I was driving through Brisbane recently and I saw a sign on a church notice board that I must confess filled me with gloom. It said, ‘Hall for Hire’. Sounds innocuous! So what is the problem? First, it was a very prominent sign close to a very busy intersection in a location that made it hard to miss. A church’s main business is proclaiming Jesus so surely something about Jesus would be infinitely better than advertising hall hire.

By contrast a friend sent me a church sign sighted on the notice board of an Anglican church in the southern Sydney region.

The sign is eye catching, humorous and contemporary (in the era of the Corona virus). It proclaims Jesus in a way that makes everyone sit up and take notice. I can imagine there will be some who won’t agree but I take my hat off to that kind of creativity. It indicates to me that there probably is a smart leader and a positive ministry going on at that church. Someone is certainly minding the store.

‘Hall for Hire’ says something quite different to me anyway. It says we are struggling and we are out of ideas and short on money. That really is not the sort of image I want to be proclaiming to the community.

I see another problem. Often churches do hire out their halls and then use the money to prop up the ministry. This is a very slippery slope from which there is often no return. I heard of one church that had permanently rented both their halls to a parachurch organization. This meant that it was almost impossible to start a youth or children’s ministry or run any sort of midweek activity.

What is the answer? Most churches don’t have a money problem; they have a vision problem. The answer is to start ministries that will utilize the halls. You won’t be able to fill it up seven days a week if you are starting from scratch but that should be the aim. There is absolutely no reason why a vision team can’t be formed to examine what God-glorifying gospel ministry could be run for men, women, children or youth in the space. At the very least, I would be considering running some form of midweek large group bible teaching or course on evangelism, leadership, church history or Christian ethical issues where I would import top quality speakers. A playgroup to engage local families or easy English to make contact refugees could be other options. In other words, anything positive to show we meant business for the kingdom of God. The longer aim would be to commence a range of other ministry groups.

This of course will take the pressure off the finances because more ministry means more people and more people whose hearts are touched by God mean more pockets and purses open for generous giving. The cycle then continues.

I have hesitated to write this article because I know there will be all sorts of situations and there may be very good reasons why your church is a glorious exception to what I have been saying. So please don’t see me as an unfeeling, uncaring person, unsympathic to the reality of church life in difficult ministry settings. What I am hoping for is that if you are in the position of having a Hall for Hire this post will stimulate you to pray, plan for, and activate ministries to fill the hall so it won’t need to be for hire any more.

 At about 9pm after supper, we would reassemble in the lounge. There I would say something like, ‘I would like to share with you where I see the church going over the next few years. Nothing is set in concrete at this stage. It has not been signed off in any detail by the parish council. But these are the sorts of things that on my heart. I would just like to talk about them and get your feedback.’

Then I would give an overview of the ministries we would like to start, the staff members we would need to support them, the buildings we might need to house them. I would encourage the room to ask questions, seek clarification and challenge the assumptions. Sometimes people would want to know why certain past decisions had been made. Other times a group member might make a really good suggestion which I endeavoured to act on later and acknowledge when it came to pass.But overall I wanted to let people know that the church was not on autopilot and that the leadership were actively thinking planning and praying about our future.

At 10 pm promptly I would thank them, pray for them and conclude the evening as I did not want them to feel they were stuck till the wee hours.

Could these evenings have been for dinner? Helen and I certainly had people over for meals on many occasions but for these particular evenings we preferred dessert and coffee. Over dessert and coffee you can invite more people and they are far easier to host and maintain. Remember the purpose of the evenings is to have a friendly relational way to speak into the lives of as many people as possible and to keep doing so over many years. It is often the persistence with a ministry like this that ultimately makes it effective.
All it needs is a bit of Sense and Sensitivity and the evening is a wonderful form of low key Persuasion. I am sure Jane would agree.

Buy the Book

See also the article The Importance of Vision

In January 2019 the University of Sydney announced that it had reached a target of $ 1 Billion dollars raised from donations to the University’s Inspire campaign that had been started in 2009. Yes, the figure I quoted was one billion dollars. That is not a mistake.

So what did they do? ‘What was the secret sauce’, some people asked.

The first major initiative was to recruit someone, Tim Dolan, who had great expertise and a track record in the field in the United States. The USA has a far more developed culture of philanthropy than Australia. The next initiative was not just to ask for support but to ask in a particular way. Dolan pointed out that Australian Universities tended to have a menu-based approach to raising money. By this he meant the University would give out a list of projects that it wanted to proceed with and ask people to get on board with their list.

By contrast Dolan advocated a personal approach where the resource raiser became a conduit for the donor and the University. This involved making a relationship with the donor, sitting down with them and exploring the sorts of projects that light their fire.

There is also recognition that not everyone can give equal amounts. Some, because of hard work or sometimes accident of birth, are endowed with far more of this world’s goods than others. In major campaigns every gift is valuable however some can give far more than others.  The University of Sydney has recently been receiving about 13,000 gifts per year. It has received around $120 million per year with about $20 million in bequests. Of the final $100 million, while there are many small gifts, most of the money comes from a couple of hundred very large donations. It is a ‘top heavy’ process

Another factor is that the projects are transformative. By transformative I mean that the gift goes to a project that can totally transform lives or environments. Recently I received a letter from my old alma mater, the University of Queensland.  The heading in large bold letters read.

It then told me of a gift that a distinguished professor had received for his research thirty years ago that enabled research that produced a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Truly this is a life transforming accomplishment.

While not everything about a university campaign is applicable to the church, much is. Both Church and University are not for profit. People in both communities are inspired by vision. In both communities every gift is valuable. However it is good to recognize that there will be people in your church that have the capacity to give significant gifts to projects that ‘turn them on’.

It actually should be easier for ministers to fund their churches’ mission than university leaders. This is because for many weeks of the year the people are sitting in front of the preacher who should be casting an enormous kingdom vision as part of the message. The minister should be building an ongoing relationship with the people. And part of that relationship should be discussing with the congregation, sometimes personally and sometimes together, the sorts of projects that light their fire. The minister also has the use of the pulpit and can bring scriptural messages to bear that will transform stubborn hearts into generous ones.

Finally, kingdom of God projects should be inherently transformative. Many of the causes represented by the universities are of totally life changing and I applaud them. Kingdom of God projects should be eternal life changing.

Nothing in what I write here is to advocate slippery underhanded dealings or viewing members as walking dollars signs. It is simply that people give to inspirational projects when they are taught to be generous, and asked to be generous to a cause that is truly out of this world. 

If you are looking for help you probably won’t be able to recruit Tim Dolan. He has gone overseas to help another university fund its mission. However you can find help in my book Giving Generously and I comment it to you. Buy the Book

In my book ‘Giving Generously’ I discuss the role of vision and use the quote ‘Money Follows Vision’. This is not the only factor in raising resources but it is a vital one. I believe the vision must be inspirational. It must engage the hearts and minds of the congregation. This encourages them to sign up for ministry and give to support the vision.

I am not a detail person so I have never believed the vision needs to be overly detailed. I remember being at a meeting once where the minister shared his plans for the church over the next five years. It involved a large spreadsheet that included detailed numbers of how many people would be in each ministry. While that sort of detail may be helpful to some, I have always been inspired by vision painted on a large canvas with broad brush strokes.

 At Figtree Anglican Church (FAC) we had a visionary slogan that appeared on our documents:

 ‘Impacting the region, modelling to the nation and sending to the world.’

We then explained to the congregation that in ‘Impacting the Region’, we wanted FAC to be known positively all over the Wollongong Region, which is largely a self-contained geographic space. It also meant that we wanted to be a blessing not only to our own church members but to the wider community.

‘Modelling to the Nation’ may sound a little pretentious, but what it meant and what we explained was that we wanted to be an adventurous church trying out new ministries and sharing  new ideas with others. For many years the Figtree elders set aside money for ministry staff, including me, to visit other dynamic churches interstate and overseas. We then tried to take the inspiration we had gained, Australianise it, and put it into practice. From time to time other churches would ring up and ask for assistance and we were glad to help them. The material on raising resources found its genesis on my first study tour to the US in 1995.

‘Sending to the World’ was a way of expressing the idea that FAC had a mission and evangelistic heart. For many many years there has been an annual mission trip conducted by Figtree members trained in Evangelism Explosion. That was only one expression of missionary activity and we wanted to say to our congregation, ‘this is who we are’. It also meant that while our local ministry might have suffered a setback if a talented person left to do mission elsewhere or go into theological college, we would actively rejoice in their calling, as sending people out to God’s work elsewhere was a core value for us.