3 Ways to Save Money in Your Church Plant

By -
Church planting can be an expensive ministry but it doesn't have to be one. In this article, I offer three ways to save money in your church plant...
1) Reuse other's VBS materials.
Many churches use their Vacation Bible School materials one time and throw them away. As a new church plant, we did not have the money to purchase VBS materials. Our friends at First Baptist Church of Dunkerton, Iowa were happy to pass on their materials to us free of charge. We received all of their purchased materials as well as a truckload of decor! Once VBS was finished, we left many of the decorations up in the children's department as our decor theme for the year.

2)  Ask churches to help with your audio/visual needs.
Some of the most expensive items to purchase for a new church plant are audio/visual equipment. While we would all love the opportunity to enjoy a shopping spree at the local A/V store, churches can be a great source of free or cheap used equipment. In my weekly newsletter update, I asked churches to assess their A/V equipment assets and let me know if they had anything they weren't using and would like to give to our church plant. Some readers gave money specifically for the purchase of equipment and Amazing Grace Baptist Church gave us a truckload of equipment, which they had received from another church but had not used!

3) Mobilize your troops to get things done.
When we signed the lease for the storefront property that would serve as our ministry/worship center, it needed a lot of work. We had to design and build walls and a stage, run wiring for sound and televisions, and paint every square foot of the property. That would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to be done by a contractor. Instead, we prayed for the Lord to send the right people to help us get the job done for the cost of materials only. He answered our prayers and the right people came forward from our core group and sponsor church to lead us through the renovation. The Baptist Convention of Iowa sent a group to help one Saturday and New Life Church, our sponsor, helped throughout the process. It took longer then if we hired a contractor and it became my full-time job for about a month, but we saved a bunch of money doing it ourselves.Our people also developed a sense of ownership and were strengthened as a core group through the work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Casting Lots and Determining God's Will

By -
What is the deal with casting lots in the OT and why is it used in the NT? Was this a valid way to determine the will of God? Can we cast lots today to determine God’s will for ourselves? When I first became a Christian and began to read through the Bible, This subject led to some very challenging questions that I could not find answers to. Recently, our pastor, David, has been taking the church through the book of Acts on Sunday nights and last Sunday we read about how the disciples used lots to decide who the replacement disciple would be for Judas Iscariot. This reminded me of my own question that I had before and how many others may also be questioning this as well. Why would believers use what would appear to be a system of chance in order to distinguish the will of God? To answer this question, let’s look at 3 things. First, we will need to understand just what “lots” is and what it was used for. Second, we will look at an OT passage in which it was used. Finally, we wil
Read more

Inclusionist, Exclusionist, Pluralist...What do they all mean?

By -
While I was preparing this week to be on a panel for the discussion of theological issues I came across a very difficult question that pushed me to spend some time solidifying my own doctrine on a certain issue. The question came from a student in our youth group: "How can a person who has never been exposed to the gospel (through no fault of his own) be expected to come to a saving knowledge of Christ?" This simple question has been discussed for centuries and divided denominations since the first denomination was formed. Dr. Ken Keathley, now a professor at a Southern Baptist seminary wrote an interesting work on this very question. His paper delineates the differences between the three schools of thought on the issue presented. The excerpt presented below is from his paper titled, "None Dare Call it Treason: Is an Inclusivist a Paul Revere or a Benedict Arnold?" appearing in the Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry, Vol. 1 No. 2. "Exclusivism holds that
Read more

The Trinity and The Triple Point

By -
In our monthly theological discussion group, a group of men and I recently discussed the Trinity . We now understand the Trinity to be: The unity of God subsisting in three distinct persons. We reviewed the different views of the Trinity, how the concept is defined in the Bible, and how it has come to be accepted as the orthodox view currently. At the close of our discussion , we began to discuss the different analogies of the Trinity. Here are a few that we discussed through the direction of Millard Erickson's book "Christian Theology." First, we talked about the egg. The egg has the yoke, the surrounding liquid, and the shell. All of these make up the egg. The egg is like the Trinity in that it has three parts unified into one egg. This is obviously an incomplete analogy since each of the parts of the egg are not really completely separated and yet totally unified. Each part of the egg has a different nature. So the egg analogy fails. What about the human/humanity ana
Read more