The emerging new way to pay for outreach and church growth: Church Economics 101

When Mark DeYmaz took over a Kmart to open his thriving church of 500, he helped his budget by opening a for-profit coffee shop and renting space to a gym next door.

In an age of declining tithing, DeYmaz proposes churches get smart, abandon obsolete models and incorporate business savvy, not to get rich from the kingdom, but to multiply outreach.

“The more people joined our church — the homeless, the immigrant, the undocumented, the poor — it cost us money, DeYmaz says on a Vice News video. “We realized that if we were going to have effective ministry, we were going to have to have multiple streams of income.”

But don’t accuse him of upending the way church is done. Tithes and offerings were just one business model. DeYmaz is not condoning stingy Christians. He’s simply using his brain and God-given resources to maximize impact, he says.

His church, Mosaic, belongs to the new burst of millennial churches that project a certain image with their relaxed dress codes, untraditional interior decorating, and hipster pastors. They’re rethinking church to be relevant for the next generation.

Pew Research charts a declining number of Americans who call themselves Christians – 65% — 12% lower than a decade ago.

“Religion is less central to American life,” says Rebecca Glazier, professor of public affairs at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. “People are just not identifying with formal religious institutions and finding spiritual fulfillment through them the way that they used to in generations past.”

Glazier sees a trend of churches using excess space to help… Read the rest: Mark DeYmaz Church Economics

Tithing inspired them to get debt free

Newlyweds Anthony and Jhanilka Hartzog didn’t worry too much about their $114,000 in combined debt since they both had good jobs. He worked for a New York-based IT firm and she was a licensed mental health counselor.

“I felt like we’ll pay it off whenever we pay it off,” Jhanilka says on a CBN video. “There’s no rush, just kind of like everybody else does, you have car payments, you have student loan payments, this is just part of life.

But as they attended church, they were challenged to think about giving more to help others in need and to think about creating generational wealth, what they hoped to pass along to their children one day.

“I’m going to church now. I want to be a part of it. I want to support,” Anthony says. “The same way we were budgeting for our food and for our clothes, we were budgeting for our tithing as well.”

By budgeting, they reigned in their expenses. The couple took another step; they supplemented their income with side hustles. Anthony signed up his new car for peer-to-peer rental. Jhanilka started a dog sitting business. Anthony worked at a gym on weekends. The industrious couple also started a cleaning business.

Within two years, they had paid off their student loans and credit card debt.

“As we were raising our income, we were tithing,” Anthony confides. “The money we were tithing was never ‘felt’ because we were always getting it back.” Read the rest: Get debt free in God.

Lit and Scribbles with Jae shares on $$$

Jae

I don’t write hardly about the tithe, but I believe in it. Today, I’ve asked Jae to share her experiences, that might be useful to somebody. She’s an accomplished writer on wordpress, and I certainly enjoy her posts always. Here’s what she says:

As you can see clearly from her face, it’s Jae.

I have found that regularly donating a portion of my income to church and charity always keeps me in good financial hands. It doesn’t mean that I’m rich or that things aren’t tight, but it seems like when you give to God he always looks after you. I heard Jon Hunstman, Sr. once said, if you want to be rich find a charity and donate to it regularly. I think rich can be both a financial thing and a spiritual thing. I feel like because I try to be generous to the less fortunate with what little I have I’m “rich” in many ways and have a happy life.