Here are two formulas to get us thinking the right way for this blog post:

motivation to give X financial problems = guilt.

Guilt = no giving.

So you preach God's word faithfully on stewardship and generosity. You cast a compelling vision of how God is working through your church to impact the Kingdom. People are touched; they are motivated ... read full post  |  3 comments

I've learned a lot from Ron Blue over the last 10 years. Ron has a way of taking complex ideas and simplifying them so that everyone gets the point. Think of the "5 uses of money" that he has been talking about for 20+ years: give, spend, pay taxes, save, and eliminate debt.

Money is complex, but Ron makes it simple. This is harder than it seems if you've never done it – and some people would even ... read full post  |  5 comments

I am reading through a boring book that is filled with interesting information. I hate it when that happens – someone has very useful material but their writing skills tend to make it difficult to locate and extract the nuggets. It is kind of like panning for gold in a desert creek instead of a Rocky Mountain stream. The gold is just as valuable but the experience of getting it may not be inspiring.

The ... read full post  |  1 comments

I am reading the book "God So loved, He Gave" and reflecting on the well known passage out of I Timothy 6: 9 – "People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction." I've both read and spoken about this verse many times and tend to shrug it off with my Western mindset. Getting rich is part of the American dream; surely ... read full post

As you teach your congregation about giving, what motives do you appeal to? How do you inspire, encourage, or inadvertently discourage your people? In the following video, Scott Ridout, lead pastor at Sun Valley Community Church in Gilbert, Arizona, offers the five most common giving motivations of churchgoers and distinguishes between lower-level motivations (which are short-term) and higher-level motivations (which ... read full post  |  3 comments