Healthy Church Budgeting | Session 1

Introduction and Demographics

Thank you for taking a good chunk of your Saturday to talk about church budgets. That means we have an unusual crowd of people here today, and I am thankful for you. Let me introduce myself, do a few more introductions of you all, explain what we are doing, and then we will get into it.

As John said, my name is Jamie Dunlop. The year that John lived in our basement was during the COVID-19 lockdown, so we got to know each other really, really well. What a joy to have a dear Christian brother to be with us during those months.

As he mentioned, I serve as one of the associate pastors at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. I have been in that capacity for the last 15 years. Before then, I was a member there working in business in D.C., and in San Francisco for a few years. Because I have a background in business, I tell people I am the associate pastor who dislikes administration the least. That means I get thrown all the questions about budgets, buildings, and legal stuff. That is a relatively small piece of my job, but I do give special attention to thinking through our budget as a church. It is my privilege to just share with you some of what I have gleaned over the last 15 years of thinking through our church budgets.

I want to do some more introductions. John already had a number of us introduce our names and churches. Some people have come in since then. I am not going to go around and introduce everyone today, but I do want to know what roles we all play with regard to the budget. If you at your church are the main preaching pastor of your church, go ahead and stand up. I think that is a very important role as we think about budgets. Thank you, brothers, for all you guys do.

If you are a deacon in your church, please go ahead and stand up. I will actually take names this time. If you could share your name and your church. Treasurer, excellent. What does being a deacon involve at Greater Heights? Excellent, that is helpful, thank you.

If you serve as an elder at your church, please go ahead and stand up. Thank you, brothers, you can sit down.

If you are a treasurer—we have one treasurer over here, any other treasurers? Great. Remind me of your churches. White Avenue and Living Rock. Okay. Are any of you CPAs? No? Well, then you do not have to answer CPA questions. Go ahead and be seated, good.

Are there any other roles I missed? Oh, finance committee. Who serves on the finance committee? We have a few finance committee members, good, thank you, that is great.

Are there any roles I missed? Leadership committee? Okay, so we have the leadership committee right here. There are a few others, but you guys are the leadership committee who care enough about the budget to show up on a Saturday. That is a special, unique role. Excellent.

Well, thank you for all that you do as you think about stewarding resources. As we get into this, I am going to try to make the case that a church budget is much more than just the numbers on the page. It is, I think, in many ways, the best articulation of the spiritual values of your church. So if you are the main preaching pastor of your church, you are trying to set that vision from God's word, but everybody else in this room is very much trying to put that vision into place in a way I think is probably more powerful than most churches realize as they think about what to do with their budgets.

Let me give you an overview of our time together. We are going to get started with the first of two talks. If you look on the next page, you see the handout for that, "Budgeting for a Healthy Church," session number one. Then we are going to have some extended time for Q&A. We will have lunch, and then after lunch, we will come back for a second talk, particularly about how we can encourage healthy giving in our churches. You can think of session one as a lot about spending, and session two as a lot about receiving that money. We will do some more Q&A, and then the last page of your handout has some discussion questions. I am hoping to divide you up by churches and walk you through a number of different questions. If you are the only person here from your church, I am going to put you in a group with other people who are the only ones here from their churches. My hope is that this is not just me feeding content to you, but also you all trying to apply some of these things and consider what you might do differently in your own churches.

The first page of your handout has some of the data you all sent me when you registered, so thank you for doing that. You can see across the top, if you are wondering who the churches represented here are, about a third of us have budgets of less than a quarter-million dollars, a third of us are medium-sized churches between a quarter-million and a million, and a third of us are over a million. About 60% of us roughly have seen those budgets grow over the last five years, and about 40% of us have seen those budgets shrink over the last five years.

I do not know why I asked this question, but it is interesting: on the right, two-thirds of us roughly have a calendar-year budget cycle. That probably means you are beginning to think about budgeting right now as you head into the fall, and a third of us are all over the map in terms of when we do it. Our church starts August 1st, so we just started our new budget. In other churches, I saw July 1st, and some in the middle of April.

That middle graph also shows what we do with our budgets. This is what I have grown to expect, but it was interesting to see it on the page. Basically, if you are a small church, I have no idea what you do with your budget. Many of you as small churches are spending most of your money, if not all of your money, on the salary of your senior pastor, but that is far from universal. Many small churches have budgets that go in all different directions. But if you are a large church, most likely you are spending about 50% of your budget on staff. I have seen that to be remarkably consistent across churches over the years, and that is what you guys have here in the L.A. area.

What do you do with the rest of the money? The bottom chart is just those five churches that are larger, and again, there are very few patterns. Some of us spend a lot of money on facilities—my guess is those are the churches that still have outstanding debt on a facility or are trying to pay rent. Some of us spend a lot more money on missions and outreach. Nobody here spends that much of their budget on programs. I saw at least for the larger churches that ranged from 2% to, I think, about 12%. Where we tended to spend money outside of staff was either missions or facilities, probably depending on their circumstances. I am a geek; I love things like this. You may not be, but if you are, merry Christmas a little early. I hope you enjoy looking at the data to see who is here.

Why a Budget Matters

Let's turn over to session number one, and I will just walk you through this handout. I mainly want to ask the question: why does a budget matter? Then I want to take the answer to that question and apply it across the different sections of our budget.

Many pastors, I think, honestly find the topic of church budgets to be a bit of a snoozer. "They didn't teach me that stuff in seminary. I'm not much of a numbers guy anyway. Can't our treasurer take care of that?" I assume you are either not in that category because you are here, or your treasurer forced you to come, and that is why you are here if you are a senior pastor. Thank you, whichever category you are in.

Nonetheless, let me start by talking about why a budget matters. I think that is honestly a trickier question to get our hands around than it might first appear. It matters because, as Jesus said, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. He certainly told us that thinking about individuals, but I think it very much applies to churches as well. Where your church's treasure is, there its heart will be also. This is something I think really moves in two directions for individuals and for churches; it is both the thermometer and the thermostat. That means my heart will follow my treasure. If I have invested a lot in Tesla stock, then I am going to be very interested when I hear news about Elon Musk. But it also means my treasure will influence my heart, and so if I find my heart is not in a good place, what I do with my treasure is going to change what I care about.

If I want to know what your church really values, I am going to look past your website. I am going to look past the glossy brochure that you give people when they visit your church for the first time. I am going to look past your membership class. I am going to look at your budget. That is what your church really values. The budget is the most honest, the most influential articulation of the spiritual values that your congregation really has.

Every budget tells a story. For some churches, that story is a happy one with the numbers getting bigger and bigger every year. For some churches, that story is a difficult one—living as a church with our hopes stuck in the past, funding what we used to fund in our glory days, hoping that maybe those glory days will come back. For other churches, the story their budget tells is an angry one, a story of appeasing factions, or backroom deals and egos in conflict.

But the story a church budget should tell is the story that Jesus told in Matthew 13, when he said that the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. It has got to be one of Jesus' simplest parables, and I think it is one of my favorites because of how it articulates the joy of following him. When a church sees the value of Jesus Christ, when his kindness, mercy, justice, beauty, goodness, and power have captured our hearts as a church, then a church budget tells a story of us joyfully parting with what this world values in order to tell the world about who he is. That is the story a church budget should tell.

So, a budget matters because of the story it tells, because of the values it reveals. That is why it matters to us. But I think an even more important question is: why does it matter to God? This is the question I really want to use to frame all of our discussions for the rest of the day. As I mentioned before, it is actually a fairly challenging question to answer precisely because God does not need your budget. Why does your budget matter to God if he does not need your budget?

We do not always talk that way, as if God does not need our budget. Sometimes I get up in front of the congregation and plead with them to give money so we can fund a missionary, or imploring them to give up their Starbucks beverage or pizza or whatever it is once a week so that instead of buying half-caf lattes, we can fund someone to go tell people about Jesus. That kind of implies that God needs their money. But the fact is, God does not need their money. Think about Psalm 50:12: "If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine and all that is in it." God's plans are in no way conditioned on your generosity. Isaiah 46:10 says, "My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please." This is the God of Ephesians 1:11, who "works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will," regardless of what your church chooses to do with its budget. God doesn't need your money.

Faithfulness over Productivity: The Parable of the Talents

So why does he care about it? To answer that question, I want to turn to another parable in the Book of Matthew, in Matthew 25, which, if you have thought about stewardship and budgets before, is a very typical place for us to go: the parable of the talents. Let me start reading in verse 14. Jesus has been telling parables about the kingdom of heaven, so he says:

“For it is just like a man about to go on a journey. He called his own servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two talents, and to another one talent, depending on each one’s ability. Then he went on a journey. Immediately the man who had received five talents went, put them to work, and earned five more. In the same way the man with two earned two more. But the man who had received one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money. “After a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five talents approached, presented five more talents, and said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents. See, I’ve earned five more talents.’ “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You were faithful over a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Share your master’s joy.’ “The man with two talents also approached. He said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I’ve earned two more talents.’ “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You were faithful over a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Share your master’s joy.’ “The man who had received one talent also approached and said, ‘Master, I know you. You’re a harsh man, reaping where you haven’t sown and gathering where you haven’t scattered seed. So I was afraid and went off and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’ “His master replied to him, ‘You evil, lazy servant! If you knew that I reap where I haven’t sown and gather where I haven’t scattered, then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and I would have received my money back with interest when I returned. “‘So take the talent from him and give it to the one who has ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have more than enough. But from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. And throw this good-for-nothing servant into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

— Matthew 25:14-30 (CSB)

As I find is so true of many of Jesus' parables, this one has a twist at the end. Without that twist, the parable almost seems moralistic: "Do your best; if you work hard for God, he'll be pleased with you." That is not the gospel of grace. Yet, that reading is precisely upside down. After all, the first servant received the exact same commendation as the second servant, even though he accomplished twice as much.

The twist is what happens to the third servant at the end of the parable: the master sends him to hell. Did you notice that? "In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." If you are reading this with fresh eyes, you think, "Really? That seems kind of harsh." He did not steal the money; he gave it back. Hell just because he did not double what he was given? That does not sound fair at all. What is going on here?

What is going on here is the gospel. The key that unlocks this parable is what the third servant's actions communicate about his master. Think about what the servant is doing. He is trying to serve not one master, but two. He was pursuing a risk-mitigation strategy where he would be in a good place if the master came back, and he would be in a good place if the master did not come back. He would be fine if the master returned because he would still have the money; he did not steal it. But if it turned out the master was not good to his promise to return, he would not have wasted his time on the master's business. I do not know if it is because he doubted whether the master was good to his promise to return or good to his promise to reward the servants when he did return, but the fact is, the servant did his own thing while the master was away.

But any doubt about this master is ridiculous. The master represents God. So when the third servant says, "I knew you to be a hard man," he shows that he does not actually know this man at all. His choices show that his faith was only in himself, and his actions and words only defamed the excellence of the master.

This is very different from the first two servants. They believed that risking everything for the master was the very best thing they could do for themselves, and they were right. Don't miss how the reward is described. What does Jesus say? He says, "Enter into the joy of your master." Having gambled everything on the goodness of their master, their reward is to enjoy forever the goodness of their master.

So, the twist at the end of the parable shows that this is a parable about faith. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "No one can serve two masters." You may think you can serve two masters—living for yourself and doing just enough for God to slip into heaven if it turns out that heaven is real. The third servant is double-minded, and so his life and his choices did not evidence a weak faith; they evidenced that he had no faith.

James tells us that even the demons believe in God, and they shudder. What is the difference between that demonic faith and saving faith? Saving faith does not simply believe facts about God; it believes that God is good to us. It believes that his rewards are worth having. The faith that pleases God, as Hebrews 11:6 says, is faith that believes that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. That idea of reward is critical to faith because reward says, "Whatever he has, I want it, because I trust him with my life."

Saving faith believes that God is so good that we can joyfully venture everything on his promises. When we do that, our lives become living advertisements of how good and desirable God is. But when someone says, "I want to get into heaven, but I also want to hedge my bets because I don't really trust God's plans for me," then that life becomes a living advertisement that God is not good, that God is not trustworthy. They are like that faithless servant.

The fact that faith takes center stage in this parable does not demean the faithful servants' productivity or suggest that in some way it did not please their master. Instead, it shows us that productivity was not ultimately what God cares about. The master rejoiced in their work, not for its own sake because he does not need the money, but because it revealed the servants' faith that he was worthy.

Remember how the master described the faith of those first two servants. He says they were faithful in faith-filled obedience. They bet with their lives that their master was worth everything, and so their lives testified to his goodness and glory. This is why we talk about faithfulness as God's goal for all of our stewardships: our stewardship of our time, our relationships, our talents—which comes from this parable—and of course, for our church budgets.

What is a Church Budget?

Let me unpack this idea of faithfulness from this parable, and then I want to apply that concept to various pieces of a church budget. Faithfulness is used in many different ways in the Scriptures. Here in Matthew 25, the concept of faithfulness can really be summarized in two concepts: obedience and risk. Faithfulness is obedient risk-taking.

The obedience part of that equation, I think, is evident enough. As Christians, the ends never justify the means because God has so often given us the means by virtue of his commands. We do not go about his work, especially in regard to the church, as if the only thing that matters is the end result. Our job is to listen to his word and to obey.

But faithfulness isn't just about obedience; it is certainly not about boring obedience, because faith always involves risk of a type—risking what this world holds onto because we know that God's promises are certain. When the path to follow Jesus and the path of this world run in parallel, obedience does not testify very much to the worth or value of Jesus Christ. But when obedience means risking what this world loves, it becomes a bold statement about the goodness and trustworthiness of the master.

That is so different from how many churches use the words stewardship and faithfulness to basically talk about being miserly. That is not it at all. Risk-taking obedience reveals the goodness and glory of God, which is what matters most in God's economy. That means your actions are valuable in all of life for much more than what they just accomplish; they are valuable because of what they proclaim about God. His glory is paramount.

Let's say you are trying to decide, "Do I go on a nice vacation, or do I give my money to my church?" You consider God's promise that treasure in heaven can never be destroyed, from Matthew 6:20, and you give the money to your church. Why does that please God? Not because he needs your money, though he will potentially do great things with it. Instead, he delights in your generosity because it shows that you believe his word.

Or maybe you take the vacation instead, reveling in the overwhelming goodness of God as you enjoy his good gifts with thanksgiving, like 1 Timothy 4 says. Either way, your faith behind your action is what matters because of the statement it makes about God. Your pocketbook matters to God because of what it proclaims about him, not because of the stuff it produces. Your church budget matters to God because of what it proclaims about him, not because of all the good ministry it produces. That is wonderful, but he did not need you to do that. He cares about our faith because that is what proclaims the excellence of who he is.

I want to take that concept of faithfulness—risk-taking obedience—and use it to define what a church budget is. Then we will just walk through a church budget and think about how it changes our attitude toward different aspects of it. You can see there on your handout my definition for a church budget:

A plan to obediently invest our congregation's money through faith in God's promises.

You can have a different definition of a church budget; I am not going to argue about definitions, but this is one I have found to be helpful. I underlined a few words there.

It is a "plan"; it is not a promise. Uncertainty is okay. Keep in mind that faithfulness is inherently risky. If we do not risk anything, is it really faith? So a budget is a plan, not a promise.

And a budget involves "obedience." Sometimes we operate, even as Christians, as if we can go about God's work any way we want as long as we achieve good results for him. But that is certainly not what Jesus teaches. We are not chess masters moving the chess pieces to accomplish great things for God by following our own rules. Doing great things for God by following your own rules isn't faithful, and it does not say good things about God, does it? It says good things about you. On the contrary, when we decide to go our own way instead of his, it says that God's ways are not worth following. It profanes the one we supposedly serve. So a faithful church budget seizes on obedience at every opportunity because it wants to align its principles with the principles of God's word. We are about showing off his wisdom, not our own.

I use the word "invest." I want to be careful there; I am not a Prosperity Gospel teacher. More importantly, the Bible is not a Prosperity Gospel textbook. We do not give money to our church so that we can go out and get a Porsche next week. That is not how it works. God gives us something much better than a Porsche; he gives us treasure in heaven. So let us not be small-minded Prosperity Gospel teachers; let us be big-minded gospel teachers.

Yet, I do find it helpful to compare a church budget to an investment vehicle like a mutual fund. Think about how a mutual fund works. Thousands of investors entrust their savings to a fund manager who looks for the very best investments in line with that fund's goals. Then someday, like the day before your daughter gets married or the day before you retire, you pull the money out, and you expect to have seen a return on that money.

It is very similar to your church budget. Every year, my congregation invests a very significant amount of their wealth in our church budget. As elders, we scramble around looking for the very best places to invest it in line with our fund's goals, which are the promises of Jesus Christ. Someday, each of those dear saints will stand before the Lord in heaven to give an account for what they have done with what he has entrusted to them. Their money is going to be a piece of that. My desperate hope and prayer is that when they give that final account to Christ, they are eternally grateful for every dollar they invested in their church budget—not because it got them a Porsche, but because it was used for Great Commission purposes, invested in God's promises, and they see a bountiful harvest of what it produces. That is why I use that word "invest."

We invest our congregation's money through faith in God's promises. This is about prudent risk-taking. Much of what is in your budget should not make any sense unless God is good to fulfill his promises.

I was interviewing real estate agents a few years ago to sell a property that we had at the church. I remember talking to this one guy who was not a Christian, and he was trying to butter me up by telling me what wonderful things we did with our church's money. I do not think he had any idea what we did with our church's money. I just thought, "Well, you just lost your credibility right there, because I know if you knew what we did with our church's money, you would not say those things, because we are investing our money in things that you as a non-Christian do not value." That is the whole point. I did not hire him.

What you do with your budget should not make any sense unless God is good to fulfill his promises. We are investing in his promises, not the acclaim of the world.

Yet we must recognize—and this is where it gets a little fuzzy—that there is often not a guaranteed link between God fulfilling his promises and what we do with our budgets, which comes back to the element of risk. If we decide to send a missionary to Northern India, we are making a statement of faithfulness in God's promises, but we do not know what is going to happen. Maybe they get sick and have to come home after three weeks. That was a risk, but it was a risk taken in the good promises of God. We do not know what is going to happen.

I was struck when I was reading through 1 Samuel 14 recently. There is an account of Jonathan and his armor-bearer deciding that just the two of them would attack the whole Philistine garrison. This is what Jonathan says. He says, "Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few." I thought, that is so true to life. God did not promise, "If you go to that garrison, I am going to deliver them into your hands." Jonathan knew that God could do that, and he decided to take a risk because he knows that God loves to gain glory for himself and loves to deliver his people. If that had gone wrong, I do not think Jonathan would have accused God of defaulting on his promises, but he still risked himself in the promises of God. That is what we do in all of our lives, and certainly with our budgets. So, that is what a church budget is: a plan to obediently invest our congregation's money in the promises of God.

Staffing, Programs, and Income Priorities

I want to picture a hypothetical church budget with income at the top and expenses running down the side, and I just want to talk through each of those categories to think about how risk-taking obedience guides us in shepherding a congregation in each of those areas. Then, when we finish, we will have some extended time for some questions.

We will start with income, the top line of your budget. For most of our congregations, the giving of the congregation is going to be the lion's share of budgeted income. For that line of the budget, a key implication of what we have talked about so far is that faith matters more than size. Faith matters more than size.

I very frequently—in fact, two Sundays ago—get up in front of my congregation and say something like, "Look, I don't care about us meeting our budget nearly as much as I care about you being faithful with what the Lord has given to you. If you're faithful and we miss the budget, I'm elated. If we meet the budget but you're not being faithful, that is failure, not success."

So often as pastors—I will speak to the pastors here—we count ministerial success by counting nickels and noses, right? How many people are in the pews, and what do they do with their pocket change after the service? But again, we need to remember our God is a big God. He is in no way dependent on us to accomplish his purposes. He is not waiting with his hands tied, helplessly hoping that maybe you will lend him a hand by giving something to your church budget. That means a healthy dose of the sovereignty and providence of God will provide a healthy dose of humility when we consider our church budgets.

Again, speaking to the pastors here, how much do we sometimes rail against the limitations of the budget? I certainly do that sometimes, at least in my mind. "If these people would just give an extra 20%, look at all the good we could do." Why would a sovereign God allow those limitations? Think of how often in Scripture it is in fact our limitations that reveal the glory of God, like Jonathan's victory in 1 Samuel.

Let me give you two implications of that idea that faith matters more than size.

Implication number one: it affects how we talk about money, and we will talk about this more this afternoon. One of the most precious commodities I trade in as a pastor is the congregation's trust—trust that when I encourage them to give, it is because I love them, not because I need their money. Think about Paul in that very unusual thank-you note that he writes to the Philippians in Philippians 4: "Not that I seek the gift, but I seek the fruit that increases to your credit." We give not because God needs a handout, but because he wants our hearts.

Yet, how credible does it sound for me to say, "I care more about your faithfulness than our meeting our budget," when the congregation knows that my back is up against the wall and I am going to have to lay off staff if they do not cough up more money? Those are very dangerous times for the credibility of my professed love of faithfulness over size, which is why, for our church's budget, I try to build flex into the budget so that we are rarely in that situation. Now, if we are never in budget trouble, we are probably not taking appropriate risks. But if it happens too often, my congregation will begin to think, with good reason, that maybe I love the budget more than I love them. Again, we will talk about that more this afternoon.

Implication number two on your handout: it changes how much money we plan for. I want you to think about a conversation like this, which I have actually heard in my own church before. The administrator says, "Well, it looks like we should expect about $800,000 in giving from the congregation this year." And the elders say, "Well, why should we set the budget at what we expect? We're people of faith, right? We believe in a big God. Let's stretch our faith; let's aim for a million." It sounds very spiritual, doesn't it?

But when we do that, I think we mislead people about the nature of faith. Who are we putting our faith in when we do that? In that great chapter on faith in the Book of Hebrews, Hebrews 11, the most frequently used word besides "faith" is the word "promise." As Christians, our faith is grounded in God's promises. If you decide, despite what the treasurer says of $800,000 expected, to aim for a million-dollar budget, that may be fine, but do not call that faith in God, because he has made no such promise. As the budget year closes and we are a quarter-million dollars behind, who is likely to reach down deep to give more because we are behind—the faithful or the faithless? An engineered budget crisis rarely motivates faithfulness. Let us not accuse God of defaulting on his promises when actually what we have done is tried to write checks that God has never signed.

So, if faithfulness matters more than size, we need to be careful how we talk about money, thinking about Philippians 4, and we need to be careful how we construct the budget so that we are not misleading our people about what faith really is. Faith is faith in what God has promised, not what I wish he would have promised.

But some of you are church plants, and you actually have another big line of income in your budget, which is fundraising. Let's talk about that. What are the implications of faithfulness as you think about fundraising?

Fundraising is a beautiful example of partnership between churches, and it should normally be temporary. Like Paul in Philippians 4, when you go to raise money from other churches to help start your baby church, you need to believe that you are doing those people a great service, which is what Paul writes about so much in Philippians 4—that he is doing what is good for them. He says he does not need the money; he says he can do all things through God who strengthens him. He says he is not looking for the gift; he is looking for the fruit that increases to their credit.

When I was 21 years old, I met Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guy. I met him on the street, and he had just started Amazon.com. I did not think much of it at the time. I was like, "Oh, you're a book guy, ha!" Not anymore. But let's imagine for a moment that he had said, "Hey Jamie, if you give me a $10,000 check right now, I'll give you 1% of the company." From today's perspective, who would thank whom? Would Jeff be so grateful I gave him money? No, I would be grateful to Jeff for making me a billionaire! That is what we think about when we think about churches helping other churches. It is a wonderful opportunity to give them the opportunity to invest in a new gospel work that will bring glory to God forever in heaven.

But there is a downside, and that downside is that sometimes that extra funding can actually begin to suppress the work of God in a church. So we need to be careful. I find it so interesting in 2 Corinthians 11, Paul is writing to the Corinthians and he says this. He says, "Did I commit a sin in humbling myself so that you might be exalted, because I preached God's gospel to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by accepting support from them in order to serve you." We do not know for sure, but when you line up the dots, it seems quite possible what he is referring to is actually the gift from the Philippians that he commends them for in Philippians 4. So he goes to the Philippians and says, "You guys did a great job giving to fund my ministry. It was wonderful, and I am so thankful because it increases the fruit to your credit." But then he looks at the Corinthians and says, "Hey guys, this is not good for you long-term. It was good for a time, but it's not good long-term." He does not want to infantilize the folks in Achaia, in Corinth, even as much as he wants to praise and thank the people who gave the money in Philippi.

Normally, a church should pay its own pastor, according to 1 Timothy 5:17. We will look at that more this afternoon because it is good for a church to accept responsibility for the weight of its own ministry. When we think about applying these principles of faithfulness to the income we raise from other churches, there is a great upside: it is a beautiful example of partnership. Long-term, it can be risky. Risk-taking trust in God's promises will sometimes result in risk-taking trust in other church partners, but we should always obediently seek to stay in line with the focus of Scripture.

Long-term dependence on outside sources can weaken a church because they do not feel the need to give. It is a model that is difficult to replicate. If you are forever dependent on outside sources, how can you plant a church yourself? And there is a loss of natural accountability of the pastor to the church, and dependence of the church on the pastor, which is a natural cycle that is good for a church. Weigh the benefits and the costs as you decide how much you are going to let your church be dependent on others and for how long. There are certainly contexts when churches may, for many years or even decades, be dependent on outside sources, but that should not be normal. Normally, we want a church to provide for itself.

That was a bunch of thoughts on the income side of the budget. Let's then walk through some big categories on the expense side of the budget.

An important one to begin with—I do not have much to say about it—is a place to meet. This congregation gave money a long time ago to build this building so they can meet here. That is a wonderful thing. A church does not strictly need to spend money on a place to meet. In the first century, it seems they always picked public places like Solomon's Colonnade in the temple or Philemon's house where the church at Colossae met, which presumably were free of charge. Yet, because the one thing your church needs in order to exist is a place to meet, I think it is fine, particularly for a new church, if most of your budget is going to fund a place to meet. That, I think, is very much in line with the priorities of Scripture. A place to meet that accommodates the whole congregation is a wonderful blessing, and it is worth spending money on.

The second item that we often see in a budget—and I have more to say about this—is staff. Risk-taking obedience comes from faith, and faith, Romans 10:17 tells us, comes by hearing the word of Christ. So it makes perfect sense that Christian churches would invest in solid Bible teaching. Again, going back to 1 Timothy 5:17, we see that particularly clear there where Paul basically says, "Look, do you have an elder in your church who is ruling well?" And then he explains, by ruling well, he means his work is preaching and teaching. Well, then you should pay him so that he can focus his time on preparing good teaching for you.

If you are going to have money in your budget for staff, there are two basic questions you need to figure out. The first is: how much do you pay? That is why it is important to recognize that in the New Testament, every instance of a verse that talks about pay for church staff emphasizes generosity—whether that is 1 Timothy 5:17 that says we should give them double honor, or Galatians 6:6 that says we should share all good things with those who teach us, or Titus 3:13 where Paul says, "Do your best to speed Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their way; see that they lack nothing."

We want to be generous, and I actually think that little verse in Titus 3 is a great summary of what our goals are for compensation: "see that they lack nothing." Not like Creflo Dollar, making sure he has a second private jet, certainly! But neither the way many churches do it, which is to give him as little as you can afford to get away with, such that his ministry is compromised because he is having to get a second job or his marriage is struggling because they do not have enough. No, see that he lacks nothing; see that his ministry is in no way hindered for lack of money because he needs to feed his family. That is more important than him feeding you as his church.

How do you put that into practice? I have often found that benchmarking off of comparable civil service positions in the government is useful. I do not think I say that merely because I am from Washington, D.C., but certainly, as I think about being in a government town, the government has very similar goals for compensation as a church does. Nobody goes into government service, at least ideally, to get rich; you go into government service to serve. Yet, the government wants as much as possible for that high school principal or police chief or whatever to be able to spend their entire career in public service without having, at some point in time, to break away because they cannot afford to feed their family. They are very similar goals. You are not in it to get rich. I make a lot less money than I did in business even 15 years ago, but I do not have to wonder if I can continue to serve my church because I cannot put food on the table. My church has found it useful to benchmark pastoral pay based on how the government pays their staff in Washington, D.C., and you might find that useful as well.

If you are a pastor and you think about your own compensation, just remember it is not just about you; you are training your congregation how to care for a pastor, and how your compensation is set, in one sense, is the umbrella for any future staff hires that you might make.

Now, it brings up a good question: what if your church cannot afford you? That is a tough one. Sometimes the fact that your church cannot afford you is not real; they could afford you, but they do not want to afford you. The money is there, but they just do not want to spend it on you. Well, then you have got to figure out if that is because you are an unusually costly pastor—like, your wife is from Australia, and once a year you have got to go visit the grandparents, and wow, that is a big chunk of change. Well, it may be that you need to go to a church that can afford you. Other times, they legitimately cannot afford you, in which case, for a time, it might be prudent to raise money from elsewhere or to get another job. But I think we want to see that as temporary if at all possible because of the priority that the Bible places on preparing excellent teaching for God's people.

I was giving this same talk in China once to a group of underground pastors, and one of them made a very astute comment. He said, "You know, Jamie, here in Shanghai, we want the best of everything: the best education for our kids, the very best food, the best places to go on vacation. But when it comes to the preaching of God's word, any will do." He said it is so commonly the attitude of churches there in Shanghai, when in factual fact, we want to be jealous for the time that our pastor has to be able to prepare good sermons, and we should pay him a good salary so he can do that full-time and not have to have a second job.

So that is the first question: how much do we pay? I gave you a few guidelines there.

The second question: how many people should we pay? Some of you are small churches, and you are just barely affording one pastor; you do not have to worry about this. But some of you are larger churches, and you are having to figure out: beyond our main preaching pastor, do we want to set aside money to have other staff?

A few thoughts for you there. There is an advantage to having administrative help in a church. Deacons are wonderful, but as a church grows, sometimes deacons cannot do everything, and it makes sense to have someone on the church staff to do stuff so that your preaching pastor is not distracted. I remember one particularly calamitous event with our health insurance as a church, and I went to talk to my senior pastor about it. We talked for about five minutes, and he said, "Now I am going back to my study to focus and prepare and teach. Thank you for letting me do that; it is in your hands now." In that moment, I was administrative help, and I was serving him to make sure that he was not distracted from the teaching of the word, just like the deacons in Acts 6. That is useful.

I think it is also useful for a church to always feel a little understaffed, so that you are always thinking carefully, "Do I really need to hire someone to do this task, or is there any way I can hand it off to people in the congregation?" I think about Paul's writing in Ephesians 4, where he says that God gave us teachers of the word—giving us a bunch of categories—to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

That is what our job is. My job as a pastor is not to do ministry; it is to equip the saints for ministry, because they need to do that ministry among one another so that they can grow up into maturity. If I do it for them, they do not grow up. My job as a pastor is very much to cut up ministry into bite-sized pieces and hand it out to the congregation. As a pastor, I find it easier to do that if I am always pushed in that direction—like, I do not have enough staff to do everything, so I need to push some of these things out to the congregation. That is a good pressure to feel.

That is very different from what you will hear from the church growth folks, who say to overstaff so that you can grow. Maybe there are times when that is prudent, but generally, I think that it is prudent to be a little understaffed because the temptation for church staff is always to do it themselves, because it is easier to hand it to a paid staff person than a volunteer. Ephesians 4 says no, we have got to push most of the ministry out to the volunteers. So, as much as it is good to have other staff, that is one caution to have in mind.

A second caution is that when you have too many staff, you can professionalize ministry. The people in the pews feel like, "Oh, I shouldn't disciple; that's the pastor's job. We've got all kinds of people on staff discipling people. That's not my job."

And we can make ministry a little more niche than it should be, by which I mean I can have a pastor for young adults, and a pastor for young adults over 30, and another pastor for young adults who just got married. I am using my staff really to divide the church instead of to unite the church. Very often, the more staff we have, the more niche ministry can be, which feels great for the congregation because it is highly customized, and yet I am working against the general push of the New Testament, which is for us to be one, not divided up.

Balance all that with the dangers on the other side of understaffing: the danger of understaffing is pastoral burnout, a Messiah complex where "I am the pastor, I love rescuing people, so I get to rescue people." Somewhere in there, hopefully, you can have some wisdom as to how many people you want to have on your church staff, again thinking about the importance, if at all possible, of a congregation getting to the place where they can pay for their own needs.

That was a lot about staff. I have a little bit less about the other areas.

Let's think about programs and ministry as you consider things like children's ministry, youth ministry, and neighborhood outreaches. You are going to have to decide how extensive, how polished, and how staff-driven those ministries will be, which is very much a budget question. Do I fund the children's ministry at half a million dollars a year, $50,000 a year, or $5,000 a year? There are a lot of decisions involved that are philosophy of ministry decisions when I think through how generously we are going to fund it, and as I make those decisions, I am seeding the DNA for my church and setting expectations for the kind of ministries they should expect.

A few considerations I think about regarding how much I should fund these different ministries in the church:

Number one, like we talked about earlier, thinking about Ephesians 4, I should prioritize the involvement of the congregation. We often think about ministry programs as the way to get people in the door with a focus on the people as recipients of ministry. I think Paul would have us think as much, if not more, about the people doing the ministry—people as providers of ministry. That seems to be where his focus is. So don't just think about ministry as a way to get people in; think about ministry as a way for us to pursue maturity together as we do ministry as a congregation.

Second, I think it is important to prioritize excellence in everything we do. We are servants of the King, so we want to prioritize excellence. There is some degree of tension between my first consideration and my second: you can pursue excellence more when it is all done by paid staff, but that is not helpful. We want to push ministry out to the congregation, but just because they are volunteers does not mean we leave excellence on the side. Again, we are servants of the King; he deserves for us to pursue excellence in everything we do.

A third thought for you: prioritize programs that bring the church together rather than splitting them apart. I mentioned that before because the great focus of the New Testament is on the unity of the church. We are Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, men and women, slave and free. In the New Testament, the focus is the fact that our identity is one in Christ, and so we should have a church where we have friendships and relationships that cross all these different divisions. Programs sometimes split the church up; they do not bring the church together.

If you are thinking about a youth ministry, is your youth ministry basically carving off the high school students to be their own church, or is the youth ministry mainly about finding twenty-somethings in the church to disciple the high school students and get to know their families? That is one version of that program that pulls together, while another splits apart. Sometimes it is worth the cost to split apart—so, you know, the two-year-olds might just be their own thing, and that is fine—but where we can, let's try to use programs and budget dollars to bring people together.

And fourth, we should prioritize programs that make the gospel attractive versus making the program attractive. What are you trying to win people with? Are you saying, "Come to this church because we have the most awesome children's ministry and your kids will clamor to come here instead of to Knott's Berry Farm?" I can see how that brings people in the door, but what are you making attractive? Do you want to have a children's ministry that glorifies Jesus, that makes the gospel attractive? That principle is not going to answer all your questions, but I hope it is a good one to have in the back of your mind: am I making the program attractive or the gospel attractive?

Spiritual Leadership and Budget Management

Next category if you look in your handout: administration. When you spend budget dollars on administration, essentially you are trading time for money.

When I grew up, I grew up in a very working-class community, and every fourth Saturday I would spend the Saturday cleaning the church building because I could not imagine my church growing up spending money on a cleaning crew. I now serve at a church in the center of an urban city with a bunch of young professionals, and we hire a cleaning crew. Why is that? Because the time-money trade-offs between my resource-poor congregation growing up (which was time-rich, inclining us to do it ourselves) and my current congregation (which is more affluent and very busy) are different. I would far rather my twenty-somethings be off discipling and evangelizing than cleaning toilets.

That is going to be the basic trade-off you have for all the aspects of administration in your budget: do I want volunteers to do this because money is more precious, or do I want to pay people to do it because time is more precious?

And my goodness, do not underestimate the value of deacons. I get away with so much ministry by depending on my deacons in the church that other churches hire staff to do, and I think that is good, it is biblical. It means that sometimes we are a little more complicated than we need to be, but I think generally that is strengthening the church, building the church. I love those deacons. We only have deacons for three years and then they step off, which I think is one reason why they are able to give so much energy and attention to that ministry. But I love what they do for us as a church. Don't forget your deacons, who were the original administrators in the church in Acts 6; that is what they did, they administered so that the unity of the church could be protected.

One last category: outreach. How do you think about the money you spend doing outreach, be it local or even global, what we call missions?

A few thoughts here for you. I think a healthy mindset for that ministry is we want it to be healthy more than we want it to be big. Your church is a church; it is not a movement. You are not trying to start something that is eventually going to go all around the world; the Lord is going to do that. You are just a church. You want to focus on what is healthy, whether that is supporting one missionary or a hundred. How can we make sure that we are being healthy in what we do?

Teach your congregation the importance of building an engine for ministry. Sometimes churches actually undervalue what happens right in front of them because, for great reasons, they love what happens overseas. I just want to remember: there are many churches that can send that missionary to Uzbekistan, but only you can reach your neighborhood. I feel like I am the great defender of the church building to our elders, and they value that, which I appreciate, because none of you are going to fund my church building—we are the only people doing that. So I want to, not in ways that are over the top, make sure we protect money for funding the engine of ministry, be that staff or building, so that long-term we can do far more externally.

How do you invest when you think about missions and outreach? It is very hard to figure out where to invest. We all know how to invest in things that we can measure but we cannot see—that would be like the stock market. You are not going to visit Tesla's factory when you decide to buy Tesla stock, but you have all kinds of research and financials, so you have a good sense of what that is worth. We also know how to invest in things that we see but we cannot measure. For example, a crisis pregnancy center down the street—we know them really well, we know what they are doing, we are over there all the time, but we cannot really measure what they are doing. We do not really want to measure what they are doing, as that can begin to push them in bad directions.

Missions consists of investments you cannot measure and you cannot see. That makes it really hard. You do not really know what that missionary in Northern India is doing. You certainly do not want him to send reports to say, "You're getting paid X number of dollars for every baptism." That is more like giving a report card to the Holy Spirit than it is shepherding your missionaries. You want him to be faithful, you do not know what the results are going to be, and you certainly do not know the timescale on which those results will happen.

I was struck the other day when someone was telling me that there are 250,000 people in Burma who trace their spiritual heritage to Adoniram Judson. Judson did not see much fruit in his lifetime, but look at what the Lord has done. If I paid Judson for baptisms, there would be a lot of deferred compensation there because the Holy Spirit decided to bring a lot of fruit 200 years later. So I cannot see it and I cannot measure it; what do I do then?

Well, I try to get to know it as well as I can. Even if I am a small church, maybe I piggyback on another, bigger sister church who can spend more resources getting to know their missionaries. Personally, I try to spend two weeks every year overseas with our missionaries—getting to know their work, getting to know their families, getting to know the partners they are with. We have a house we built next to our church, so when they are in the States, they come and stay with us for that time instead of going somewhere else, because we want to know them. There is no substitute for really knowing the work you invest in. If you have 100 people in your budget for your mission section and you are giving them each $100 a month, that may look great because you have, you know, the United Nations of flags on your budget, but you cannot know any of them very well. I say concentrate your dollars so that you can really know those people you are funding, because you cannot measure it and you cannot see it.

That is a bunch of thoughts about the expense side of your budget. Let me address one last question: who is in charge of your budget?

I would say if the goal of your church budget is to accomplish as much ministry as possible, like any other charitable organization, then a committee of business-minded professionals would be the ideal management team. But that is not our goal. Our goal is to be faithful; our goal is risk-taking obedience. That means a church budget is a spiritual document with spiritual aims, and that means it requires spiritual leaders.

Just think about how many spiritually fraught questions are wrapped up in your budget process. Should we continue funding this missionary, or is it time to cut funding and gradually get him to the point where he can come home? Is this program over here fostering unity, or is it fostering consumerism? Should we cut the building fund to increase missions, or should we cut missions to increase the building fund? We are trading spiritual values, and none of those are administrative questions; those are all pastoral questions, those are spiritual questions.

Keep in mind the analogy I mentioned earlier of a church budget as a spiritual mutual fund. Who are those spiritual investment managers? I would encourage you to find as your investment managers those people who have been given the responsibility for spiritual leadership in your church—not your finance committee, or your deacons, or your trustees, though they may be of assistance. Those are your pastors, those are your elders, those whom Christ has gifted to your church and whom you have determined meet the spiritual qualifications of 1 Timothy 3. Those are the spiritual leaders the Lord has given you to guide you in every spiritual task as a church, and certainly, this is no less than those.

Just think about how it works in Acts 6. The deacons were to provide for the widows so that the apostles, who seemed at the time to be serving as church elders, were not distracted from their teaching. And yet, who was to make the spiritually fraught decision of which widows qualified for help? In 1 Timothy 5, Paul told Timothy, the pastor, that he was the one responsible for figuring out who was on the list and who was off before he hands it over to the deacons who administer that work. If administration is full of spiritual significance, elders and pastors should never think it is something we can merely delegate.

We can certainly get lots of help, particularly if we are elders and pastors who do not have an administrative bone in our bodies, and yet Titus 1:7 calls us overseers. That is a word with administrative connotations. Elders and pastors are overseers; we are in charge of administration generally.

I think it is prudent for a congregation to approve a budget. I am a Baptist, so I have more theological oomph to that assumption, but even if you are not, they are the ones giving to the budget, so I think it is prudent for them to approve the budget. But they should be led always by their spiritual leaders, by their pastors and elders.

And again, I do not presume that those men are automatically competent for that work. So where do you get help? That is where you have deacons, that is where you have a finance committee. I spent 10 years in business before I became a pastor; it prepared me very little for managing a church budget. I was married for 15 years before I became a pastor; managing a household budget was a much better preparation. If you are looking for competent help as pastors and elders for your budget process, do not assume that just because a guy is successful in business, he knows anything about budgeting. Maybe he is a great sales guy and has never seen a budget in his life. But find someone who seems to manage their household well in regard to the budget; you will probably find someone who thinks well about a church budget.

Just keep in mind, churches are very different than businesses. A business spends money in order to make money; a church is investing that money. A business is an enterprise that is oriented toward accomplishing something; a church is fundamentally about showing Somebody. There are some overlaps, but I think they are more different than most people realize.

So what should your elders and pastors do with regard to the budget? I have seven ideas for you. You do not have to write them down; they are actually in the discussion questions you are going to get to later on this afternoon.

First, if you are an elder or a pastor, I think you need to ultimately be responsible for setting the top-line income estimate, because that is a very pastoral decision. If we came up with $800,000 last year, should we set it at $800,000 this year? Should we decide that this opportunity is worth so much that we are going to ask the congregation to give more this year? Did we ask so much of them last year that we should lay off the gas a little bit this year? I think that final decision is a pastoral decision: how can we best lead the congregation in that balance of being aggressive for Jesus and gentle?

Second, pastors and elders should lead in just making sure that the high-level allocations seem right. Should we spend half the budget on staff, or do we feel like we are overstaffing or understaffing when we do that? Again, that is a pastoral decision. Should we spend 30% on missions and only 10% on the building, or should we flip those two?

Third, I think pastors and elders are responsible for basic quality control to make sure that every line of the budget is going toward something which is worthwhile and God-honoring. Now, some of you have budgets that frankly are spending money on things you would prefer not to spend money on, but you want to be patient as the congregation matures to let them discover that themselves. That is fine, so I am not saying that elders must make sure that the budget is immediately ideal, but it should be ideal for where your congregation is right now. You are trying to look across all those budget lines and just say, "Do we have confidence we are spending money well?"

Fourth, pastors and elders are the ones who need to balance long-term plans with emerging opportunities. You know, we are trying to get our building renovated, so we are putting money aside every year for that, but now there is a guy we are really excited about planting a church the next town over. Do we pause the building renovation plan to help him? That is what my church did one year. Again, that is a pastoral trade-off. Balancing long-term plans with emerging opportunities is something that your elders should be involved in.

Fifth, pastors and elders should be assessing which opportunities for ministry are your unique stewardship of your church versus others. There are some things your church is better qualified to do than almost anybody else; outreach in your neighborhood would be an obvious answer. But there may be some particular skills that your members have, or a particular insight they have from your history as a church, or maybe you have special language abilities as a church, or insight into a particular culture where you would say, "Okay, this is something we have a special responsibility for because we have a special stewardship," and that will show up in the budget. Again, that is a pastoral decision.

Sixth, elders and pastors should be the ones to break the budget. When do you decide that things have changed and we need to do something different than we have budgeted? That would always come to my congregation to vote on, but the elders are the ones who lead in that process. Last year, we had a wonderful opportunity to hire a guy who had been serving as an elder for many years, had finished his theological training, and had been planning to go serve at another church. That did not work out, and we had an opportunity, so the elders came to the church and said, "Hey, this isn't in the budget and it's really expensive, but this doesn't come along every year. We would like to break the budget, with your approval, and hire this guy." That is something that elders and pastors can lead.

Seventh, last thing, I would encourage elders and pastors to be the ones who talk most about the budget. I think it is fine for a deacon or a finance committee to show them the numbers, but I have found personally there are so many wonderful opportunities to teach when I talk about the budget. I would be jealous to let anybody else do that because I want to pastor my congregation. My congregation may not be familiar with the language of Chalcedon or the order of decrees in God's sovereign will, but they know the language of money. So talking about the budget is an unusually good opportunity for me to pastor them in a language they are familiar with. So I would encourage you: if you are a pastor, think carefully before you let someone else talk about the budget, because this is a prime opportunity for you to pastor them.

If you look at the next page, I just grabbed this from a book I wrote, but I have a little schedule of how I talk about the budget at each of our bimonthly members' meetings. Every month, I have a different little kind of mini-talk that I give. I never prepare them in advance; I normally just think about it while I am walking up to talk to the congregation, but this is my opportunity to just highlight different aspects of the budget and what the spiritual lessons are that I can give to the church about that.

With all that detail thrown at you, let me conclude. A budget is all about faithfulness—being a faithful steward of what Christ has entrusted to your church. And the most important stewardship you have is not for your money, it is not even for your people; it is for the message you have received. I find it interesting that in the New Testament, we are often told to be good stewards, but rarely does the context suggest that what the author is speaking about is our money. 1 Corinthians 4:1-2 tells us that we are stewards of the mysteries of God, and it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. 1 Peter 4:10 tells us that we are stewards of God's varied grace as we practice the gifts that he has given to us.

So as you assemble your budget, and as you debate your budget, and as you deploy your budget and reflect on your budget, what stewardship do you have primarily in view? I hope that for you, faithfulness does not connote something boring like Old Faithful continually going year after year. I hope faithfulness brings to mind something exciting: the opportunity to steward the mysteries of the gospel through the risk-taking obedience of your congregation.

I am going to stop talking for a bit, and we will just open up for general questions. I think we are down to one mic—oh, we have two. So if you have a question, put up your hand. John will run speedily to you, and tell us your name, remind us of your church, and give us your question.

Questions and Answers

Vincent: Vincent from Emmanuel Church, Orange County. I'm wondering your thoughts on, especially in Southern California, building budgets. When should we think about faithfully saving for a building? Buildings here can be five to ten million dollars, and we have a church that's 40 or 50 members. What's it look like to faithfully save for a building, or even think about it, versus having just a ton of money sitting in an account that we could be using for other things?

Jamie Dunlop: When do you save for a building? I also come from a place where buildings are super expensive, so my church could put every dollar of our budget toward a building, and it would take us five years to save for the building that we are in—which would mean hiring no staff, no missionaries, just everything for the building, which obviously is impossible. I am thankful for the people who paid that building off in 1927 so that we could enjoy it today.

So I would say if you can get to the point where you can have a building, that is a wonderful thing. I would encourage a church, as soon as you are in the place where you feel like you have the staff you need, to begin saving for a building. How much you do that, I don't know. Does that mean you are ever going to buy a building? It may not. It may mean that you get to know other churches in the area, and you pray that some church which is dying would give you, or sell you at a great rate, their building, and that money goes to help renovate and revitalize that facility. I have seen many churches do that. But if you have no money in the bank, then you are rarely going to be in a position where you can even do that.

So I would think, because a meeting space is so critical to what it means to be a church, that would be a pretty early priority to begin saving. But pray that the Lord would help you figure it out, because you are probably not going to buy a facility like this from scratch. You are going to need help, and ideally, that help will come from another like-minded congregation that says, "We've got a facility, we don't have much of a congregation anymore, but we serve the same Lord as you do. How about you take it off our hands?"

Eric: Eric, First Baptist. You said that you build flex into the budget. What does that look like? Is it on paper, or is it just inflated numbers? How do you practically do it?

Jamie Dunlop: It is funny; when I gave our budget report two weeks ago to the congregation, I actually walked through what that flex was, and I told them why. I said, "I want you to trust that when I tell you to give, it's because I want the fruit that increases to your credit, not because my back's up against the wall. And if my back is up against the wall, I will be honest with you and I will tell you. This time I'm not asking because of the fruit increasing to your credit, though I hope it does; I am asking because I don't want to lay off my senior pastor."

And so I explained there are a few things in our budget that we do to try to increase that credibility. One is our reserve fund. So, a reserve fund or a line of credit can be useful because if for some reason we have a bad year, I do not have to balance the budget immediately; we can kind of hit that and then balance over the next two years.

The second is we put money aside for facility improvements every year, but we do not spend that money until the end of the budget year. So that is a piece of flex; if we do not give as expected, we just delay those improvements by a year.

And third, we will sometimes have pieces of the budget that are discretionary—say, a kind of one-time block of funding for a project overseas we would like to see—and we will wait until we see some financial benchmarks hit through the year before we decide to release that money.

Joshua: Joshua, Emmanuel Church of Orange County. In connection to building flex, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about what we've done since we are a church plant—two years old. By the Lord's grace, we have godly men who are working with the senior pastor to develop a budget. One of the things that we had done, because we are small and we didn't know how many people the Lord is going to bring, and it was tough to even figure out monthly giving, was to put in place a stretch budget alongside our regular budget. It was something where, somewhere during the year, if the Lord was growing our giving, or as we were fundraising we were getting more funds, we had put in particular categories where we would like to allocate money. We asked the church to vote on both budgets, and there were questions around that and some confusion, but it's been encouraging for us to exercise that. My question is: what do you think about it?

Jamie Dunlop: Yeah, I have seen churches do that. I think it can be really helpful when you have a great amount of uncertainty as to how much money is going to come in—like, "Hey, it could be $200,000, it could be $400,000, we really don't know." It can be somewhat discouraging for a church when they could be giving $400,000 but you only spent the first $200,000, and you don't really know what's going to happen with the next $200,000, in which case those stretch budgets can be useful. It could be two budgets, or what I see more commonly is just to say, "Hey, here's what we're committed to, and here's our plan for the next $100,000 should it come, should the Lord choose to entrust us with that."

I would just want to clarify that for the congregation. Again, like I said earlier, my goal is for you to be faithful givers. So if we cannot do the stretch budget, that does not mean things have gone wrong, and if we can, that does not mean things have gone right. Because there is a high degree of uncertainty, as you can expect, we think it is prudent for us to have a plan that goes beyond the expected value on the income line. So, yeah, I think it can be useful. My church is exceedingly predictable; we are a government town, everybody knows exactly how much they are going to make the following year, and we are pretty recession-proof, so we have not done that. But it is only because what we have is pretty steady year-to-year.

Alex: Alex, Christian Fellowship Bible Church, West Covina. What percentage does your church give to programs, and what are those programs at your church that bring the congregation together? And how do you go about when that program is not as effective, or pulling money from that program?

Jamie Dunlop: How much we give to programs kind of depends on how you count staff time, but if you counted all the staff time that goes in, I think it would be about 10%. That would be mainly student ministry, children's ministry, and youth ministry; those would be the big three.

For each of them, we have tried to design the program so that it accomplishes its aims but still tries to pull people together. I mentioned youth ministry is very much focused on trying to encourage people between the ages of youth and their parents to be involved in the ministry. For our youth retreat that is coming up next weekend, we have 45 students signed up and 20 volunteers signed up who are adults. I love that ratio—the youth ministry is not just the youth pastor and the youth, it is a whole bunch of the congregation and the youth.

For student ministry, we have very much tried, again, to make it so that our staff on campus are there to pull people from the church into the lives of students and pull students into the lives of the church. I call it a bridge from the church to the campus, and the campus to the church. It does not always work the way we want it to, but instead of saying, "You're the evangelist of the college students, send us a letter when you get a convert," I want them to be the bridge to help us as a church be involved in the lives of those students.

In children's ministry, it would probably be the least unity-focused; we are just trying to give the kids something good to do so their parents can be fed by the word of God. Of course, that uses a lot of volunteers, and I think it is good for those volunteers, but that would be the place where it is pretty focused on high-quality programming, mainly just giving the kids something so their parents can be fed.

Louis: Louis, First Bilingual Baptist Church. What factors do you consider when you're setting income or projecting income for the following year?

Jamie Dunlop: Yeah, when I first came into my position, I had a nice, fancy regression model that I used where I tried to throw in all kinds of factors, and I realized that a church is not big enough generally to warrant that. Basically, I had high precision but low accuracy, so I backed up.

For my income, I just look at what our numerical growth is going to be—which for us is not much because our building is pretty full—and what is the giving per member I expect to see. As I think about giving per member, I look at inflation rates, I look at what the federal government is going to do for a pay raise the next year, I look at what the trend has been the last few years, and I just kind of make my best estimate.

But that is for my church. I do find that a simple model is generally better than a complex model; it has proven more reliable. So I just look at those two pieces of information: number of members and giving per member, and I just try to zero in on those.

If we are going to do a church plant, I will look not by individual, but by the group: how much did this group of 40 people give to the church this last year? This is so I can be prepared both for the sake of that church planter—"Hey, guess what, you've got a quarter-million dollars coming your way"—and so we can plan for a quarter-million dollars less in our budget.

Audience Member: How do you deal with a small church where you have low income and seniors making up your congregation?

Jamie Dunlop: My guess is your giving is probably fairly predictable, so I would probably budget pretty much for whatever the trend has been. If we are declining by 5% per year, then I will budget assuming we decline by another 5% next year. If we are increasing by 5% per year, I would budget for an increase of 5% per year. My guess is your older saints' income is fairly predictable, they are pretty faithful, they have well-established habits, and so that trend line is probably going to give you a pretty good sense of what is going to happen in the future.

I will talk more about this this afternoon, but I want to be content with that. If we are an older congregation and we cannot give very much, the Lord knows what he is doing. I can trust him with that small budget. Praise God for whatever he entrusts to us, and we will do with it whatever we can.

Lucas: Lucas, Crossway Church in Pacoima. I came from a church previously where they had a budget mitigation committee. When can that be pragmatic or prudent? That question came up when you were talking about implication number two: how much money we plan for. When giving falls beneath the budget, they adjust the budget on the fly.

Jamie Dunlop: My preference is to do that in advance with some of those big pieces we wait to spend later, because it is honestly hard to adjust the budget on the fly. Most of the commitments are not really fungible. Like, we have the building we are going to have; I cannot decide to have half the building. I do not want to fire staff, who sometimes took years to put in place, because of a short-term budget crisis. I want to feel the same about our missionaries as I feel about our staff; it might feel easier to reduce their support, but they are no less precious than the staff I have right in front of me. If I look at those three pieces of my budget, that is 90% of my budget right there. So if I have a budget crisis, there is not a lot that I can cut that is not cutting into muscle. This is why I would wonder if that committee would be better served to think through what in the budget we want to save until we know the money is there, rather than cutting things once they are actually in process. But I do not know your situation, and I could be misreading it.

Desmond: Desmond, senior pastor, Greater Heights Mission Bible Church. height, not heights, trust me, no "s". I've been here for two and a half years, and through God's grace, this church has been here for 61 years, but really with no budget—no planning of a budget, no foundation of a budget. Coming in, we're learning that we want to do this correctly. So where do we start? We are a church of about 50 to 60 people. Where do we start, from the years that this church has been surviving in God's grace, with people who are faithful but who are not CPAs or bookkeepers, but who have been truly just following what has been going on for 60 years? How do we actually build out a budget for next year?

Jamie Dunlop: Great question. Well, you do not have to have a budget to have a church. I know a church in China where the budget is a banker's box under the pastor's bed. It is probably not best practice, but they are still a church!

Where do you begin? I would probably begin just by looking at the past. Now, I do not know how things are changing now that you are there, so maybe past data isn't particularly helpful, but my guess is it is better than nothing. I would just look across the past three years and use that to get a sense of, okay, how much income do we have? And then, with loose hands on it because it is your first year, set big categories. Don't budget for staplers, but budget for staff, missions, and facilities. Give yourself some big categories, and maybe over the next few years as you get into it, you can begin to narrow those down and be more specific. Start with big categories, hold it loosely, but at least tell the congregation, "Hey, if you give, this is what we intend to do with the money." I think that sometimes people do not give to churches because they do not really know what is going to happen with the money, and so having a budget is a pastoral help to induce people to give, which helps them be more faithful to Jesus. I love that you are here, and I think it is a good direction to go.

Joe: Joe, Risen Church, Santa Monica. I have two questions. First one is about faithfulness on the giving side. It's really hard to measure—only God can measure faithfulness—but there are certain exercises we can do. Is it something like looking at your member list and saying, "We have 100 members and only 99 gave, so I need to talk to that one person"? Or is it two sermons a year? Or is it pulling folks aside saying, "Hey Joe, I haven't seen you give anything in the past year, so are you okay financially?" The second question is: when you present the budget to the congregation, do you have folks that say, "I don't agree on that budget line, Jamie, you got to take that out," or is it just more presenting it and everyone's just like, "Yeah, okay, we bless it," or do you have debates with the congregation as a whole?

Jamie Dunlop: Great questions. Yeah, telling my congregation "I care more about your faithfulness than our budget" is a useful pastoral principle, but it is very hard to actually implement because the Holy Spirit has not given me a "faithfulness factor" report for the congregation.

There are a few things I look at. I do look at the portion of the members who do not give, and our elders actually work through that list precisely because of what you said: I want to make sure they are okay. I generally assume if someone is not giving, there are problems elsewhere in their life that are easier to tackle. So we will have a list of people who do not give, and we'll say, "Well, they're a student, they're unemployed, oh, this person... why? That's concerning." I might give them a call. I am rarely going to say, "I am calling you because you didn't give this year." I am more just going to say, "Hey, could I come sit down in your living room and just see how you guys are doing?" I will probably find good things to focus on in that conversation, because giving is sometimes the last piece to fall in place when someone is not living faithfully, or it is the first sign of struggle.

I look at giving per member. I look at the difference in giving between a member in their first year and a member in their third year—that is a number I give to the elders every year. I look at the portion of our giving that comes from our top 5% of givers, because I do not want us to be deceived into thinking that everybody is giving when actually we just have a few wealthy people who are giving more and more every year. So there are a few data points that I publish for the elders once a year, a bunch of statistics just to help us get a sense of how we are doing as a church in terms of our giving.

How does our process work? In May of every year, after the elders have worked through our budget, I will give a copy to the congregation. It is about 25 pages, so it is pretty detailed, and it involves both the numbers and our reasoning behind those numbers. We will have a special meeting on a Sunday afternoon for anybody who has questions or concerns about the budget to voice them to the elders. I encourage people: you do not have to wait until that meeting. If you have a concern or something you think should be done differently, why don't you send it to me ahead of time?

Our constitution, as long as our church has been around, has said that the budget is an up-or-down vote with no amendments from the floor, because that gets pretty chaotic. A hundred years ago they did it that way, and we still do it that way. So we have that special meeting, the elders take all that feedback and think through how we might want to change the budget proposal, but then the congregation just says yay or nay on the whole package because it is a package; it is not something you can edit easily from the floor. It is a majority vote.

We have the little Southern Baptist offering envelopes that we put in the pews, so we know we have names behind probably 99.8% of the gifts that we receive. Your church may be different, in which case you cannot do some of what I talked about. And I tell people, as a pastor, I do not want to know how much you give. I think that really messes with your motivations for giving. But the computer wants to know how much you give so we can give you a tax receipt, so I encourage people to give in a way that is trackable, but that is not because I personally know. Only the computer knows.

We are going to go with Mako, and then we are going to go to lunch.

Mako: Mako from Evergreen Baptist Church. Our fiscal year starts January 1st. You mentioned that at Capitol Hill it starts August 1st. What is the reason behind it, and has Capitol Hill always started the fiscal year on August 1st?

Jamie Dunlop: No. In 2017, we shifted from a January 1st fiscal year. The reason why we did that is because as our congregation got older and wealthier, we were getting more and more of our giving in December. These days, we will get three times as much giving in December as we do in November, which I do not think is unusual for a church. If that is at the end of our budget year, then the greatest uncertainty around giving is at the very end, and there is nothing we can do about it. By shifting to a different fiscal year, we were actually able to lower our reserves, because if we discover that December giving did not come in like we had hoped, we have seven months to adjust our spending, particularly with those kind of flex amounts, to make sure we can still land in the black.

Mako: Was it challenging to move the fiscal year from January 1st to August 1st? Was it a big challenge for the congregation?

Jamie Dunlop: No, I wish my congregation cared more about things like that! We just did a seven-month budget one year, and then we went to a 12-month budget the next year.

The reason we did August 1st was more unique to us. I have a young congregation, so they tend to be gone in the summer. I could either choose August 1st or October 1st, because I wanted the budget year to start just before or just after our members' meeting. We approve it, and we start the new budget the next week. We do our members' meetings in July and September, so I had to choose: do I present the budget when all the members are here, but we vote on it two months later when many of them are on vacation, or do I present the budget when they are all on vacation and we vote on it when they are all here? I decided to opt for the first, because I figured if you were here when we presented the budget and you don't like what is in there, you can still tell me about it, but if you weren't here when we presented it, then the vote is not as useful. That is why we ended up with August 1st.

Let's thank Jamie.