You want to engage your community. Your church wants to grow.
You didn’t get into ministry to just crunch numbers and balance spreadsheets.
If that was your goal, you could do it in a hundred other places.
But God called you to make a difference and spread the good news about Jesus. Now, the daunting challenge of managing a budget is overwhelming the vision God has given you.
Here’s the good news: Your budget doesn’t have to be a hindrance to your church’s vision.
This blog post will show you how to set up a budget that matches your mission, vision, and values, helping you better use your resources to achieve what you’ve been called to do.
What are Mission, Vision, and Values?
The heart of your church is its mission, vision, and values. It’s how you describe your church’s unique ministry in your community around the world.
- Your mission is the fundamental reason your church exists. Every decision you make should be made through the lens of your church’s mission. Often rooted in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), your mission reflects your commitment to making disciples in your neighborhood and around the world.
- Your vision is a forward-looking statement that paints a picture of where your church is going. It provides your church with a direction for the future. Ideally, it inspires your congregants to work together to achieve it.
- Your values are the core principles that guide your church’s behavior and decision-making. They influence how you do your ministry.
Your church’s mission, values, and vision aren’t independent elements. They work together to ensure your church stays focused on what you’re called to do, why you’re doing it, and how you’re doing it. Your mission provides your purpose. Your vision provides the direction. Your values provide the guiding principles that shape how you pursue your mission and vision.
If your church hasn’t spent the time to work through these elements, it’s important you do so before putting together your next budget.
Building Trust: Why Alignment Matters
Anyone who has paid attention to the social pressures over the last few decades has noticed a precipitous drop in the public’s trust of public institutions—from the government, to mainstream media, to financial institutions.
And of course, the church is not an exception. A September 2023 article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that trust in nonprofits remains relatively high. But that support is declining. Out of all the institutions included in the survey, nonprofits had the steepest drop in trust, with a 4 percent decline in the previous year.
What builds trust between you and your congregants (the kind of trust that leads to increasing generosity)? According to one George Barna study, the most important factor—across all generations—is whether a church uses its resources wisely. Nearly two-thirds of Baby Boomers and more than half of Gen Xers call this extremely important.
Your givers want to know that when they give to your ministry, their donations are going to help support what God’s doing in your community and around the world. You do this when you align your budget with the mission, vision, and values you tell people you have.
A Comprehensive Approach to Church Budget Alignment
So how do you make sure your budget reflects your church’s mission, vision, and values? You’re intentional about it. You won’t accidentally align your budget. If you simply set out to build better alignment without building practical ways to do so into your process, it won’t happen.
Start with the action steps below.
- Clarify your mission, vision, and values. Fuzzy ideas about what drives your church won’t help you be aligned. Make sure everyone involved in budget creation gets your mission, vision, and values and is committed to reflecting them in your budget.
- Go line by line through your budget. Ask yourself whether the line item is related to your church’s mission.
Be brutally specific here. Force yourself to write how the budget item reflects your mission.
Or consider asking team members responsible for certain areas of your budget to do this before they submit figures to those responsible for finalizing it. - Assign a rating to each expense based on how well it aligns with your church’s core values. It’s important to recognize that most church values come with some inherent tension. For instance, a new ministry might score highly on “community service” but lower on “stewardship.” Using a 1-5 scale for each budget item can help you clearly see the trade-offs you’re making. This approach also allows you to identify if you’re consistently favoring one value over another. Aim for a balanced approach.
- Break down your vision into goals you can fund. Your vision should be so big that your church can’t possibly accomplish it in just a single budget. Make sure you’ve broken down your vision into bite-sized (year or even quarter-sized) goals that you can fund in your budget.
You will not fund your vision to eliminate hunger in your community in a single budget. But you can provide the funding to feed a specific number of people/families in the upcoming year.
You can follow these steps whether you’ve already created your budget for the year (and so you’re auditing an existent budget), or you’re starting with a fresh spending plan.
Keep It Going
Now that you’ve taken important steps toward better alignment between your mission, vision, and values and your budget, don’t get complacent. It’s a great start, but your work isn’t done. In fact, it’s just beginning. Regularly review your budget to make sure you haven’t drifted out of alignment.
Regularly tie together your mission, vision, and values to your budget and the generosity of your congregation in public situations. Help your congregants understand their generosity (and faithfulness) ties directly to your ability to fulfill God’s mission in your community.
To learn more about how to tie your church’s annual budget to your vision for growth, check out our free ebook, Budgeting Today for Tomorrow’s Church Growth.
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