Funding Your Ministry

[Emma Hodges]

I’ve been reading the God Ask over the last few months, and it has been a really good book for me to reflect on. Here are my three main takeaways:

1) Fundraising is biblical, and is an amazing way to grow our trust in God. It was cool reading throughout the book about different times in the bible where God instructed his believers to give to Christian workers and support their ministry. As well, in the Bible it is written all over that we need to trust God with our finances and our work should be a reflection of how we serve him.

2) Don’t under ask people or take on the perspective of “poor me” when fundraising. I can definitely be vulnerable to this as I am not the type of person to naturally be inclined to want to fundraise or ask people for help ever. So, the idea of asking people to give their money to me is very daunting and I’m definitely prone to under ask what I know people can give because I don’t want to bother them. But through reading this book I was reminded of how God instructs us to be generous with our finances and so when I’m asking someone to invest in us I’m providing an opportunity to get them involved in missions and to have them support our work.

3) Know your vision and be sold on it. The author spoke about the importance of knowing your vision and your mission and knowing your “why” behind what you’re doing. If you’re wanting to ask other people to get involved in your vision, and to support you financially or with prayer, it’s important that you’re sold on what you’re doing so that you can sell them on it as well. People aren’t going to be sold on something that they can tell the person is not sold on themselves. It’s important to find out your passion and the reason for why you’re doing what you’re doing and make sure that you have a certain level of confidence in yourself so that you believe that you can accomplish what you’re setting out to do.

[Daycee]

I like your comments about “money smart” versus obedience to what God calls us to! Great perspective, thanks for your thoughts on this.

[Jaylen]

My three main takeaways from “The God Ask” are 1. Your perspective is everything, 2. It’s God’s money, not yours, and 3. Fundraising is a blessing, not a burden.

What I mean by your perspective is everything is that you should make every effort to discover God’s perspective on money and people’s generosity to the highest degree, and then make every effort to nurture that perspective and live it out as much as you possibly can. The enemy seeks to distort our view of fundraising, keep us insecure and doubtful, and cause us to look at the process from a human perspective rather than a spiritual one.
What I mean by it’s God’s money, not yours is that what such a big takeaway for me because it’s so easy to forget. This is sort of like perspective as well, but it is such a core human impulse to look at money as something to save, treasure, not talk about, spend wisely, etc. The reality is, we aren’t meant to be “money smart” (yes we use Godly discernment) but rather we are meant to be obedient to God, and he might tell us to do things with our money that strictly contradict smart financial moves. But, we are God’s servants and the money we possess has been given to us by Him, only to further the kingdom. Money is just a practical element that gets things done, and God wants to get his purposes done in us with our money.
The last one is a hard one. I hear many people talk about how much they hate fundraising, and I think that’s unfortunate. To an extent, we might never come to a place where we love it but we should invest time into finding the beauty and value of it. It’s easy to be burdened by the “no’s”, or the people who don’t respond, or whatever it is. But the picture of a community of a prayerful and financial support team is such a Godly thing that we should all strive to be a part of.