Church Planting And Why Basic Training Is Very Important

An assessment of the Hispanic Church Planting Report reveals the necessity of training.

Brendan Jones

Earlier this year, the Send Institute at the Billy Graham Center commissioned a study on Hispanic Church Planting. It was a joint sponsored project between 12 denominations with an advisory team of 8 Hispanic church planting leaders. Members of the Church Planting Leadership Fellowship provided lists of new Hispanic church works, and LifeWay Research fielded the study.

Send Institute Director Daniel Yang provided an overview of what church planting organizations can learn from the survey. Then, Robert Guerrero shared on what we can learn about grit and faith. Today, Ramón Osorio, Ethnic Relations Director at the North American Mission Board, talks about why basic training is critical for church planters.


According to the Hispanic Church Planting Report, church planting basic training plays a major role when it comes to the number of new commitments to Jesus Christ in Hispanic congregations during the first four years of existence.

Typically, church plants grow when members from other churches transfer membership or when believers move to the area and are looking for a church.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with those methods of church growth, the goal of church planting is to expand the Kingdom of God through new believers who will also present the gospel to those who do not have a relationship with Christ.

Planters who received basic training in church planting prior to launching a new congregation saw more new commitments to Jesus than those who did not. Clearly, we have a case for investing time in church planters before they start working on the field.

One can argue that a church planter’s training should continue even after they have launched the church. From the survey, we see that regardless of the type and duration of the instruction, basic training positively impacts the success rate of church planters and the expansion of the kingdom, equipping planters to better understand essential factors in the church planting process.

This knowledge allows new churches to start healthier and be more evangelistic.

Any kind of training that church planters receive needs to establish the biblical foundations for the mission and the Christian character of the planter. Besides those key elements, basic training should address four main factors: calling, motivation, team development and leadership, and community exegesis and engagement.

First, when planters arrive at the basic training meeting, they have usually gone through a selection process, but it is always important to make sure they have a clear calling from God to church planting and to the area where they will serve.

Even though over 80 percent of church plants persist, two out of ten do not. One of the reasons church plants fail is a leader to whom God never asked to start a congregation in that specific place. God calls people to all sorts of ministry, but the type of challenges facing church planters require the planter and his family to be certain of God’s calling. This is the case for 76 percent of the Hispanic planters in the survey.

Second, planters should know their motivation for starting a new church before they move into the field.

Church planting is difficult, and at times the only reason to continue is the certainty of the calling and the conviction of pure motivation. Basic training should lead planters to discover and discard from their hearts wrong motivations like the lack of other ministry opportunities, the desire to ‘show them how it should be done,’ church splits, or other motivations similar to these.

Instead, in basic training, sending organizations must call planters to find their motivation in their love for God, their love for the lost, and their commitment to Christ’s mission of making disciples.

Third, basic training ought to equip church planters in how to form and lead multiplying teams with a missional DNA.

In the New Testament, we learned that the Apostle Paul planted churches in teams. From the survey, we learned that 62 percent of the planters started the work alone. With that, it is encouraging to see that 80 percent of pastors delegate key leadership roles to volunteers, and 75 percent of pastors provide leadership training to their church members.

This team-building approach becomes more important with bi-vocational or co-vocational planters because they need to share responsibilities in order to comply with family, work, and ministry demands. Another advantage of training planters in team leadership is that the congregation starts with a multiplying culture that will facilitate planting new churches in the short term.

Fourth, a successful church plant connects the right church model with the right outreach activities with the right community.

A poorly planned service with ESL classes as a major outreach in a highly educated niche of Hispanics will probably not get enough traction. In basic training, church planters should learn how to study the geography and demography of the area that God is calling them. This becomes more important when 69 percent of attendees live within twenty minutes of the gathering place.

This study of the community begins with collecting demographic data, learning the history of the city and region, and identifying the influential leaders. This information is usually available online or at the city’s office. A point to notice here is that only 41 percent of planters pursue meetings and interviews with area leaders to understand the community. Those who train planters ought to emphasize the importance of connecting with the power brokers in the community they serve.

But the exegesis of the community goes beyond online data.

Planters must know how to understand the culture of the community in general and of the different groups that compose it.

This is true even for first-generation Hispanic pastors because Hispanics in the United States come from different countries, diverse religious, social, educational, and economic backgrounds and, in addition, have adopted values and forms from the host nation and from other people in their immediate context.

With everything they learn from the community, planters will establish the vision, decide the model, and plan the strategy for the new church.

The fact that only 30 percent of the respondents indicated they received training that incorporated dynamics of the Latino/Hispanic context shows how much work we need to do in this area. The exegesis of the people where the church will start is vital, especially when only 35 percent of church plants selected the location because of those they are trying to reach. The rest of the church plants chose their place of gathering based on availability or convenience.

Finally, those in charge of training planters should emphasize that serving the community is not a tool to get people to know you or your church or one that you can use in the infant years of the congregation and abandon once they gather a good group of attendees.

Serving the community is a way of showing the love of God to our neighbors, regardless of their decision about the church or about Christ. The new church plant needs to think in terms of how to bless her community and motivate and teach the members to get involved. It is interesting to notice how 75 percent of adults serve in the church and only 25 percent serve in the community.

If we want to see church start-ups that grow through new commitments to Jesus Christ, mother churches, denominations, or sending networks must provide church planters with basic church planting training before they start planting. To be effective, that training needs to lead the planters towards self-awareness with regards to calling and motivation, equip the planter in working as a team catalyst and guide the planter in how to understand and connect with the community where the new church will flourish.


Written by RAMÓN OSORIO and was first published on Christianity Today

Ethnic Tensions Rises as Ethiopians Protest Church Burnings

After a dramatic October, some say Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed must earn his Nobel Peace Prize.

Last month, Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to achieve peace and reconciliation” as prime minister of Ethiopia. Today, he announced that the unusual unrest and ethnic violence which also marked last month had killed nearly 90 of his citizens.


A reformer and a reconciler, the 43-year-old head of state has made unprecedented changes in just 18 months in office, including ending a longstanding border war with neighboring Eritrea; appointing women to half his cabinet posts; releasing thousands of political prisoners, and diffusing a tense situation with insubordinate military officers by doing push-ups.

“I see Abiy as an answer to prayer,” said Frew Tamrat, principal of Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa, the capital city. “He tries to live by biblical values. He is a preacher of peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness.”

Though he has a Muslim father and an Ethiopian Orthodox mother, Abiy [Ethiopians go by their given names] attends a “Pente” church whose denomination—Mulu Wongel (Full Gospel Believers)—belongs to the Evangelical Churches Fellowship of Ethiopia.

“His style of leadership relies a lot on a kind of positive mindset, word-of-faith-type Pentecostal charismatic religion,” said Meron Tekleberhan, a graduate of the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology currently finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Durham. “He considers that to be the source of his political philosophy.”

Abiy’s peacemaking has not been limited to the political sphere. In August 2018, he successfully reconciled two factions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the largest religious group in Ethiopia.

The Tewahedo church comprises 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population and has more than 45 million followers, according to the World Christian Database. In 1991, Patriarch Abune Merkorios was exiled to the United States in the power transition between the Derg communist regime and the current state, leading to the creation of a so-called “exiled synod.”

Reconciliation between the two factions was unforeseen. According to the Tewahedo tradition, a patriarch is only appointed once the previous patriarch has passed away, so there was no scenario for cooperation. Thanks to Abiy’s input, the estranged leaders of the two synods now work side by side, with believers able to worship together.

Similar to Nelson Mandela’s concept of ubuntu, Abiy often invokes the unity of medemer as his political motivation. The literal meaning in Amharic, Ethiopia’s official language, is “addition,” but the word can also be translated as “synergy” or ”togetherness.” A million-copy manifesto outlining his political philosophy and published under the same title was released in October.


Yet there are many who fear that the peace prize was premature. The Nobel committee itself acknowledged that “many challenges remain unresolved,” noting especially the vast amounts of people forced to flee their homes amid rising ethnic tensions. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, Ethiopia currently leads the world with 2.9 million people displaced by violence.

That number continues to rise as conflict grows. Today, Abiy announced that 86 people were killed last month and thousands more displaced in widespread civil unrest across the Oromia region.

“He may [eventually] deserve a Nobel prize, but not now,” said Meron. “It seems premature, overenthusiastic on the part of the committee, and a bit superficial.”

Tedla Woldeyohannes, an Ethiopian professor of philosophy at Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis, Missouri, credits current political turmoil to Abiy’s “pastoral prime ministership.” In his view, the current deterioration in law and order is enabled by Abiy’s focus on an agenda of love, peace, and reconciliation.

“Expecting people to love one another and to live in peace with one another just because a leader of a country speaks about these topics is not practicable,” he argued in an op-ed for ECAD Forum. “A leader’s commitment to a country is to protect the safety and security of citizens, not to exercise patience toward criminals.”

Recent political conflicts have had religious consequences. Last month’s celebrations of Meskel—a festival commemorating the fourth-century finding of the true cross, according to Tewahedo tradition—reflected an urgent longing for an elusive peace. This year, the proceedings in Addis Ababa were noticeably political. Half a million people chanted: “May there be peace, peace, peace for Ethiopia.”

Just a week before Meskel, tens of millions of people marched across the nation. It was the latest in a series of peaceful protests condemning rising violence towards Tewahedo churches throughout the country. Since Abiy’s ascension, more than 30 churches have been violently attacked, and more than half were razed to the ground. Approximately 45 clergy and church members have also been killed while defending their churches against mob attacks from ethno-nationalist groups.

The largest of these demonstrations took place in the city of Bahir Dar, 200 miles north of the capital. Wearing traditional white religious garments, protesters thronged the palm tree-lined avenues of the nation’s fifth-largest city carrying Ethiopian flags, the colorful umbrellas used in Tewahedo religious ceremonies, and signs and banners denouncing violence and expressing solidarity.

“Members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have been slaughtered,” said Seifu Alemayehu, a demonstration organizer, at a press conference in September, noting also the displacement of thousands more. “The government has been neglectful while this is happening.”

Recent violence appears to be politically motivated. In July, three churches were torched and three people killed in the southern region of Sidama amid protests demanding regional autonomy and ethnic self-administration.

With the coffee-growing region a focal point of an ongoing saga of widespread ethno-nationalism, Abiy authorized a referendum in Sidama this November to determine its status.

“The hostility towards Ethiopian Orthodox churches is deeply tied to ethnic identity politics in the country,” Tedla told Christianity Today.

The Tewahedo Church is mostly concentrated in the northern ethnic regions of Amhara and Tigray, where it comprises 84 percent and 96 percent of the population, respectively. In contrast, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) where Sidama is located, only 20 percent are Orthodox while the rest are overwhelmingly Protestants. [The July/August 2019 issue of CT reported how Sidama is the center of a missions movement among Ethiopian evangelicals.]

Thus, some see the protests as possessing an ethnic dimension. Some of the signs carried by protesters bore slogans such as “church and politics are not the same,” as well as messages accusing the government of inaction, demanding that those responsible be held accountable.

“Abiy is just one man,” said Meron. “As much as he tries to wring change by the force of his personality, a lot of what is happening is longstanding. These ruptures have existed for generations.”

Protesters also denounced efforts to divide the Tewahedo church along ethnic lines. Rising tensions within Ethiopia have not only brought challenges from mobs outside the church but from within as well.

Recently, an Oromo nationalist faction within the Tewahedo church began agitating for the Orthodox to split along ethnic lines in a manner similar to the structure of the federal government, which is divided into nine zones delineated predominantly by ethnic group. Oromia is the largest of these zones, and the Oromo people are the largest ethnolinguistic group in Ethiopia, comprising approximately 34 percent of the population. The Holy Synod, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s highest council, condemned this divisiveness during emergency meetings.

Abiy’s medemer philosophy and vision for religious pluralism is visible among the protesters. Many Ethiopian Muslims and Protestants marched alongside Orthodox believers to condemn the violence. One banner, borne by members of a local mosque in Bahir Dar, showed a cross and crescent moon side by side above the message: “We are one.” Other signs bore messages of solidarity: “We stand together.”

“Sometimes people try to separate us by tribe, language, ethnicity, religion,” said Ephrem Samuel of the SIM-affiliated Kale Heywet church, who attended the protest in Bahir Dar. “But when we come together like this … it shows that we are one.”

But for many Ethiopians, vital unity is not the same as good policy. To justify his Nobel, Abiy must successfully address the nation’s many deeply-rooted challenges.

“He has made a few good starts, but until the elections we are expecting in May, we will not know how well he has done,” said Meron.

“He may be the right leader at the wrong time.”

Written by Jack Bryan for Christianity Today, he is a freelance journalist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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American Pastor Still Detained in India

 ...Awaiting December Trial

Bryan Nerren

Bryan Nerren “always knew the danger” of missions in South Asia but longed to see revival in Nepal.

Each year, when Tennessee pastor Bryan Nerren delivered the closing message at a conference for Nepali Christian leaders in South Asia, he called them to persist in ministry despite the associated risk in a Hindu-dominated region sometimes hostile to their faith.

Now, Nerren, 58, is living out his sermon more than at any time in his 17 years of mission trips to South Asia, trapped in India for more than a month and prohibited from returning home following six-day imprisonment. While Indian officials charge him with failing to fill out the proper paperwork to declare the cash he was carrying, Nerren’s attorneys call the charges unjust and the detention an example of religious persecution.

Nerren, a pastor of the nondenominational International House of Prayer in Shelbyville, Tennessee, did nothing wrong and “is essentially being held hostage in India for his Christian faith,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the evangelical legal organization representing him. “He deserves to come home.”

Released on bail October 11 in the Indian state of West Bengal, Nerren had his passport seized by a judge while he awaits a December 12 court date. Despite backchannel work by the Trump administration and three US senators, Nerren’s family doesn’t know when he will return home.

Arrest and imprisonment

Nerren’s legal trouble began on October 5. He and two other American ministers cleared Indian customs upon arriving in New Delhi and proceeded through security to board their domestic flight to the northeast Indian city of Bagdogra to lead a conference there, the ACLJ reported. After Nerren answered questions for an hour in New Delhi about the cash he was carrying—including questions about whether the funds would be used for Christian causes—customs officials authorized him to board his flight.

But upon arrival in Bagdogra, he was arrested for allegedly not filling out a form to declare his cash. The ensuing six-day imprisonment included a trip to the hospital because of a health condition, where a physician treating Nerren spit on the ground, apparently in disgust, after learning he was a Christian.

Nerren’s wife Rhonda traveled to Washington in late October to meet with State Department officials and Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), and James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the ACLJ told Christianity Today. All officials with whom Rhonda Nerren met are “engaged” and “concerned” about her husband’s case, but no information has been released about the specific steps they are taking to secure his release.

Nerren’s son Kevin, an associate pastor at the International House of Prayer, told CT his father has “always known the danger” of ministering in India and Nepal, but he persisted because of love for the Nepali people. (His work in India was limited to the northeastern region, with a focus on its large Nepali population, and he has only ministered there “a couple of times.”)

Each fall, Bryan Nerren has traveled to Nepal to train Sunday school teachers, and each spring he has returned to lead a staff retreat for a Nepali nonprofit organization that partners with the US nonprofit Nerren established to support his mission endeavors, the Asian Children’s Education Fellowship (ACEF). According to the group’s website, ACEF has trained more than 20,000 leaders in Nepal.

“You will never have a conversation with him without his bringing up Nepal,” Kevin Nerren said of his father. In the hallways at the International House of Prayer, “there are pictures and a flag and mementos from Nepal everywhere.”

‘Revival like none other’

The danger of Nerren’s mission work stems from the fact proselytizing has been illegal in Nepal since 2017. Open Doors USA places Nepal at number 32 on its list of the 50 countries where it is most dangerous to be a Christian.

India ranks number 10 on Open Doors USA’s persecution list, with an increase in attacks on Christians by Hindu radicals reported since the current Hindu nationalist government came to power in 2014.

Despite the risk, Nerren has persisted in his work with the Nepali people because of a desire to see 1 million Christians in Nepal, Kevin Nerren said.

Official estimates put the number of believers in Nepal at about 400,000 out of a total population of 29.7 million—explosive growth since a 1951 census listed no Christians in the country. Yet Kevin Nerren believes the total number of believers is actually “well over” 1 million today, an assessment corroborated by an NPR report claiming the number Christians in Nepal could be “much higher” than officially reported and calling it “one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian populations.”

Nepal has experienced “a revival like none other,” Kevin Nerren said, recounting trips where his father has discovered thriving Christian communities in remote mountain villages. Such communities arise, he said, because Nepalese villagers go to major cities to find work, encounter the gospel there, and take it back to their villages.

Nerren’s ministry has focused on training Nepali believers in Nepal and India to share their faith and fuel that indigenous Christian movement.

If Nerren manages to get out of the region he loves, his next challenge might be getting back in as publicity surrounding his case mounts.

“His name’s probably going to be on a blacklist,” Kevin Nerren said, “especially for India, and he may not get to go to Nepal to do ministry again … He’s struggling with that a bit. But he’ll never stop loving Nepal.”



Written by
David Roach is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Parrot praising God

This parrot lives beside a church... Listen and be blessed.

Rockets Rain Down on Israel

...After Killing of Top Jihadist

So far 150 rockets have hit the south and central regions of Israel, including the Tel Aviv area

The day began with air raid sirens across the northern Negev and the Greater Tel Aviv area.

Overnight, the Israel Air Force (IAF) had taken out Bahaa Abu al-Ata, a high-ranking Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza. Al-Ata was responsible for numerous attacks on Israel in recent months and years. He is also believed to have been planning further larger attacks against Israeli population centers.

The Islamic Jihad response was not long in coming. At 5:50 AM, the first air raid sirens sounded. The terror group openly declared that it was at war with Israel.

Soon after, the rocket fire began and then spread north. At first, they hit the cities of Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod. By 7:00 AM, rockets were being fired at the central Israel towns of Rishon Letzion and Holon. All across the south and in the heavily-populated Greater Tel Aviv region, schools were closed and families were warned to remain near a bomb shelter. Most places of business also remained shuttered, and security officials banned any large public gatherings.

Israel’s surgical strike against al-Ata destroyed only the bedroom where the terror chief was sleeping.

By 8:00, more than 30 terrorist rockets had been fired into Israel. In Ashkelon, shrapnel fell near a sports field, and in Sderot, a residential building suffered a direct hit. There were no physical injuries, but a number of people were treated for shock. Around this time, the first rocket hit the Greater Tel Aviv area.

At 11:00 AM, Naftali Bennett was scheduled to take the post of Minister of Defense. The coming hours will reveal how the situation develops, though most are assuming that this new “round” of fighting could take a few days, and might develop into another major military operation in the Gaza Strip. Of course, whether or not it comes to that often depends on the number of casualties on the Israeli side.

By mid-afternoon, the number of rockets fired from Gaza had reached 150, while the vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile system had intercepted at least 60 of those rockets that it’s algorithms deemed most threatening.

Shock Missionary Move Announced Francis Chan

Moving to Asia to be a missionary

Pastor and author Francis Chan delivers remarks as part of the Q Commons event, broadcast internationally on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019. | Courtesy of Q Ideas/Parker Young

“I’m going to come under this because I’m going to stand before Him one day and I’m going to be judged by Him, and I don’t want to be judged as a coward,” Chan concluded. “That’s the greatest joy you’re going to find in life, is when you understand you have a holy, holy judge for a Father who is rich in mercy and full of love for you and is knocking on the door.” 

Former megachurch pastor Francis Chan has announced he will be moving to Asia in order to become a full-time missionary.

Chan delivered the shocking news during a sermon at Azusa Pacific University on Wednesday, to the great surprise of those in attendance.

“A few months ago, we were in Myanmar and my wife and I and kids, we were just with a translator going from hut to hut in these slums, trying to explain to people who Jesus is,” he explained, according to the Christian Post. “These people had never even heard of Him. And the eagerness, the way they listened, seeing people get baptized — it was just like, wow, what do we do on a normal day that even compares to this?”

Chan went on to describe the moment that he and his wife knew they had to go. “As we got on the plane home, I was like, ‘Honey, I think it’s time to move,’” Francis explained, noting that he felt he had “been fishing in the same pond my whole life and now there’s like thousands of other fishermen at the same pond, and our lines are getting tangled and everyone’s fighting over stupid things.”

The pastor continued: “What if I heard of a lake that’s like a five-mile hike away, and no one’s fishing it. And they’re saying, ‘Man, the fish are biting — just throw a hook in there and they’ll go for it!’ Man, I’ll make that five-mile hike if I love fishing.”



Continuing with the same analogy, Chan went on to note that there were many things keeping him in the United States. “I’ll tell you what would keep me at the pond is. I built a house on the pond, and all my friends have houses on the pond. And we don’t even fish that much, we just go out, and we hang out, and we talk, and we play, and I don’t want to leave my friends.”


“But if my calling is to go fish, and there’s no one fishing over there, why wouldn’t I go?”

Chan, the best-selling author of “Crazy Love,” hit the headlines back in 2010 after announcing that he would be resigning from his position as senior pastor of Cornerstone Church — a 6,000 member congregation in California which he himself founded.

Speaking to the Relevant Podcast in September 2018, Chan said he “got tired of hearing [his] own voice,” and felt as if the congregation was relying on him too much instead of seeking God for themselves.

Chan and his family are set to move to Asia in February of next year.

Churches can boost revenue through preaching and teaching

Show thee the money: churches can boost revenue through preaching and teaching

Talking money at church can be a scary prospect for ministers but overcoming that fear may bolster overall congregational health, according to a new survey of American churches.

The National Study of Congregations’ Economic Practices (NSCEP) found that fellowships that engage in frequent, transparent conversation around receiving, managing and spending money often create giving cultures that multiple income streams.

But it isn’t easy for many clergies.

“They talk about this being something they were unprepared for in their education, so they didn’t have training on budgets and stewardship and finance in seminary,” said David King, director of Indiana University’s Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, which produced the study.

The survey highlights the benefit of taking up the subject. It found that 48 percent of the 1,231 American congregations studied from 2014 to 2017 experienced an increase in revenue during that period, compared to 35 percent that reported a giving decrease.

Congregations established after 2000 saw membership and income rise 66 percent and 69 percent, respectively. Black churches also reported strong gains in both attendance, 62 percent, and giving, 59 percent.

Catholics, at 56 percent, and mainline Protestants, at 38 percent, led among those who experienced declines in giving, the report said.

King spoke with Baptist News Global about other key findings in the report, and about the congregational attitudes they uncovered. His comments follow here, edited for clarity.

Were any of the findings particularly surprising to you?

The financial health of congregations is not quite as bad as we might have thought. We hear of scarcity and closings, and that is the case for many. And the narrative oftentimes is one of rising religious disaffiliation, which is about individuals. But we focused on institutions and we saw a slightly different story: 39 percent of congregations are growing; 38 percent are declining in the number of participants, and many others are holding steady.

Millennials are said to reject traditional tithing. Did the study bear that out?

We don’t know too much from this study about how Millennials are giving in general. Most congregations are not made up of just one demographic. Most arguments for giving don’t strike the connection point Millennials are looking for. They and the next generation want to be connected. Just doing their fair share or contributing to the overall mission of the congregation doesn’t motivate them as will a particular cause. While there is no one way that inspires everyone, we may need to reassess and reimagine how to motivate people to give.

Is the revenue decline among Catholics and mainline Protestants mostly driven by membership decreases?

Catholics and mainliners are declining in numbers and in revenues, Catholics the most strongly – in both numbers and revenues. Mainline churches were declining in numbers but less so in revenues. Catholics are often more dependent on general offerings and often don’t talk about pledge campaigns.

Why are newer churches doing so well with giving?

If newer churches are bringing in non-churched people, there may be an open imagination among them for participating in congregational life through giving and volunteering. There is a newness to it. A lot of newer churches are probably willing to ask because it’s part of the DNA of a new venture, so they can be flexible in establishing those traditions. If you are a more historic congregation, it may take longer to rebuild or expand giving traditions – but it is doable.

How has that been doable according to your research?

Congregations that have multiple forms of giving – such as text-to-give or a mobile phone app – are more likely to be growing. Second, those who are talking about money regularly, teaching about giving, specifically talking about higher levels of transparency in congregational finances and budgets – they are growing more than those who talk about it just once a year.

How can clergy and lay leaders push past the off-limits attitudes around this topic?

There is this taboo, a sacred-profane divide where money is considered to be worldly and we are supposed to be talking about spiritual things.  I think it’s often a nervousness and anxiety.

That’s where transparency and honesty are important. Knowing what’s happening allows these types of congregations to be out front on these issues. Lay people are hungry for conversations on these kinds of topics. They want guidance for themselves and their families on how to teach their kids about personal finance and how to share with others. That opens the door to other kinds of streams.


By Jeff Brumley
Jeff is assistant editor for Baptist News Global. He is based in Jacksonville, Fla.

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