Aug
19
2011

Finance Fridays: Vision and Your Budget

An article by Matt

In many churches across the country the fiscal year is coming to a close and preparations for next years budget are being made. Over the next several weeks meetings will be had, proposals will be made, and budgets will be set. While many church leaders that I know dread this time of year, wanting nothing more than to endure this necessary evil and get on with the rest of their lives, some have begun to lean into this season and use it as a powerful vision communication tool. Last week Will Mancini (whose stuff you NEED to be reading), posted about how you need to be using your systems and structures to communicate your church’s vision.

Pastors often like to make the comment “if you want to know what is important to someone, look at their checkbook.” If this is true for our congregation, this is doubly true for the church itself. The way that your church spends money, and the way that you are organizing your budget is a powerful communicator of what is, and what is not, important to your church. As your church enters into the budgeting season, this is a powerful time to reflect on what leadership communicates as being important to the church versus what your budget communicates as being important to the church. Here are some questions to be asking yourself as you head into this season:

Are we funding things because they tie into our vision, or because we have always done them?
Are the things we most often communicate on Sunday morning being given funding priority in our budget?
If someone unconnected with our church were to look at our budget, what would they say our core values were?
Can I effectively communicate a compelling vision for each major expense in our church?

While not everything that you spend money on is going to fill you with an overflow of excitement, if you come away from planning the allocation of your financial resources without feeling inspired about the next ministry year… you may need to ask some serious questions about why your church is doing what it is doing.

As a bonus, Ben Stroup had a pretty cool post about what the budgeting conversation could look like. Check it out here.

Does the budgeting process inspire YOU? Why or why not?