  But by providing this opportunity, you may make a real difference, both in the finances of your church and in the discipleship of your members.

The Komen Foundation has only been around since 1982.  In fact I was amazed to read in Betty Ford’s obituary that her bout with breast cancer led the way to this disease being talked about publicly and led to a huge increase in the number of mammograms.

For breast cancer fund raising to have come this far in a relatively short time tells me they are doing things right and we should be paying attention.

Let’s learn from them, shall we?

So when the church decided to get involved in Aldersgate’s effort to replace the 1930s cabins with new, beautiful log cabins they started with some shared understanding.  The people in the pews already knew what the Camp was and what it did.  They had seen the cabins that were built before even the oldest member likely ever went to camp as a kid.  They knew of the value of the camp experience, how great it is to see your pastor lose the tie and fool around on a tire swing or to build bonds with fellow church members around a campfire.

Because the entire church was on the same page, they were able to provide more than enough support to build two cabins, one of which is already under construction.  Oh, and members of the church got the construction started this spring  and will be spending a four day weekend at the camp this fall to finish it.  Time together hammering and sawing equals more sense of community.

What are the shared experiences of your congregation?  Not every church goes to camp for a week (although I happen to believe that a few dozen s’mores in June could make for happier budget discussions in the fall) but many do church-wide missions projects like Royal Family Kids Camp or “youth” mission trips where the average age is well over 21.

I believe that these shared experiences build community within a church.  And community translates to generosity, to a sense of shared purpose, to an environment where, although we may not always agree on everything, we are at least all pulling the rope in the same direction.

There is an old saying, “You can’t rock the boat and row the boat at the same time.”  Maybe it’s time to get the oars out of the closet and begin to develop a congregation-wide project to help them “Rethink Church,” develop that sense of community and get the energies of your congregation focused in a positive, Wesleyan direction.

Oh, by the way, a cabin at Aldersgate costs about the same as a new car.  If you want to learn more about participating in this important effort, contact Eric Dingler, Aldergate’s Camp Director

But those churches still have rooves that need to be replaced, bathrooms that need to be upgraded, and additions that need to be built.  These campaigns can’t wait forever.

On Saturday, September 24, the Foundation will be hosting an all-day workshop on Church Capital Campaigns.

We have two speakers for the day.  Rev. Dr. Michael Reeves wrote the definitive book on church campaigns, Extraordinary Money:  Understanding the Church Capital Campaign.  He has worked with both the Texas and Louisiana United Methodist Foundations and is now the Pastor of Financial Discipleship at a large United Methodist Church in Texas.

He will be joined by Rev. Dr. Brad Call.  Reverend Call is a member of the East Ohio Conference and serves Thoburn UMC in St. Clairsville.  He has been advising church campaigns for years and was recently on the staff at the New England United Methodist Foundation.

Between our two speakers, they have directed more than 400 church capital campaigns.  Trust me, they know what they’re doing.

We will be at Montrose Zion UMC north of Akron.  Registration begins at 8:30 and the program runs until 3.  The $25 registration includes lunch and is priced to allow a church to bring a team of likely campaign leaders to get everyone on the same page.

If your church has a campaign that is “shovel ready” or if you think that maybe you will need to do one at some point, plan to participate.  This is the kind of educational opportunity that does not come around very often.

For a brochure with more information, including the registration form, go here.

This is a four-week program, designed for use with a significant portion of the congregation.  Similar to Schnase’s book, there are four weeks’ worth of small group studies and preaching helps to help incorporate the themes into worship.  I think this is a very effective approach, as it gets the entire congregation thinking about the same things for a month or so.  And it can easily segue directly into your fall stewardship campaign.

At the heart of it is a 28-day devotional guide.  Each study participant (or at least each family) would receive this book with the expectation that they would spend a few quiet minutes every day with it.

For the small group study there is a leader’s guide, lifting up some of the themes from the previous weeks’ reading and a short (30 seconds or so) video.  There are similar videos to be used during worship as well.  I find the videos to be the real weak link in this whole program.  Having watched videos as part of the Disciple study and nearly all of the studies put out by Adam Hamilton, I expected the videos to really add some content and sizzle to the study.  But I find them long on style and short on content.  Viewers are presented with no spoken words, just text on the screen with absolutely beautiful backgrounds and music.  I personally kept waiting for the video get to started, to get to the point, and it never did.  You can get a feel for the videos through the promo video posted on Youtube here.

And if you have people in worship who are not part of the study, the worship videos will not help them get caught up.  I imagined myself in that situation and decided I would feel like an outsider watching something I didn’t understand, almost like an inside joke.

Clearly the strength is the 28 days of devotional reading, written by Bishop Schnase.  I found them very interesting and well-written with enough variety to keep me engaged.  If yours is a church where doing these kinds of reading matches the culture, then this program has real potential.  My wife leads the small group study that we attend, and we agreed that with the middle-aged parents that attend our group the chances of us doing our homework and reading this every day are really pretty slim.

(By the way, if you won’t be offering the study in your church, at least pick up a copy of the devotional book.  There is stewardship preching gold in there.)

So the bottom line is whether or not I would endorse this study for use in your church this fall.  It really depends on your church’s culture.  If a good chunk of your congregation will read the devotionals on a near-daily basis, then I would heartily encourage you to offer this.  But if not, there is little offered to help everyone “catch up” to maximize the impact in worship.

And if you do decide to use it in your congregation, check out online retailers who offer discounts significantly below the “sticker price” and offer free shipping, a real help if you are buying dozens of books for your small group studies.

Saturday was Faith Day at Progressive Field.  So I packed four Sheetzes in the minivan and headed to downtown Cleveland.  I paid $10 to park six blocks away, had my game ticket scanned to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, my wife had her purse inspected in search of illicit bottled water and we were herded in to watch the game.  Five outs later the heavens opened and we dashed for the cover of the stadium concourse, next to the guy selling hot dogs. 

For two hours we heard nothing from Tribe management:  no weather update, no prognosis for when they would start, no indication that as they sat in their warm, upscale offices they even knew they had 10,000 paying fans standing in the cold on concrete waiting to find if they would get to see a game that day.  Finally the game was postponed and we were told that our tickets, assuming we had not lost them, could be redeemed when the game was made up.  If we were not available for the make up date, we were out of luck.

I don’t want to sound like the Indians are doing anything different from any other pro sports team.  We are expected to build them stadiums (stadii?) and agree to be treated like this.

But as I stood in the cold, wet stadium I thought about coverage in the Plain Dealer that week about plans for the new casino.  The developers said they needed to find thousands of close parking places that would be offered free of charge, have valet parking available to those who wanted to feel like VIPs and create a Times-Square like feel when people arrive to lay down their cash in hopes of striking it reach.

When I pay $5.50 for a dog at the stadium, I assure I don’t feel like a VIP in Times Square.

Mike Greenberg, morning talk show host on ESPN Radio, points out that if any other company treated its customers like pro sports franchises, they would quickly go out of business.

Yesterday morning I visited a smaller church in the Firelands District to do a planned giving seminar.  I showed up a few minutes early for the first service.  I was quickly able to figure out which door to use and when I made it to the narthex I was warmly greeted by someone who was not an official greeter.  We visited and he showed me to where I would be doing my talk afterward.

There was no shortage of smiles, greetings and handshakes at both services.  The words to the hymns were projected on the front of the sanctuary, making it easy to follow along the service.  The introduction to the offering was far from heavy-handed and afterward there was again warm conversation.

Although there is no shortage of United Methodists who cringe when I use this analogy, that church gave me the casino treatment yesterday.  I got the impression they were glad I was there, made sure I was welcomed and comfortable and in spite of the ridiculously early hour I had to leave home I would welcome the opportunity to go back.

I’m not sure how you would divide the nearly 800 churches in our Conference.  But I’m sure that many are Casinos and many are pro sports teams.

Take a look at your Sunday morning operation from the point of view of a visitor?  Do you welcome them like a casino or do you do so like a stadium?

“If you’re still open, you’re a success.”  But then he admonished them to get out of survival mode and plan for the future.

I think that’s where we are with church endowments.  The church endowment experts will tell you that endowment income should never be used to support the operations of the church.  Expenses like salaries, utilities and paper and glue should be paid for from the offering plate.  Putting these expenses on the endowment will allow your congregation to become complacent, rather than deciding that they will need to financially support the ministry that they want to have happen.

But I imagine that rule was pretty well trampled on in recent years.  As the Sunday morning offerings shrunk, many churches turned to their endowments and other reserve funds to help plug the holes and keep their ministries moving ahead.  Frankly, I don’t have a problem with that.

But now that things are turning around (knock on wood) I think it’s time that churches get out of this habit.  Your financial situation this year is likely to indicate the situation for the next decade or so.  A shrinking membership with staffing levels that have increased is simply not sustainable.  And we really don’t have any reason to expect that expenses like utilities, insurance or communion supplies will drop significantly.

It is what it is.

Congress is really good at spending into oblivion, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the church.

Make sure that you are talking finances outside of the Finance Committee, that all of your leaders understand.  It does not need to be doom and gloom.  In fact, present the great things you are doing and portray it as an opportunity to refocus your mission and make sure your giving levels are where they need to be.

Maybe this fall is the time for the money conversations I wrote about earlier.

But one warning as you face difficult decisions.  The temptation will be to “take care of us first.”  Some will want to balance the budget by dropping missions, outreach, evangelism, all of those things that cost money but don’t seem to benefit the members.  This is a sure-fire way to accelerate your church’s decline.  A church that ceases to be about others ceases to be a church.  And while the current occupants of your pews may be just fine with that, those who are considering becoming part of your congregation will notice this in a hurry.

This notion when it comes to raising children prompted Lenore Skenazy to write Free Range Kids, a book and now a blog.  In it, she reminds us that kids need to go out and play and have fun.  If they end up with skinned knees or a knot on the head, they’ll survive.  It’s what kids do.  The alternative is for kids to sit home and play video games.  After all,  childhood obesity may be a safer alternative than a bruise or a scrape.

This notion is also true when it comes to investments.  I was working with one church that was developing its investment policy.  It was the most conservative I had ever seen and I asked them about it.  By email I received the following response: 

“When one of our members gives money to the endowment, their number one concern is that this money will forever be there and we can do nothing to risk that the value would ever go down.”

Obviously I don’t know his potential donors as well as he does, but I took exception to what he is saying.  I do not believe that people give the church money with the purpose of making sure it is there forever.  I believe they give it to help the church do kingdom work.

This does not mean that the principal should be invaded casually or that we should considering absurdly risky investments hoping to double our money overnight.  But a responsible investment policy is likely to yield between 5% and 8% every year.  This is money that is available to support the missions of the church.  

A church that invests in CDs as a way to be “safe at all costs” is only making 2% at the very most.  Last year our Balanced Fund returned more than 10% and our Conservative returned more than 5%.  Is there a chance that one or both of these funds could lose money in a year?  Absolutely.  But over time a church with a stronger investment strategy will come out much further ahead.

Think about how that foregone interest multiplies over time.  A fund making 8% will double every 9 years if there are not withdrawals.  Invested at just 2%, it will take 36 years to double. 

But the endowment committee that is not willing to risk anything is, in Free Range Kids parlance, choosing childhood obesity over a skinned knee.

Clearly risk tolerance is an issue that each church must consider on its own, not one that I can come in from the outside and decree.  But I think we need to realize that there are just as many risks in being too conservative as there are in being too aggressive.