One of the supposedly airtight principles of church leadership is that you can tell what a church’s priorities are by seeing where they allocate their funds.
That is true in some churches, but not in all. Maybe not in most.
Here’s why.
The vast majority of churches are small, and small-church budgets are far more often dictated by what we don’t have than by what we want to do.
What is amazing in many small churches is not how little money goes into the budget for benevolence, outreach, discipleship curriculum, and mercy ministries, but how much ministry gets done with little or no budget support.
Off-Budget Ministry
When writing a budget for the coming year, many pastors will use an online or denominational template that recommends how much money should be allocated to various ministries, salaries, and maintenance.
But the smaller the church, the more likely it is that you’ll fall way outside those parameters. Standardized budget patterns are simply not able to account for the extreme variety represented in small-church ministry.
Unless the budget template you’re using gives plenty of leeway for various church sizes, types of communities, and different ministry choices (like bivocational pastoring), it will probably be more restrictive than helpful. And even if it does take that into account, use their recommendations loosely, with plenty of room to adapt to your circumstance.
Small-church priorities are determined far less by where we spend our money than by how we invest our time, our energy, our compassion, and our enthusiasm.
All over the world, there are churches that are making sure
- The sick and elderly get visited
- The homeless get warm food and a roof over their heads
- Kids from poor homes get new (to them) clothes for school
- Unemployed neighbors receive free job placement assistance
- Drug addicts have a place to go for recovery
- And so much more
All without a line-item in the church budget.
Doing It Matters More Than Spending On It
I’m grateful for the bigger churches that have enough income to pay their pastors a living wage, cover the mortgage for hurting members, and do cool graphics to catch people’s attention about the ministries of the church.
But anyone who insists that every church of every size needs to have a minimum budget allocation for every ministry doesn’t understand the reality of small-church life. And that’s a big miss, because small congregations are where about half of all church ministry gets done.
Compassion, worship, discipleship, and evangelism don’t need to be in the budget in order for them to be on a church’s priority list.
They just need to happen.
(Photo by Marco Verch | Flickr)
