On Church Budgets
Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : March 20, 2007
On Sunday, Missio Dei continued its reboot process by talking about church finances. One of the things that we decided was to never have more than 49% of our church finances go towards staff and facilities. This isn’t to say that it is evil to spend most of your resources on such things. However, we have drawn a line in order to reinforce our convictions as well as to challenge the common church practice of spending most church resources on a few “holy” people and an unter-utilized “holy” building. Instead, most of our resources will go towards hospitality: foodstuffs, help for people in transition, training and education, etc.
I think that this will be harder than we think…to really do church budgeting in a way that subverts the norm. Any good ideas about the sorts of things we can include in our budget?
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My former church did a triple tithe on everything that came in:
10% to our sister church in Nepal
10% to our immediate neighborhood
10 % to other missional endeavors on an ad-hoc basis
I understand limiting your spending on personnel, but I think it may be a bit short-sighted to limit your spending on “facilities” in general.
Perhaps you should consider putting a limit, instead on “worship facilities” or “facilities primarily for Christian use.” Because one of the greatest impacts a church can have on its community is to maintain a facility that is geared towards THEM, such as a shelter, a youth rec center, a food distribution center, etc.
Ryan…you’re probably right. I think that there are some definite uses of buildings that could have huge impact in our ministry (like housing). I think, for us, we’re thinking of office space, class space, and meeting space as “facilities” space.